Loyalty, Dissent, and Betrayal: Modern Lithuania and East-Central European Moral Imagination (On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral ... Freedom, & Moral Imagination in the Baltics)

LOYALTY, DISSENT, AND BETRAYAL MODERN LITHUANIA AND EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN MORAL IMAGINATION

On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics 4

Editor Leonidas Donskis, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, and Director of the Political Science and Diplomacy School at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Editorial and Advisory Board Timo Airaksinen, University of Helsinki, Finland Egidijus Aleksandravicius, Lithuanian Emigration Institute; Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Endre Bojtar, Central European University; Budapest, Hungary Kristian Gerner, University of Lund, Sweden John Hiden, University of Glasgow, UK Mikko Lagerspetz, Estonian Institute of Humanities, Estonia Andreas Lawaty, Nordost-Institut; Lüneburg, Germany Olli Loukola, University of Helsinki, Finland Alvydas Nikzentaitis, Lithuanian History Institute, Lithuania Rein Raud, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Estonian Institute of Humanities, Estonia Alfred Erich Senn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania David Smith, University of Glasgow, UK Saulius Suziedelis, Millersville University, USA Joachim Tauber, Nordost-Institut; Lüneburg, Germany Tomas Venclova, Yale University, USA

LOYALTY, DISSENT, AND BETRAYAL MODERN LITHUANIA AND EAST-CENTRAL EUROPEAN MORAL IMAGINATION

Leonidas Donskis Preface by

Zygmunt Bauman

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

©Cover photo: “Tevyne pavojuje” (“Motherland in danger”) by Tomas Ragina. Courtesy Kauno diena. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1727-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in the Netherlands

For Zygmunt Bauman

“The point was to do something, heroic or criminal, which was unpredictable and undetermined by anybody else.” —Hannah Arendt “A deceived person is turned into a thing.” —Mikhail Bakhtin “We are likely to be especially critical of the things we love.” —Lewis A. Coser “Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics.” —Charles Péguy “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.” —Simone Weil

Table of Contents Preface by Zygmunt Bauman Acknowledgments Introduction ONE. On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Lithuanian Philosophy in the Twentieth Century 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Central/East European Concept of Culture Philosophy of Culture and the Search for Identity The Withdrawal and Return of Lithuanian Philosophy The Second Voice of Lithuanian Culture

TWO. The Second Voice of Lithuanian Politics and Culture: Sketches for Three Moral Biographies 1. 2. 3.

Vytautas Kavolis: Liberalism and the Politics of Critical Self-Discovery Aleksandras Shtromas: Liberal Conservatism and the Politics of Dissent Tomas Venclova: Ethical Universalism and the Politics of Dialogue

THREE. Vytautas Kavolis: Toward a Polylogue of Civilizations 1. 2. 3.

Vytautas Kavolis’s Concept of Civilization Criticism, Tolerance, and Openness: Toward a Postmodern Nationalism Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century

FOUR. Shtromas vs. Venclova: Loyalty, Dissent, and Betrayal in the Liberal-Nationalistic Moral Imagination 1. 2.

Loyalty and Dissent Betrayal and Insensitivity

FIVE. Juozas Girnius: Loyalty, Dissent, and Betrayal in the Conservative-Nationalistic Moral Imagination 1. 2. 3. 4.

Nationalism and Patriotism National Philosophy or a Set of National Stereotypes? Idealism and the Spring of Life Forms of Faithfulness to the Nation: Loyalty and Dissent

ix xiii 1

11 12 15 25 29 33 33 40 47 57 58 63 70

73 73 84 97 99 102 106 111

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SIX. Imagology, Populism, and Treason

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Ambiguous Person and the Ambivalence of Modern Life Imagology Populism The Scandal that Divided the Nation Ordinary Paksism

119 120 127 135 139 142

Notes

145

Bibliography

153

Index

161

Preface Dissent: act of betrayal, or loyalty? Leonidas Donskis’ new remarkable study is one consistent, thorough, and dedicated effort to provide an answer to that question. A highly important and timely effort it is, since that question today haunts all those bold and restless spirits who rebel throughout the planet against the ethically blind and morally odious condition in which their fellow humans have been cast; it is also a question deployed now, as it has been since time immemorial, by all those who want to lock the humans they rule in that condition – to defame, blackmail and marginalize such dissenting spirits. And it is on the outcome of the on-going confrontation between the dissenters and their detractors that our shared chances to survive or perish on the overcrowded, globalized planet these days ultimately depend. The flourishing of ethnic and tribal loyalties in the age of global interdependence only appears to be paradoxical. As the community loses its hold on the fate and the daily life of its members, and as communal identity and territorial sovereignty lose their practical import, all three gain in spiritual significance. Haunted by uncertainty oozing from the unannounced and bewildering changes in the stakes and the rules of innumerable world-wide games, our contemporaries seek shelter in something nearer to hand, easier to understand and so perhaps more amenable to control. As there seems to be precious little one can do to make the planet a safer and more trustworthy place – perhaps here at least, in the neighbourhood one knows, among people one can talk to and whom one can hear and understand, one could hide from the storms raging outside? Dreams of local retrenchment are natural, even if mistaken and ineffective responses to the planet running out of joint and rapidly turning from the site of opportunity and exciting adventure into a wilderness teeming with awesome, frightening threats and unspeakable dangers. And there is hardly any other imaginable entity on which to pin the hope of shelter as tempting, and apparently as made-to-measure of the purpose, than the kind of ‘communities’ known to the Europeans (and increasingly, under Europeans’ influence, to the rest of the planet’s residents) under the name of nations. Donskis explains – lucidly, convincingly – why this is the case; why people who desperately seek secure shelter tend to be willing objects of the nationalist recruiting drive, why they crave to trust the nationalists’ promise of safe, cosy and comfortable home, and why that promise cannot be kept and the trust cannot but be betrayed. Among imagined communities, nation occupies a very special place, since it is an inseparable part of the idea of the ‘nation’ that it ties together, into one fully determined and unbreakable sequence, the past that cannot be revoked with the future that is up for grabs. Because the nation is already a community of history, it appears to be exquisitely fit to become a community of fate. In this abominably frail and unpredictable world full of treacherous bogs and quicksands, some solid,

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rocky ground immune to earthquakes and walled against the tornados is at long last found. . . The snag, though, as Donskis reminds us, is that ‘history has to be made and unmade every day’; and to make the task yet more daunting there is more than just one way in which it can be ‘made and unmade’. Among numerous ways recommended or advised against by all sorts of advocates and adversaries, there is no one way that enjoys a ‘natural’ privilege over its competitors. The privilege, and even more so the monopoly, need to be yet provided and equipped with artificial limbs to rest on. Power over minds and bodies is the most commonly sought and resorted to variety of such limbs. History, to cut the long story short, is a highly contentious and hotly and ferociously contested issue – yet another stake in the struggle for and in defence of power. For those demanding unswerving and uncritical loyalty to the nation this truth is uneasy to stomach. This is, indeed, a most inconvenient truth. Preserving loyalty and keeping people in line who are not fully convinced and thus unreliably loyal would be that much easier if history was cut in rock and unshakeable, and admitted only one story, rendering its message nonnegotiable and putting it safely beyond the reach of critique and contention. But if history was indeed ‘given’, and given once and for all, and for that reason determined the conduct, beliefs and destiny of all its heirs, as proponents of such a view insist – why should they go out of their way to convince or force the sons and daughters of the nation to stay loyal? Would not the loyalty they demand have been guaranteed beforehand and beyond human power to violate? Would the very idea of ‘loyalty’ have been coined and brandished about, would it have had any meaning at all, were there no alternative and so no necessity to choose? Aristotle said that outside a ‘polis’ (that complex phenomenon that in his time ‘naturally’ blended, congealed and condensed phenomena like community, city and state which we have to struggle hard to reconcile) only beasts or angels can survive. In Aristotle’s time, ostracism – a forced exile from the polis with a ban on return – was the ultimate, indeed the capital, punishment for the most heinous crimes. It was indeed so awful a prospect that Socrates preferred hemlock to that lot. . . This could be the case and had to be the case because the inhabited world of the ancients was (and remained long after their time) divided neatly into settled, cohesive and exclusive communities into which men and women were born and in which they died (unless, that is, sent into exile before their time came. . .) Outside the land divided in such a fashion the maps bore a warning: ubi leones. . . With the advent of modernity, however, all that changed. The unity of community, state and territory was irreparably disrupted, and it became the daunting task and uphill struggle of the modern state to reclaim and rebuild that unity of territory over which its sovereign power (that is, the power to include and to exclude) extended. Given the challenge, the idea of ‘nation’ came handy.

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Nation was not however like the community of yore which it was intended to replace. That old-style community did not know that it was a community; it retained its integrity thanks to that innocence. It reproduced itself ‘by the by’, ‘matter of factly’ – and it could reproduce itself in such an unthinking way because there was no option of alternative ‘belonging’ open to people born into it. The moment it became self-conscious and so turned from a community ‘in itself’ into a community ‘for itself’ testified to its twilight and demise. Nation (one would say modern nation, were the phrase not so pleonastic, as there are no other nations except the modern ones) comes on the contrary into being and exists since then solely in the ‘for itself’ modality. It needs to be conscious of its identity and act on that awareness. As Donskis explains, it needs to be re-created, re-asserted, re-confirmed daily – by the tangible, active and effective loyalty of its members. . . Under such circumstances, the conservatives who assert that they wish to defend the nation from pressures to change and preserve it in its present and already perfect shape or go back to the lost tradition and ‘ancient values’, and the liberals, who want their nation to endlessly improve, to correct its mistakes and to apologize for its misdeeds – are much in the same position. Both believe that something is wrong and may even get worse if nothing is done. In other words, both are dissatisfied with the status quo, both think that it leaves much to be desired and both are convinced that it calls for urgent repairs. Both the conservatives and the liberals must keep busy and none can allow their vigilance to lapse. The building of a nation never ends, and the right moment to disarm and rest on laurels never comes. So what does it mean to be loyal? Conservatives would say: it means to accept that nothing could be wrong in what the nation did in its past, and that there is nothing to apologize for; in the case of controversy, be always on the side of your nation, your country – remembering, that it is your country, right or wrong. The liberals, on the other hand, would probably repeat after Gilbert Keith Chesterton: ‘”My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. . . It is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober”.’ Any loving son would run to help his mother to sober up when finding her drunk. Any loving son will do whatever he can to prevent mother from reaching for a bottle again. . . The conflict between two nationalisms – of the conservative and the liberal variety – has come recently to a head in East-Central Europe: that vast swathe of the continent currently emerging from a half-century of the Soviet totalitarian rule with little to guide it through the untested and unfamiliar territory except its own dreams and other people memories. For the last few years that part of Europe moved, to quote Donskis’ apt phrase, ‘faster than history’ – trying to telescope two centuries of other people’s history in a couple of decades of its own and furnish the upper floor apartments while half-way through digging the foundations. Nowhere else did the confrontation between two opposite renditions of national identity-in-the-making take a

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similarly dramatic course, sharpening the differences toned down and blunted elsewhere and revealing the grave consequences of their apparently minor nuances. For that reason, this part of Europe may serve as a laboratory in which the labours and struggles still awaiting most of the planet are currently rehearsed through a succession of trials and errors, forward leaps and reversals of fortune; and where the feasibility and viability of social and political solutions suggested or implied by the two adversary visions are experimentally tested. This is how readers should and hopefully will view Leonidas Donskis’ profound analyses of the Lithuanians’ slow and painful way out of the ethically corrupting and socially incapacitating nightmare of two totalitarian regimes and his captivating, in-depth account of the responses to the challenges of these turbulent times given by the three Lithuanian giants of liberal thought: Kavolis, Shtromas and Venclova (alas, unfortunately for the West, much lesser-known to the Western-thinking public than they deserve). Readers eager to learn what is in store these days for the parts of the planet lined up to follow the trails blazed by post-communist Europe will be grateful for the wealth of information that a careful reading of this book offers. Donskis’ main message, cogently and persuasively argued and carefully documented throughout this book, is that in its liberal version nationalism has an enormous potential for a sound and effective social and cultural critique and that it can for that reason be turned into a truly powerful force in the ongoing fight against discord-breeding social injustice and in the search for a self-critical, and therefore safely democratic, society. This is a message which no one of us, struggling as we are to find our way through these confused times, while searching for the yet unfound answers to the heretofore vaguely articulated questions, can ignore; except at our own peril. Zygmunt Bauman

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study for a research grant in the academic year 2003–2004. The fellowship at Collegium Budapest, Hungary, enabled me to write this book. I am indebted to Dr. Anu-Mai Köll, Professor of History at Stockholm University, Sweden, for kindly inviting me to spend a month at Stockholm University as a guest researcher, and also for providing me with a setting to put the finishing touches to the book. For valuable suggestions, which helped me considerably in preparing the manuscript, I am grateful to Mr. Eric van Broekhuizen, Managing Editor of the book series, “On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics,” Editions Rodopi, B. V. I thank Mr. J. D. Mininger, a Lecturer in Literature and Philosophy in the English Department at Lithuania Christian College in Klaipėda, Lithuania, for proofreading and editing my book. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Darius J. Ross for his gracious help in polishing my book in terms of language and style. I am indebted to Ms. Daiva Simanavičiūtė, a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania, for her technical assistance. I thank Ms. Kornelija Buožytė, a Lithuanian artist, for lending her skills to design the cover of the book. I thank Mr. Tomas Ragina, a Lithuanian artist, for lending his artwork to design the cover of the book. I am grateful to the Lithuanian daily Kauno diena for graciously allowing me to use the photograph by Tomas Ragina for the cover of the book. I thank the following journals for their gracious permission to include the following works: Leonidas Donskis, “On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Lithuanian Philosophy in the Twentieth Century,” Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 54, No. 3 (September 2002): 179–206. For this permission to reprint, I thank Kluwer Academic Publishers. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. This work has been included with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media. Leonidas Donskis, “The Second Voice of Lithuanian Politics and Culture: Sketches of Three Moral Biographies,” Studia Polityczne, No. 14 (2003): 151–183. © 2003 Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN. Leonidas Donskis, “Vytautas Kavolis: Toward a Polylogue of Civilizations,” Comparative Civilizations Review, No. 51 (Fall 2004): 26–43. Finally, I thank my dearest wife Jolanta, my life companion and precious friend. She gave me the strength and inspiration I needed to write this book. Kaunas, Lithuania June 2005

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Introduction Our contemporaries are obviously tempted to proclaim the twentieth century to have been the era of the end of nearly everything that relates to the historical, moral, and political imaginations. Post-modernism, postmaterialism, post-ideological politics, post-Christian era, post-industrial society, post-capitalist economy. . . No aspect of politics and culture remains untouched by this postmodern propensity, not to say obsession, to relegate the phenomena of modernity to the margins of history. Nowadays it is difficult to imagine any sort of modern social phenomenon pronounced or written without this sonorous “post” that indicates the death or at least the symbolic end of the modern moral imagination and modernity itself. Yet this is not the end of the story. Now we are to put into question the validity and existence of history itself. Of the temptation of many writers and commentators to write off our stage in the history of modernity as passing away or dying away or bowing out in terms of the end of history, Zygmunt Bauman writes: What prompts so many commentators to speak of the ‘end of history’, of postmodernity, ‘second modernity’ and ‘surmodernity’, or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of modernity has presently reached its ‘natural limit’.1 Societies that experienced the terror of ideology are naturally tempted to deny or to at least call into question History with capital H as just another term for Ideology. East-Central European artists and intellectuals know better than anybody else what it means to live under the terror of the Inexorable Laws of History. Too much history can become a burden. Territorial claims, bloodshed, and education of hatred are nearly always justified by referring to history and religion: the subordination of the two to politics is a disease of our time. The same applies to the clashes over the exclusive right to possess the holy sites or to have the final say in the rivalries of politically exploited religions over thisworldly matters or in the encounters of violent ideologies. Competing memories, loyalties, pains, and sufferings have no better justification and reference point than history. Too much history may be at odds with our modern intellectual and moral sensibilities, although it is obvious that our infatuation with history is itself a sign of modernity. We respect and cherish a strong sense of history in ourselves and in others; yet when it comes to a kind of conservative disdain for present politics and culture, we tend to strongly object to the domination of the “eternal yesterday” (to use Max Weber’s term) over today or tomorrow. Whereas the liberal imagination speaks out in favor of today and tomorrow, the

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conservative imagination raises its voice in defense of yesterday. Hence the dividing line between the liberal and conservative approach to history. However, suffice it to recall the dystopian world of Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Arthur Koestler, where history is but an empty sound. History does not signify anything there anymore, since it is thrown at the mercy of the will-to-power and the metaphysics of the will, which identifies reality with its conscious transformation or “rationalization.” According to this design of thought, history has to be measured in hours and minutes, instead of decades and centuries. Moreover, history has to be made and unmade every day. If so, we have to treat human lives as clay or bronze or oil on our brush: we have to clean the canvas or dismantle the construction instantly as the need for an adjustment or new configuration arises. How on earth can we abolish art only on the basis of someone’s claim that we consume too much oil or bronze? As the character O’Brien from Orwell’s 1984 points out, empirical reality does not exist other than through the Party, its politics, and its interpretation of that reality. If so, the human being is merely a construct of the Party’s metaphysics of the will. A particular human individual has no independent existence. The Party supplies the only means through which he or she can identify and express him or herself as an individual—self-identification, perception of reality, memory, and language. In fabricating these, the Party forges consciousness and human existence. History does not exist either. It is merely constructed by the politically predominant modes of discourse. Yet it is quite possible to belong mentally and intellectually to mutually exclusive symbolic designs of memory, loyalty, participation, and selfcomprehension. Some people claim to act in a postmodern world and, accordingly, to think within the framework of postmodernism, whereas others speak out in favor of modernity. As Bauman reminds us, the history of time began with modernity; moreover, modernity is the history of time—or to put it in another fashion, modernity is the time when time has a history.2 There is another problem here, though. Postmodernism, with its wellknown inclinations towards historical and ethical relativism, is capable of putting into question what undoubtedly constitutes the moral substance of many people. We can call into question the existence and validity of nearly every social and political phenomenon, but if we doubt the historical validity of the Holocaust, then we are at risk of losing the ground. If we deny the Holocaust, then we deny history, and the other way around. What is behind such a stance is value, rather than sheer fact. History exists insofar as value precedes truth. A narrator of history is therefore a moralist, rather than a sheer dispenser of a scholarly technique, scientific method, or truth. The news of the end of modernity, of modernity’s decline and passing away along with history itself appears to have been premature. And yet. . . the news of modernity’s passing away, even the rumors of its swan song, are grossly exaggerated: their profusion does not make the

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obituaries any less premature. It seems that the kind of society which has been diagnosed and put on trial by the founders of critical theory (or, for that matter, by Orwell’s dystopia) was just one of the forms that versatile and protean modern society was to take. Its waning does not augur the end of modernity. Nor does it herald the end of human misery. Least of all does it presage the end of critique as an intellectual task and vocation; and by no means does it render such critique redundant.3 Interestingly enough, the “faster than history” idiom acquires a special meaning when dealing with social change in Central and Eastern Europe. The speed of time in what Czesáaw Miáosz and Milan Kundera, each in his own way, described as “yet another Europe” is beyond the historical, cultural, and political imaginations of Western Europeans and North Americans. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet and post-Communist countries underwent considerable social and cultural change. To paraphrase the title of Kundera’s novel that became one more admirable idiom to express the East-Central European sense of history and grasp of life, all this leads to the experience of the unbearable lightness of change. What happened in Western Europe as the greatest events and civilizationshaping movements of centuries acquired a form, in Central and Eastern Europe, of mandatory and rapid economic and political programs that had to be implemented by successor states of the Soviet Union. This is to say that the new democracies had to catch up with Western European history to qualify for the exclusive and honorable club of Europe. Moreover, “yet another Europe” had to become even faster than history, transforming itself into a more or less recognizable collective actor in global economy and politics. Capitalism, which had long been presented in Soviet high school textbooks as the major menace to humankind, now seems more aggressive and dynamic in post-Soviet societies than in far more moderate, timid, egalitarian, social-democratic, welfare-state-orientated, and post-capitalist Western European countries. Sweden, Finland, and the rest of the Nordic countries, for instance, can only marvel at what they perceive as a sort of old-fashioned, historically recycled, ruthless and wild capitalism of the Baltics, or, to put it in more conventional terms, the libertarian economy of Estonia and other Baltic countries. The countries that used to symbolize to Soviet citizens the embodiment of wild capitalism, with its overt glorification of the winners and contempt for the losers, now appear to them as astonishingly communitarian, warm and humane. Indeed, they are pure and innocent in comparison with the “first come first served” or “grab the stolen” or “catch it all” type of mentality that paradoxically, albeit logically, resonates with a sort of Marxism turned upside down—this extremely vulgar variety of economic determinism and materialism in Lithuania and other East-Central European countries barely

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surprises those who know quite well that the last thing one could expect to be named among priorities there is culture. Although quite a few pay lip service to it without giving much consideration as to how to foster intellectual dialogue among countries, somehow almost everybody agrees there that the West has to pay for “the culture, uniqueness and spirituality” of post-totalitarian countries—generous grants in exchange for suffering and unique experience. Lithuania seems locked mentally somewhere between the discovery of the intrinsic logic of capitalism characteristic of the nineteenth century and postWeimar Republic period—incredibly fast economic growth and passionate advocacy of the values of free enterprise and capitalism, accompanied by a good deal of anomie, fission of the body social, stark social contrasts, a shocking degree of corruption, a culture of poverty (to recall Oscar Lewis’s term which refers to low trust, self-victimization, disbelief in social ties and networks, contempt for institutions, etc.), and cynicism. If we want to imagine a blend of nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomena of consciousness, politics, and culture, then we can safely assume that our postmodern and post-totalitarian era proved capable of squeezing two centuries of uninterrupted European history into the one decade of “transition” of Lithuania from the planned economy of Communism to freemarket economy and global capitalism. In a way, Lithuania appears to have become a kind of laboratory where the speed of social change and cultural transformation could be measured and tested. Indeed, Lithuania is far ahead of what we know as the grand historical narrative, or, plainly, predictable and moralizing history; nay, these societies are faster than history. They are faster than history, yet slower than a lifetime. People often complain here that their lives and careers have been ruined by this rapid social change and grand transformation. They take it as a tragedy, arguing (and not without reason) that their lives, energies, and work have been wasted, if not completely spoiled. The lifetime of a human being proves insufficient to witness a thrilling and sweeping transformation of society. Vytautas Kavolis, an eminent Lithuanian émigré sociologist, worked out a theory of postmodernism as an attempt to reconcile what has been separated by modernity. At the same time, the idea of postmodernism served, for Kavolis, as an interpretative framework for the split between the modernist and the antimodernist. He accorded the concept of the postmodern to the process of desovietization, too: If desovietization, in its diversity of forms, continues relatively unhindered and does not become complacent with its own rhetoric, it has the potentiality of becoming a first-rate (that is, “enriching”) civilizational movement. If the concept of the “postmodern” can still be retrieved from the cultists who have made it a monopoly of their own exuberance, desovietization could even be considered, in some of its cultural

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emphases, as “postmodern.” (I conceive of the “postmodern” not as antimodernist, but as the building of bridges between the “modernist” and the “antimodernist.”)4 Indeed, modernity has come to split up the human world. How are we to react to the challenge of modernity? How are we to accept it? How are we to reconcile and bridge what has been ruthlessly separated by modernity: truth and value; rationality and emotional intimacy; expertise and sensitivity; hierarchy and equality/individualism; tradition and innovation; the classic canon and the released creative experiment; metaphysics and science; a particular individual and community; a particular community and universal humanity? Intellectuals and artists in Lithuania might fill many gaps and bridge some parts of human sensibility divided between disciplines and scattered across the universe of our global culture. They are ahead of many social and political processes that are on their way to Lithuania. They predict and passionately deny these processes, laugh at them, make fun of them, anticipate and critically question them. Contemporary art has become a sort of social and cultural critique in our postmodern world—yet this applies to Central and East European societies better than anything else. At the same time, modern social and cultural critique may prevent the spread of one more disease of our time—unlimited manipulations of public opinion shamelessly performed in the name of freedom and democracy. It can do this by calling into question everything that fails to do justice to humanity or respect human dignity. In doing so, contemporary critics would be able to find their raison d’être in our age of the divorce of words and meanings, power and politics, politeness and sensitivity—along with their efforts to help restore the damaged sociability and power of association crucial for their societies. In the twentieth century, modern intellectuals and artists intensely hated the crowd and spoke up in favor of the individual. Postmodern art, if properly understood, could advocate community, thus attempting reconciliation of the individual and community/society. Whatever the speed of life and the intensity of change, our epoch can be faster than history—especially, if measured like it was measured a century ago. Yet it will always be slower than the lifetime of a particular human individual. Contemporary art’s effort to reconcile the individual with him or herself, with community, society, and history would therefore come as a perfect tribute to what always remains beyond or ahead of history—values, humanity, and the miracle of human dialogue. Is it possible to bridge these historically formed and profound gaps between the two Europes, the New and the Old? Yes and no. In all likelihood, the new clashes, encounters, and the new kinds of othering will emerge, since othering as a moral inclination and as a political tendency is deeply embedded

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in Europe, and therefore forms a significant trajectory of European consciousness and imagination. What is the role of intellectuals in the nation- or community-building process? Some scholars of nationalism suggest that intellectuals invent traditions, work out interpretive frameworks for collective identity and selfcomprehension, establish collective identities, forge political and moral vocabularies, and even shape their respective nations. At the same time, dissenting intellectuals may challenge their nations by offering an alternative vision or critique of their societies and cultures. In the early 1990s, some Lithuanian intellectuals were quite optimistic about their social roles in society. For instance, Riþardas Gavelis, a recently deceased Lithuanian writer, who might well be described as a caustic public intellectual and libertarian-minded critic of society and culture, responding to the journal Metmenys 1993 questionnaire, wrote about the role of what he termed the free intellectual in the following way: I nevertheless have some hope. It is precisely thanks to the fact that Lithuania dropped out of the general development [of Western culture] that we have managed to preserve a now almost extinct species—the free intellectual. Such creatures are virtually extinct in Europe, and even more so in America. There the intellectual is almost always part of some kind of academic circle. And that means that he unavoidably becomes a member of the state hierarchy, even if he teaches at a private university. Whether they like it or not, they must accommodate the rules of the academic career, of the narrow world of academia, of a narrow context of specialized reference. The era of the free intellectual—of the kind that Russell and Sartre were—has long passed in the world. . . . In Lithuania, for now, the true intellectual is free whether he wants it or not, because there is basically no influential academic world. For that reason, individual intellectuals have a greater influence on overall cultural development than anywhere else. . . . I would consider this to be a positive thing. In times of change and confusion free intellectuals are more useful than inflexible academic structures. Individuals are more flexible, more inclined to take risks, are not afraid to lose their academic positions or authority. It is my hope that free intellectuals will be the ones to launch the process of synchronizing Lithuanian and world culture.5 Yet quite different positions were expressed regarding the social role of the intellectual in society. Donatas Sauka, a conservative literary scholar, wrote, as early as 1995, that Lithuanian intellectuals forgot their mission to preserve cultural tradition and to defend the nation, offering the exhausted paradigm of the building and defense of the nation against those who tarnished its image and international reputation. Small wonder, then, that Sauka, in doing so, also warned that “the liberals of the younger generation

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and their older colleagues among émigrés” threatened the injured nation. Sauka put it thus: Who, then, defends society’s conservative opinions—who speaks in the name of the injured nation, who expresses its historical insults, who mythologizes its rural moral reputation? Who, really? What is the point of trying out the sharpness of one’s arrows when attacking a monster created by one’s own imagination; but please give us a true picture of its traits, give us its first and last names! The liberals of the younger generation and their older colleagues among émigrés, who often hold condemnatory trials, do not have a concrete target which could embody the essence of such an ideology. And the target of their polemic is not too fresh—but faded ideas and moral directives, statements by the current leaders of the nation that were expressed during the euphoria of the Rebirth period.6 Here we have two opposing concepts of the intellectuals—whereas Gavelis suggests the concept of which depicts the intellectuals as critics of the establishment, society and culture, Sauka takes them as defenders of the nation’s pride and prejudice. What does lurk behind the critique of society and culture offered by intellectuals—loyalty or dissent? Fidelity or betrayal? Last but not least, what is the real raison d’être of modern intellectuals? Personification of conscience? Dedication to the nation and its historical injuries and moral traumas? Advocacy of individual reason and conscience? Social and cultural criticism? The politics of loyalty or the politics of dissent? Support for sustainable society? Preservation of historical memory? Interestingly enough, one thing that has long been taken for granted in Lithuania—the idea that the real intellectual is a dedicated educator, builder, and shaper of the nation, rather than public thinker or social and cultural critic —underwent considerable change and was put into question over the past ten years. If very few have critically questioned the idea that the intellectual is or at least and ought to be instrumental in the nation-building process, things started changing around 1995. The mainstream Lithuanian nationalism was challenged by a new approach, which brought about the concept of civil society instead of the people or the nation. Some Lithuanian intellectuals began increasingly associating themselves with civil society, the community-building process, and the public domain—this tendency was extremely timely and important, bearing in mind the deterioration of social links and networks, anomie, and social atomization of Lithuanian society. The Lithuanian philosopher Arvydas Šliogeris anticipated and described this shift, calling into question Riþardas Gavelis’s enthusiasm for individual intellectuals, and placing more emphasis on the community-building instead of personal emancipation. Despite some undertones of Kulturpessimismus, a sort of extremely harsh and exaggerated critique of Lithuanian public life,

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Šliogeris’s standpoint sheds new light on the critical importance of public debate for society under transition. According to Šliogeris, Several years of independence have proven our inability to rationally order our present, our lack of common sense, and even any sense. What can that pitiful of active and thinking people—still capable of seeing the world clearly, simply, with a sober and cold eye—accomplish? Some such individuals exist, but they are powerless, because the parade is being led by the mobile vulgus and its idols. Is there any hope? Yes, there is, but that hope is hazy and cannot b transformed into a technical project, because in its deepest essence it is non-technical, anti-technical. My hope is all tied to the spontaneous emergence of small communities in which organic future forms of communal existence can begin to grow. However, these new forms of community can only develop somewhere beyond the boundaries of existing “organized” forms of (political, religious, economic, educational) life. The instigators of these communities must say a determined No to all, absolutely all, currently dominating structures of public and private life, because those structures are in fact dead and continue to exist only from habit. Democracy, freedom, prosperity, spirituality, truth, conscience, Christianity, culture, tradition—all of this has turned into ideological chatter and self-deception. If “values” and forms of existence remain as they are, it is no longer possible to breathe life back into these things. Why do I speak about the creation of new types of communities? For, after all, here remains the danger that such a newly created community will be nothing but a herd of slaves and schizophrenics ruled by paranoid and cynical Rasputins. There are already more than enough such sects in today’s world. The formation of authentic communities involves enormous risk. But there is no other option, because individuals are ultimately helpless.7 It is widely and rightly assumed that loyalty and betrayal are among the key concepts of the ethic of nationalism. Marriage of state and culture, which seems the essence of the congruence between political power structure and collective identity, usually offers a simple explanation of loyalty and dissent. Within such an interpretative framework of nationalism, loyalty is seen as a kind of once-and-for-all commitment of the individual to his or her nation and its historical-cultural substance, whereas betrayal is identified as a failure to commit him or herself to a common cause or as a diversion from the object of political loyalty and cultural/linguistic fidelity. However, yawning gaps exist between different patterns of nationalism. For conservative or radical nationalists, even social and cultural critique of one’s people and state can be regarded as nothing more and nothing less than treason, whilst for their liberal counterparts it is precisely what constitutes political awareness, civic virtue, and a conscious dedication to the people, culture, and state. Upon closer look, it appears that the concepts of loyalty,

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dissent, and betrayal can be instrumental in mapping the liberal and democratic facet of nationalism. Loyalty, dissent, and betrayal are political and moral categories. It is impossible to analyze them without touching upon crucial issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as political culture, liberal democracy, poverty, hatred, populism, manipulative exchanges and deliberate political manipulations, social criticism, and political commitment. This book reveals what it means to live in a changing society where all these things increasingly tend to become the nexus of social and political existence. History can be properly understood only where the acceleration of the speed of change reaches its climax, and where social change becomes faster than history.

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Chapter One On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Lithuanian Philosophy in the Twentieth Century A close examination of the emergence of modern Lithuanian philosophy may be most instructive when studying the intellectual and moral sensibilities of Eastern Europe. At the same time, a study of modern Lithuanian theoretical thought may reveal a number of the hitherto concealed nuances of the multicultural and multifaceted character of modern Lithuania. Contrary to the widely accepted, albeit loosely argued, opinion of not a few western scholars of the Baltic countries, viz., that Lithuania came into modern political existence as a homogenous entity that had nothing to do with its multiethnic and multicultural past, an examination of twentieth-century Lithuanian philosophy may prove the opposite. Although the multicultural character of Renaissance and Baroque Lithuania, indeed, underwent considerable change throughout past centuries, modern Lithuanian philosophy may arguably have originated as a universalistic attempt to bridge distant cultures and create a synthesis of the civilizations of East and West. This reflected not only its initial orientation to Russian philosophy (as we shall see, the similarity between the concept of “a synthesis of civilizations” and that of “Eurasianism” is striking), but also the dynamics of Lithuanian nationalism. Like any other Central or East European nationalism, it had its liberal and conservative phases. In fact, modern Lithuanian philosophy originated as a response to the questions formulated in Russian philosophy—religious, moral, and social what. Later it turned to Continental European philosophy, preoccupying itself with German and French existentialism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. In inter-war Lithuania, the philosophy of culture may well be said to have become the principal philosophical discipline. At that time, the philosophy of culture, as a discipline sensu stricto, was fading away in Western Europe giving way to the intrusion of the social sciences in the fields of theory of culture and Kulturkritik. Yet it was flourishing in Lithuania where even the Department of the Philosophy of Culture was established at the University of Lithuania in Kaunas (which was renamed, in 1930, Vytautas Magnus University). Regrettably, the loss of independent political and intellectual existence that Lithuania experienced for five decades isolated and marginalized the then lively and promising intellectual culture. Yet Lithuanian philosophy, in the early 1980s, started recovering and reorienting itself, again, to Western currents of modern theoretical thought. Though Lithuanian philosophy may well be said to have survived into the twenty-first century through the major contribution of Lithuanian émigré thinkers, the second birth of modern Lithuanian philosophy would have been unthinkable without the gradual emancipation of thought that occurred in Lithuania itself.

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Interestingly enough, the birth of modern philosophy, in inter-war Lithuania, was instrumental in the search for modes of public discourse, collective identity, and cultural policy, and also for elaborating the national project as a whole. Still more striking is the fact that the revival of philosophy was instrumental in achieving the independence and freedom of Lithuania in 1990. 1. The Central/East European Concept of Culture The eminent German sociologist Norbert Elias, in Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (a brilliant theoretical study analyzing the impact of etiquette and manners on individual self-control and on the emergence of the modern state), uncovered the sociogenesis of the concepts of Kultur and Zivilisation. More precisely, Elias traced the sociogenesis and psychogenesis of the distinction between the two concepts and the corresponding terms. Anglo-American and French-speaking scholars have always tended to use these terms as synonyms. The appearance of a sharp dividing line between them seems a specifically German phenomenon deeply embedded in Geschichtsphilosophie and Kulturphilosophie, subsequently reinterpreted within Central/East European philosophies of history and culture under the influence of German social philosophy. Elias, in his surgical analysis of the social processes that brought about the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, provided a discursive map of how the culturally predominant social group contrives to identify itself with the whole of the people. According to Elias, the German middle-class intelligentsia, at the end of the eighteenth century, had come to define and identify itself through the concepts Kultur and Bildung, in contrast to the specifically French concept Civilisation, which had become merely a symbolic reference to German court aristocracy—pro-French and contemptuous of German language and literature.1 For the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German middle-class intelligentsia, politically insignificant and even impotent within the nearly feudal structure of social hierarchy and political power, Kultur and Bildung began to refer to das rein Geistige (the purely spiritual), i.e., the realm of pure spirituality/self-cultivation, and to a notion of creative genius consciously disconnected from the sphere of economic and political power. Civilisation, by contrast, was perceived by them as the very essence of the artificiality, superficiality, banality, moral corruption, and empty conventional politeness so characteristic of the court aristocracy and their stances. Elias succeeded in uncovering further implications for the analysis of the development of these concepts as well as that of collective identities (his hypothesis reveals an important anatomy of the birth of group stereotyping). The German middle-class intelligentsia eventually contrived to generalize its collective identity to cover the entire German people.

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The latter was interpreted through the concepts of Kultur and Bildung, while Civilisation was transformed by them into an interpretive framework within which the entire French people could be defined and identified. The Germans, within such a framework, turn out to be en bloc thoughtful, spiritual, sincere, and honest, while the French were depicted as hopelessly pompous, pretentious, superficial, and hypocritical. Thus Elias puts forward and contextualizes the sociological premise that the modern nation-state, as a conjunction between a polity and a shared culture, is nothing but a politico-cultural construct of the new kind of egalitarian elite. Another key implication of his conception is even more striking: the intelligentsia comes to constitute itself only by virtue of the definition and identification of something that stands behind it, namely, an imagined community and a forged common culture. This is the way that intellectuals come into existence as an agency of consciousness bridging the principle of imagination and the principle of reality. Last but not least, Elias implies that intellectuals as a group are always searching for an enemy, no matter whether imaginary or real, in order to define themselves and experience their collective identity. Elias further shows how those intellectuals who orchestrated the Sturm und Drang movement came to enlarge the concepts of Kultur and Bildung to constitute a symbolic framework within which writers, philosophers, composers, artists, and university scholars could eventually be replaced by the German people as such—as the bearer of virtue, talent, creative genius, honesty, simplicity, and authenticity. Analogously, the concept Civilisation develops into an alternative symbolic framework within which the entire French people replace the German court aristocracyʊas the bearer of all possible vices, including alleged intellectual and creative limitations. Therefore, Elias provides, along with his other insights into the contrasting models of collective selfunderstanding, an analytically-incisive discursive map of nationalism, that is, the sociogenesis and psychogenesis of the concept of Volk. Louis Dumont’s Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, by virtue of employing the perspective of the structural history of ideas, sheds new light on the encounter of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which turns out to have been, in essence, a clash of two contrasting models of self-understanding and of the two intellectual and moral stances. According to Dumont, Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte was but a conscious response to Voltaire’s philosophy of history (Voltaire introduced the term “philosophy of history”). For Voltaire, the essence of the philosophy of history lies in reflecting on the liberation of human individuals and their consciousness from the realm of superstition. In contradistinction to Voltaire, Herder assesses the task and the subject matter of the philosophy of history not in terms of the individual but as the study of historically unique peoples and their cultures.

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The point is that Herder takes the Volk and its Kultur as the collective individual. Like human individuals who have, in their political existence, the inescapable rights of self-determination and self-fulfillment, cultures are—by virtue of being collective individuals—historically unique, autonomous, selfasserting, and self-sufficient. In other words, Herder puts forward, for the first time, the idea of the autonomy of the cultural dimension. Therefore, individualism ceases to function solely as a political idea and turns into a crucial cultural category. The inner spring of the body politic, once theoretically embraced and articulated by political philosophy, transforms itself both into a mode of historical narrative and into an interpretive framework for the humanities. We have here two interpretations of individualism and identity. There is no doubt that the Enlightenment provided solid ground for theoretical interpretation of political individualism and civilizational identity as political principles, but it was Romanticism that forged cultural individualism and ethnic/cultural identity as cultural constructs. To be sure, theoretical principles precede ideological constructs: theories—as in the cases of liberalism and nationalism—tend to transform themselves into ideologies, but the reverse sequence is, in principle, impossible. As Dumont insightfully points out: Herder rehabilitates everything that the French and English eighteenth century rejected or ignored: the barbarous Middle Ages, Ancient Egypt sacrificed to the glory of Greece, and perhaps most important, religion. Instead of history consisting in the accession of reason, a reason disembodied and everywhere identical to itself, Herder sees in history the contrasted interplay of individual cultures or cultural individuals, each constituting a specific human community, or Volk, in which an aspect of general humanity is embodied in a unique and irreplaceable manner. The German Volk, bearer of western Christian culture, is the modern example of the category. In the flow of history there is not only simply progress (Fortschritt) but, within each of the two civilizational complexes, the ancient and the modern, what one may call a succession of “forward strivings” or blossomings (Fortgang, Fortstreben), all “of equal necessity, equal originality, equal merit, equal happiness.”2 So Herder seems to have been not only a critic of modern universalistic rationalism, with its one-dimensional faith in never-ending progress, but also an opponent of individualist French culture shaped by Voltaire, the Encyclopédie, and the philosophes. The Herderian definition of the human being may substantiate this statement. Contrary to the theoreticians of the Enlightenment, Herder, like Rousseau, speaks of the human being who consciously belongs to and prolongs the existence of his/her cultural community, rather than of the history-free, abstract, logically derived individual—an example of the human species.

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Two important implications of Dumont’s interpretation of individualism and its national variants (as we have seen, French and German) might be offered. First, Herder came to defend German culture and its natural right of being in the world in the face of the powerful and influential French culture. It was unnecessary to persuade anyone that French culture, even for German intellectuals (from Goethe and Eckermann to Fichte and Hegel), had become the quintessence and even symbol of Europe. Herder must have perceived economic and political individualism as a specifically French phenomenon, to which he opposed cultural individualism in order to defend the rights of non-French/non-modern cultures and historical epochs, a number of which had been neglected or even despised by the Enlightenment thinkers. Therefore, it is by no means accidental that cultural individualism was constructed in the course of the Sturm und Drang movement, that is, in the initial phase of German Romanticism. Herder’s ideas have greatly affected not only theories but also the practice of nationalism. One wonders how a liberal-minded philosopher like Herder succeeded in making such an enormous impact on nineteenth-century racialist and explicitly racist theories, let alone Blut-und-Boden nationalism. In all likelihood he owes this “success” to the ambiguity of such concepts as Volksgeist and Volksseele. One of Herder’s major contributions was his notion of the equality of cultures. It was not only the most humane facet of the upcoming era of nationalism (no wonder that the concept of liberal nationalism makes sense when referred to Herder’s legacy), but an important facet of liberalism itself. Last but not least, Herder’s ideas were adopted by Central/East European philosophers of history and culture. They developed Herder’s theoretical legacy into an interpretive framework within which modern modes of identity and self-comprehension were articulated. It was not without reason that Dumont described Herder as the founding father of modern East European thought. The same is true of Herder’s impact on Eastern Europe in its search for modes of identity and self-fulfillment. 2. Philosophy of Culture and the Search for Identity Vincas Trumpa, an émigré Lithuanian historian who spent much of his life in the United States, once noted that during the inter-war period Lithuania transformed its will-to-power into a will-to-culture, and thus transformed itself from a Naturvolk into a Kulturvolk.3 Trumpa stresses that this might help to explain why and how the philosophy of culture, developed by such Lithuanian philosophers as Stasys Šalkauskis and Antanas Maceina, flourished in inter-war Lithuania. In fact, the philosophy of culture of the first half of the twentieth century can be considered a specifically Central/East European—in particular a Russian, Romanian, Polish, and Lithuanian—phenomenon, for it sprang from “German

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subculture,” which was related to European culture as a national variant relates to a general cultural model. However, Trumpa might have added that the principle of culture, and numerous projects for promoting the rise of national culture (and providing it with a theoretical or interpretive framework), was as empirically disconnected from mundane reality in Lithuania as was the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia from the common people, or the eighteenth-century German middle-class intelligentsia from the court aristocracy.4 At this point, suffice it to mention the Lithuanian intelligentsia who, at the dawn of the emergence of modern Lithuania, described the Polish language and culture precisely in the way the German intelligentsia did with regard to French culture. The similarity of these cases is striking, for the Lithuanian intelligentsia came to regard the Polish-speaking Lithuanian gentry exactly as the German intelligentsia had regarded pro-French German aristocracy. Vincas Trumpa, then, must have been right—culture (or, in his terms, the “will-to-culture”) was the principal driving force behind the politics of interwar Lithuania. However, while Trumpa must be credited for many interesting insights, he failed to stress that because it was based on religious thinking the concept of culture wielded by inter-war Lithuanian philosophers could not be effectively applied either to modern, secularized—in both religious and ideological terms—society, or to multidimensional reality in general. Moreover, according to this concept, culture was understood as pure spirituality or as the conscious renunciation of social reality, and, thus, offered no way to process the complex, diverse, and multifaceted nature of human reality. Experiences of depression and despair usually call for symbolic compensation. For example, the new and allegedly vulnerable nations of Central and Eastern Europe appear to be determined by a kind of inadequacy of self-consciousness and collective identity, and, as a result, tend to look back in time inʊthough this is not exclusively the caseʊan obviously messianic manner. For example, the Third Rome of the Russian Slavophiles or the Athens of the North extolled by Lithuanian neo-Romantics—among them the French poet of Polish-Lithuanian origin, Oscar Miáosz—are both symbolic constructs grounded in a fundamental denial of modern Western civilization and an emphasis on personal heritage. This was evident in the ideological disputes that took place, from the time of Peter the Great, between the anti-Western, antimodern Russian Slavophiles and the Hegelian Zapadniki (Westerners), who were sympathetic to Western reforms. This sort of Central/East European messianism has common roots in a purist, ethnocentric ideology that is inherently wary of modern, in particular Western, conventions. The messianic tendency undoubtedly penetrated Lithuanian consciousness and culture through the works of Adam Mickiewicz—whose poetic vision of Poland as a crucified nation and redeemer of other nations can be considered the climax of messianic

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thought—and Polish Romanticism in general, not to mention Jules Michelet’s revolutionary messianism and Giuseppe Mazzini’s vision of Roma Terza, which, in turn, grew out of the Risorgimento. The Russian pan-Slavist Nikolai Danilevsky’s enormously influential comparative study of civilizations, Rossia i Evropa [Russia and Europe] (1869), not only anticipated the morphological conception of culture later elaborated in Leo Frobenius’s Ursprung der Afrikanischen Kulturen und Naturwissenschaftliche Kulturlehre (1898) and Paideuma (1921), and Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–1922), but also made room for the development of a completely independent Russian culture, which would replace Western civilization after its inevitable collapse. Instead of using such terms as “culture” and “civilization,” Danilevsky proposed a new vocabulary and a new theory of cultural-historical types based on a cyclical theory of history. Unwilling to claim full credit for this new perspective, he acknowledged his debt to Heinrich Rückert’s Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte in organischer Darstellung (1857). From the perspective of Danilevsky’s historical analysis and model for the future, the case of modern Lithuania is provocative. Throughout the twentieth century, Lithuania’s self-image as the Athens of the North has peacefully coexisted with a moderate messianic construct, casting this small nation as an important bridge between East and West (the former often reduced to Slavic civilization or Russia). The concept of a synthesis of civilizations—East and West—was elaborated and promoted by the Lithuanian philosopher Stasys Šalkauskis, particularly in Sur les confins de deux mondes (1919), a book on Lithuania written in French, in Switzerland. This concept would be repeatedly employed and elaborated in Šalkauskis’s book, Lietuviǐ tauta ir jos ugdymas [The Lithuanian People and its Education] (1933). Later it was severely criticized by other Lithuanian philosophers and essayists, including Šalkauskis’s disciple Antanas Maceina. Still more negative views of this thesis were expressed by such inter-war Lithuanian nationalists as Vytautas Alantas, in his militant nationalist manifesto, Žygiuojanti tauta [The People Marching On] (1940). An examination of several inter-war Lithuanian philosophical texts reveals just how strongly Lithuanian philosophy was affected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian philosophy. Two key Lithuanian intellectuals— Stasys Šalkauskis and Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas—wrote their doctoral dissertations at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland (both written in French), focusing on the prominent Russian religious thinker and social philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. Šalkauskis studied Solovyov’s philosophy of religion, while Putinas analyzed the Russian thinker’s aesthetics. Šalkauskis’s dissertation was titled L’âme du monde dans la philosophie de Vl. Soloviev (1920), Putinas’s L’Esthétique de Vladimir Soloviev (1923). Šalkauskis and Putinas studied philosophy and wrote their dissertations under the guidance of M. de

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Munnynck, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, whom they both described as their mentor. (Antanas Maceina also studied philosophy at the University of Fribourg, which was widely regarded among young Lithuanian academics as a home away from home.) During that period, in addition to Solovyov, other Russian thinkers— Nikolai Berdyaev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Konstantin Leontyev, Vassily Rozanov, the Russian nihilists, among others, influenced many Lithuanian academics and public intellectuals. In addition to other influences of Russian culture on Lithuania, these thinkers’ ideas can, in part, be seen as a principal source of Lithuanian messianism. Roughly speaking, Šalkauskis’s vision of Lithuania as a bridge between the civilizations of East and West is nothing but another term for the specifically Russian notion of Eurasia, though this concept is usually reserved exclusively for Russia and its historic mission. A devout reader and follower of Solovyov, Šalkauskis’s concept of a synthesis of civilizations is merely a Lithuanian variation on a classic theme in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian social philosophy. “Eurasianism,” both as a philosophical tendency and model of cultural/civilizational identity, was a central concept in Lev Karsavin’s work and writing—he spent several decades lecturing in Lithuania, and fundamentally influenced the development of Lithuanian philosophy of culture and cultural history. In 1928, he was offered a professorship at the then newly founded University of Lithuania in Kaunas, where he had arrived from Paris. An eminent Russian religious thinker and an erudite cultural historian, Karsavin soon became a fluent speaker of Lithuanian and established his reputation as one of the most brilliant lecturers at the University of Lithuania. His five-volume magnum opus, Europos kultnjros istorija [The Cultural History of Europe] (1931–1937), written in Lithuanian and published in interwar Lithuania, is a work of European significance and has yet to be surpassed among Lithuanian contributions of the sort. When the Soviet Union repeatedly occupied Lithuania after World War II, Karsavin was exiled to the Komi ASSR, where he died in 1952. A man with several planes of identity, and also of multidimensional spiritual and moral existence, Karsavin converted to Roman Catholicism. Essentially, the same things can be said about Šalkauskis’s disciple and critic, Antanas Maceina—in terms of his commitment to the elaboration and promotion of the philosophy of culture—who, it appears, was deeply influenced by Nikolai Berdyaev’s apocalyptic philosophy of history. It suffices to recall how Berdyaev, in Smysl istorii [The Meaning of History] (1923), defines the genesis of the philosophy of history as a painful reflection upon history, rather than in terms of how Geschichtsphilosophie, as a philosophical discipline, comes sui generis into existence.

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The historic catastrophes and turning points that lead to the crucial moments of world history have always contributed to the development of the philosophy of history, of efforts to reflect upon historical process, the creation of the philosophy of history, regardless of its logic or what direction it might have taken. . . . The first substantial philosophy of history created in the Christian era—that of the Blessed Augustine,5 which fundamentally influenced the further development of the philosophy of history, coincided with one of the most catastrophic moments in world historyʊthe decline of the Ancient world and the fall of Rome. Another original philosophy of history (it was created in the pre-Christian era, with the first philosophy of history to enlighten humanity) was the Prophet Daniel’s Book, which deals solely with the catastrophic events characteristic of the fate of the Jews. After the Great French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, human thought once again turned to the philosophy of history and its constructions, and attempted to grasp and reflect upon the process of history. In Joseph de Maistre’s and Bonald’s visions of the world, the philosophy of history is accorded an important role. I do not believe that anyone could radically oppose the statement that not only Russia, but also all of Europe and perhaps the entire world have recently entered a catastrophic period in their development. We live in a time of grand historical collapse. A new epoch of history has certainly begun.6 The catastrophic concept of history elaborated in Russian philosophy was eventually adopted by various thinkers representing the speculative approach to the philosophy of history in the first half of the twentieth century. Popular throughout Central and Eastern Europe, it did not bypass Lithuania. In Asmuo ir istorija [The Individual and History] (1981), Maceina virtually repeats Berdyaev’s principal thesis, agreeing with him that the philosophy of history is a product of historical crises and breakdowns: During such historical crises or turning points the philosophy of history emerges as a form of cognitive historical consciousness: the Prophet Daniel in Israel, St. Augustine in Antiquity, Joachim de Fiore in the Middle Ages, Giambattista Vico and Joseph de Maistre in the modern era, Oswald Spengler and Nikolai Berdyaev in our times—all of them theorized in times of historical catastrophe, and all of their theories are related to the painful and frightening shifts of history. The philosophy of history is a product of neither wonder nor doubt, but of sufferingʊboth personal and national.7 An apocalyptic understanding of history thus led Maceina and other Lithuanian philosophers who followed him, or who continue to follow him in this respect, to conclude that learning—including the acquisition of historical knowledge—occurs through suffering. Philosophies of history and culture

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are, therefore, inevitably employed as the only appropriate framework within which the genesis and historic mission of a people can be traced. The people (interpreted in historical and cultural terms) and the nation (understood as a sociocultural phenomenon, though with obvious political implications) accede to a meta-discursive level, and, in that context, the proliferation of the humanities and/or social sciences is explicated. Unlike inter-war Romanian literary and academic intellectuals, who succeeded in promoting not only the humanities but also the social sciences, their Lithuanian counterparts remained locked within philosophies of history and culture as the only relevant way of dealing with the question of where We came from. It was Vytautas Kavolis, a great Lithuanian émigré scholar, who urged his colleagues in Lithuania to make an analytic comparison of Maceina’s ideas with those of Romania’s “1927 Generation.” First of all, the thinking of the 1927 Generation—including Nae Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Mircea Vulcănescu, Constantin Noica, Mircea Eliade, and Eugène Ionesco—can be seen as a model of Central/East European intellectual movements in general. They provided numerous explanations for the origins of the Romanian nation. They wrote and spoke in the context of never-ending intellectual debates about how to contextualize the nation historically and culturally. While attempting, desperately, to choose between East and West, Romanian intellectuals developed Western, Oriental (i.e., Greek Orthodox theological traditions), Roman, and Dacian, or indigenous, versions and interpretations of the origins of their nation. The 1927 Generation’s members conceived of their theories, doctrines, myths, and even their poetry, in terms of the ideological tension between East and West. Thus, it is possible to identify streams of consciousness that are paradigmatic of Central/East European nationalist movements—structural isomorphisms or, in Raymond Williams’ terms, the structures of sentiments inherent in Central/East European consciousness.8 As for the young Maceina, he was simultaneously leaning, in the late 1930s, toward Bolshevism and National Socialism, both perceived by him as a perfect alternative to much hated liberalism, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie. In some of his works in social philosophy—such as Socialinis teisingumas [Social Justice] (1938), Buržuazijos žlugimas [The Downfall of the Bourgeoisie] (1940), and Prometơjizmo problema [The Prometheanism Problem] (1938)—Maceina went so far as to describe the bourgeoisie in terms of an everlasting metaphysical principle. (To Maceina’s credit, we have to note that he would later admit his fallacies and reject these somber prophecies.) The 1927 Generation, for their part, expressed many ideas concerning how to oppose the supposedly deteriorating, liberal-democratic, and cosmopolitan West by focusing on blood-and-soil community building, i.e., Blut-und-Boden nationalism, ethnocracy, politically charged religion, and xenophobic sentiment. Last but not least, the 1927 Generation unequivocally supported

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the Iron Guard, one of the most controversial and problematic movements in Romanian political history. In this respect, the 1927 Generation can be legitimately compared with its counterpart in France, the Action Française movement headed by the Generation’s French alter egos, Léon Daudet and Charles Maurras, and profoundly influenced by Maurice Barrès. Notwithstanding obvious structural isomorphisms and almost identical structures of sentiments, inter-war Lithuania’s nationalist movement differed in various ways from its counterparts in Romania, Poland, and other Central/East European countries. Although, as a meta-discourse, the nation in Lithuania emerged from the system of dominant ideas and values, intellectual strategies, moral stances, keywords, and even frameworks for self-interpretation, the development of the humanities and social sciences in Lithuania at that time hardly compares with that in, say, Romania. Recall the debate between two influential interwar Romanian scholars—Lucian Blaga, the philosopher of culture, and Henri Stahl, one of the founders of Romanian sociology.9 Another important difference that needs to be admitted here is that rather schematic and introductory works in philosophy of culture, such as Šalkauskis’s Kultnjros filosofijos metmens [An Outline of the Philosophy of Culture] (1926) or Maceina’s Kultnjros filosofijos Ƴvadas [Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture] (1936), may never have reached the heights of Lucian Blaga’s or Constantin Noica’s elegant, poetic, and metaphoric essays in philosophy of culture. In short, for a long time the philosophy of culture was the only theoretical framework for the interpretation of the self, the historical essence of the nation, the nation’s past, present, and future, and the nation’s cultural achievements. It is not surprising that, in addition to the philosophers who developed the Lithuanian version of the philosophy of culture—Stasys Šalkauskis, Antanas Maceina, Juozas Girnius, Vosylius Sezemanas, Bronius Stoþkus—a number of Lithuanian writers, journalists, critics, and lay intellectuals also contributed to the philosophy of culture by raising problems and questions related to the vision/project of Lithuanian national culture.10 Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, enormously popular among Lithuanian intellectuals of that time, served as a great theoretical challenge and as a reminder of what kind of issues should be raised to keep Lithuania aware of the most symptomatic tendencies of Western civilization. A few words are in order about Vosylius Sezemanas (Vassily Sesemann) who deserves an honorable mention as an eminent philosophy professor and as a sophisticated academic writer not only in inter- and post-war Lithuania, but also in a wider European context. Born in Finland and brought up in a multicultural background in Russia, Sezemanas studied philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg, Russia, and then at the University of Marburg, Germany. In Germany, he discovered the Marburg and Freiburg schools of the neo-Kantians. Nicolai Hartmann, who

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would become one of the towering figures in modern German philosophy, was Sezemanas’s classmate in St. Petersburg classical gymnasium. Having spent their young days in Russia, they developed a life-long friendship. Influenced by Nikolai Lossky’s intuitivist philosophy, the neo-Kantians’ ideas, Hartmann’s ontology and philosophical anthropology, and also by phenomenological philosophy, Sezemanas wrote, in German and Russian, numerous articles on philosophical idealism, classical and modern epistemology, logic, and aesthetics. In 1923, Sezemanas was offered a professorship at the University of Lithuania. Sezemanas moved to Lithuania and remained a towering figure for decades—in logic, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. Exiled to Siberia after World War II, he returned to Lithuania after several years and taught philosophy in Vilnius. A thinker of European stature and a brilliant lecturer, his impact on the younger generation of Lithuanian academics and intellectuals was immense. Sezemanas’s works in the philosophy of culture, value theory, and aesthetics remain landmarks in modern Lithuanian philosophy. This is especially true of Sezemanas’s book, Estetika [Aesthetics] (1970), a valuable collection of his articles, essays, and reviews. Like Karsavin, who may well be regarded as a preeminent Russian and Lithuanian philosopher, Sezemanas, a great European, came to bridge modern German, Russian, and Lithuanian philosophies. An ambitious thinker who deserves honorable mention for the breadth and clarity of his thought is Izaokas Donskis. Having studied philosophy at the Universities of St. Petersburg and Berlin, Donskis earned his doctorate from the University of Berlin for his dissertation, Der Individualbegriff und der Allgemeinbegriff (1923). From 1931 to 1933, he studied international law at the University of London. Upon returning to Lithuania, Donskis wrote numerous contributions to scholarly journals, focusing on the ontology of space and time, Henri Bergson’s moral and religious philosophy, and also on the problem of the soul. As an essayist, he wrote in Lithuanian, English, and Yiddish. Although Donskis seems to have been undeservedly neglected for a long time by Lithuanian historians of philosophy, he was nevertheless included in the Lithuanian Encyclopedia published by Lithuanian émigrés in Boston, USA. Various explanations might be offered for why, during this inter-war period in Central/Eastern Europe, essentialist philosophies of history and culture so clearly prevailed over nominalistically oriented social science. First of all, neither Anglo-American nor French social and political philosophy had any significant influence in inter-war Lithuania. The weakness, if not the absence, of the social sciences in Lithuania might explain why and how, in inter-war Lithuania, entire epistemological/discursive dimensions failed to emergeʊwhy an appropriate interpretative vocabulary for understanding society and culture failed to develop, and how, as a result, modernity and liberal democracy were fundamentally misinterpreted.11

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It was therefore not only the widespread influence of ideological discourse, but also the absence of an appropriate conceptual and explanatory framework that led to widespread misinterpretations and misconceptions of social reality. This is not to say, however, that theoretical fallacies may have resulted from the incongruity between, on the one hand, social reality and the ineffective tools for social analysis, and, on the other, the lack of an appropriate analytical language. Lithuanian academics of that period enthused about Oswald Spengler, Leo Frobenius, Ludwig Klages, Eduard Spranger, Anton Hilckman, and Martin Heidegger, as well as, needless to say, the most prominent representatives of Lebensphilosophie, Geschichtsphilosophie, and Kulturphilosophie. Unfortunately, however, none were very concerned with the thought of John Stuart Mill, let alone of Émile Durkheim or Max Weber. As a result, the conservative nationalism—inclusive of what might be termed philosophic nationalism—that characterized inter-war Lithuanian intellectual culture sprang from peripheral models of consciousness deeply rooted in Central/East European linguistic and cultural politics and from what might be called the fear of modernity.12 The picture of inter-war Lithuanian philosophy would be missing an important aspect, if we passed over the role and place of religious philosophy in the works of Šalkauskis, Maceina, or Girnius. In addition to Solovyov’s religious philosophy, Šalkauskis was deeply influenced by modern French Catholic philosophers, such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, both sophisticated religious thinkers and renowned interpreters of Thomas Aquinas. Interestingly enough, Šalkauskis’s and Maceina’s trinitarian theories of history and culture, based on the crucial concepts of nature, culture, and religion (all conceived of as the phases and realms of being), sprang from Gilson and Maritain. Girnius, who attended Heidegger’s seminar at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and who was particularly interested in existentialism (he defended his doctoral dissertation, La metaphysique existentielle de K. Jaspers, at the University of Montreal, Canada, in 1951), contributed to the theme of religion by writing on what he termed the human being without God. Maceina, whose early thinking was preoccupied with subjects and topics borrowed from Russian and French personalist philosophy—basically, from Nikolai Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier—later turned to German existentialism and hermeneutics, focusing on such major figures of twentiethcentury philosophy as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Hans Georg Gadamer. After World War II, Maceina fled to Germany where he established himself as the specialist in Marxism and Russian philosophy, yet remaining a religious philosopher by vocation. He lectured at the University of Freiburg,

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and was later promoted to Professor of Philosophy at the University of Münster. A profound religious thinker and a gifted poet, Maceina’s works written after World War II, such as Religijos filosofija [Philosophy of Religion] (1976), Dievas ir laisvơ [God and Freedom] (1985), Filosofijos kilmơ ir prasmơ [The Origin and Meaning of Philosophy] (1978), or his great trilogy Cor Inquietum—Maceina’s magnum opus consisting of Didysis Inkvizitorius [The Grand Inquisitor] (1946), Niekšybơs paslaptis [The Mystery of Turpitude] (1964), and Jobo drama [Job’s Drama] (1950)—are classics of Lithuanian philosophy. Maceina’s works written in German include Der Grossinquisitor (1952), Das Geheimnis der Bosheit (1955), Das Volkslied als Ausdruck der Volksseele: Geist und Charakter der litauischen Dainos (Commentationes Balticae II, 3, 1955), “Der Menschgott Dostojewskijs als Gestalt des östlichen Atheismus” (Stimmen der Zeit, 1955), and “A. Mickiewicz als Dichter des Prometheismus” (Zeitschrift für Ostforschung, 1956). Interestingly enough, Maceina’s Das Volkslied als Ausdruck der Volksseele could be regarded not only as a philosophical interpretation of Lithuanian folksongs and traditional culture, but also as a tribute to Herder, the discoverer of Lithuanian folksongs as an expression of the spirit of the people, and the founding father of Lithuanian and East European Kulturphilosophie. A gradual reorientation of Lithuanian philosophy from Russian to West European philosophical issues and patterns of thought can be instructive when studying the dynamics of inter-war Lithuanian intellectual culture. Being an inescapable part of the search for a new pattern of identity and culture, so characteristic of the newly emerged nations, inter-war Lithuanian philosophy could best be described as an interpretive framework for self-definition and self-comprehension. If it makes sense at all to speak about such a thing as Lithuanian philosophy, this term can only be justified by referring to modern philosophy as a conscious part of the national project and as a crucial aspect of the search for identity. This is more than true of inter-war Lithuanian philosophy of culture. Small wonder, then, that Lithuanian philosophy was tinged with ideological dramas and political clashes of that time. At the same time, it was not devoid of some naïve expectations and illusions regarding the ability of philosophy to provide the guidelines for the future national project or the framework for the development of national culture. This is precisely what we could call the philosophic nationalism of Central and Eastern Europe—if not ideology masquerading as philosophy, then at least a pattern of consciousness that allows room for ideological and political exploitation of culture. Yet Lithuanian philosophy, being nearly a perfect litmus test of inter-war Europe’s frame of mind and constant balancing on the

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boundary of two worlds, succeeded in responding to all major influences and challenges of the time. 3. The Withdrawal and Return of Lithuanian Philosophy What happened to Lithuanian philosophy after the occupation and annexation of Lithuania can only be described in terms of its intellectual captivity and isolation. After World War II, ideological Marxism left no room for the development of independent and critical thought. The domination of brutally enforced Marxism-Leninism, a travesty of theoretical and practical philosophy alike, isolated Lithuanian humanities and social sciences from Western theoretical thought. As mentioned earlier, Sezemanas, having returned from exile, was allowed to lecture at the University of Vilnius, which was something of a miracle, given his background, style, competence, and overall intellectual orientation. Yet his superb lectures, along with his immense personality, long remained a lonely island in the ocean of militant and doctrinaire Marxism. However, in the early 1980s philosophy began to recover in Vilniusʊslowly but surely. The Department of Philosophy at the University of Vilnius, headed by Professor Eugenijus Meškauskas, became a kind of oasis for a wider concept of philosophy and also for the study of modern Western thought. A relatively tolerant atmosphere, which was simply unthinkable elsewhere in Soviet Lithuanian academia, may best explain why and how this Department became the center of Western-oriented philosophy. It quite justifiably developed its reputation as the only place in Lithuania where it was possible, in those days, to study and write—more or less freely—doctoral dissertations on Anglo-American analytic philosophy or any trend of Continental philosophy, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, personalism, or critical theory. At that time, a phenomenon emerged in Lithuania that could be called an attempt to construct an ideology-free Marxism. It was a radical reinterpretation of an all-embracing and mandatory doctrine and was, in a way, reminiscent of the revisionist Marxism of György Lukács in Hungary or of the Praxis group in the former Yugoslavia. The case of Eugenijus Meškauskas is striking, at least as far as the fate of philosophy in Soviet Lithuania is concerned. Meškauskas took Marxism as an explanatory framework for what he called a universally valid and strictly scientific methodology. Interpreting Marxism as a modern epistemology based on a clear awareness of the dialectical nature of human knowledge and of the world around us, Meškauskas, in fact, did his utmost to free Marxism of its doctrinaire monistic character. What resulted was an idea that was to have decisive implications for the study of modern philosophy and for the pursuit of individual style and expression, namely, the idea that Marxism itself was inescapably a part of

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contemporary philosophy. As such, it had to be contextualized within the framework of modern theoretical thought. In practice, this meant that Marxism could recognize its compatibility with other schools and trends of thought. Therefore, a critical dialogue with other theories could be practiced within the explanatory framework of Marxist methodology or Marxist epistemology. The tolerant atmosphere created by Meškauskas in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vilnius resulted in the emergence of what might be regarded as a new, modern era of Lithuanian philosophy. A Marxist by free choice and an academic reminiscent of the best traditions of inter-war Lithuania, Meškauskas encouraged young lecturers and doctoral students to pursue their studies in analytic philosophy, social and moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of history, and philosophy of culture, all placed within the wider context of modern thought. Masquerading as a critique of Western “bourgeois” philosophy—an accolade to imposed Marxism-Leninism that was virtually unavoidable in those days—an academically accurate study of classical and modern philosophy was carried out. It is necessary to mention the impact that Polish philosophy and intellectual culture had on Lithuania in the 1970s and 1980s. Two post-war generations of Lithuanian philosophers and humanists in general studied the history of philosophy in Wáadysáaw Tatarkiewicz’s volumes on the history of philosophy. An erudite scholar and a uniquely qualified historian of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, Tatarkiewicz was regarded among Lithuanian doctoral students as highly as, say, Frederick Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit of immense erudition who established his reputation as one of the most preeminent historians of philosophy. Far more open to Western influences than Lithuania and allowed to cultivate an intellectual culture that would have been unthinkable in Lithuania at that time, Poland provided Lithuania with a well researched and documented philosophical literature, not to mention numerous translations of key texts in classical and modern philosophy. Such international figures among Polish philosophers as Roman Ingarden or Leszek Koáakowski captivated the minds of a number of young Lithuanian intellectuals. (Suffice it to mention Tomas Sodeika, a leading philosophy professor in present-day Lithuania, and a profound thinker, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological philosophy.) The return of Lithuanian philosophy occurred in the 1980s, a decade that may quite justifiably be regarded as one of the high points in the history of modern Lithuanian thought. In 1980, Albinas Lozuraitis published Tiesa ir vertybơ [Truth and Value], a valuable book on the theoretical and practical orientations of ancient Greek philosophy. Three years later, Arnjnas Sverdiolas published the book, Kultnjros filosofija Lietuvoje [Philosophy of Culture in Lithuania], which was a painstaking study of the philosophy of culture in inter-war Lithuania.

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In 1985, Arvydas Šliogeris published Žmogaus pasaulis ir egzistencinis mąstymas [The Human World and Existential Thinking], a breakthrough in his generation’s striving for independent and critical scholarship able to bridge West and East European sensibilities. The book analyzed the origins of existential thinking and covered a huge territory of modern thought, from Descartes to Heidegger. Having established himself both as a founder and a leader of what we could term the new Lithuanian philosophy, Šliogeris published, in 1988, his second book, Daiktas ir menas: du meno knjrinio ontologijos etiudai [The Thing and Art: Two Sketches in the Ontology of the Work of Art]. A piece of theoretical lucidity and elegance, Šliogeris’s book may well be regarded as the culmination of Lithuanian philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, it became a landmark in modern Lithuanian philosophy as a whole. Devoted to an in-depth exploration of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and Paul Cézanne’s painting, this book was the first masterpiece of academic writing in post-war Lithuania. Combining ontology—first and foremost the Heideggerian perspective with its propensity to wrestle with language by resorting to graceful metaphors and coining hyphenated terms—with Kulturkritik, philosophy of culture, philosophy of art, and philosophy of literature, Šliogeris elaborated a thoughtful, metaphoric, and poetic philosophy with a highly individual style. A prolific writer and a brilliant stylist, Šliogeris wrote his third book in 1990, Bnjtis ir pasaulis: tyliojo gyvenimo fragmentai [Being and the World: Some Fragments of Silent Life]. In this book, which he described as a metaphysical diary of his youth, we can find, among other things, the term “philotopy,” i.e., love of place. As a reference to this-worldly reality (more precisely, to a precinct of love and attachment), the concept of “philotopy”— in a way reminiscent of Simone Weil’s concept of the need for roots explicated in her L’Enracinement—was instrumental in Šliogeris’s attempt to create a metaphysics of the homeland. In the course of many writings exploiting the same topics and stylistic devices, Šliogeris began to repeat himself and, ultimately, exhausted his thematic foci. Nevertheless, his major books from the period of 1985–1992 arguably represent the most valuable achievement of Lithuanian philosophy. There is no doubt that they deserve translation into major European languages. Another founder and leader of new Lithuanian philosophy was, and continues to be, Arnjnas Sverdiolas. An interdisciplinary master who is equally at home in phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, and various schools of literary theory, Sverdiolas seems to be the only thinker capable of bridging the inter-war and present currents of Lithuanian philosophy. Uniquely attentive to, and respectful of, inter-war Lithuania’s intellectual culture, Sverdiolas took the then heroes of Lithuanian philosophy of culture— Šalkauskis, Maceina, Girnius, and others—very seriously, incorporating the issues they addressed into his own inclusive design of thought. An erudite

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scholar and an accurate historian of philosophy competent in all major schools of modern thought, Sverdiolas developed his own version of the philosophy of culture, shaping it as a multidimensional and interdisciplinary theory of the humanities that engaged in a dialogue with Lithuanian and West European intellectual traditions. An elusive, albeit intense, dialogue of tradition and modernity remains a notable trait of Sverdiolas’s thought. His recent major work is the book Steigtis ir sauga [Foundation and Preservation] (1996), an attempt to construct an explanatory framework for the humanities and also an innovative reinterpretation of the classical legacy of Western thought. Taking the entire Western philosophical tradition as an interpretive framework for key cultural categories, such as foundation and preservation, this book raises pivotal issues in the philosophy of culture.13 Among the key philosophers who reshaped Lithuanian philosophy in the past two decades and made it into an intellectual presence, Tomas Sodeika should be mentioned as well. A leading specialist in phenomenological philosophy in Lithuania, an ambitious thinker, and an elegant writer, Sodeika’s thought is deeply rooted in twentieth-century Continental philosophy. His theoretical interests range from Husserl and Heidegger to the dialogue-based personalism of Martin Buber. The translator of Buber’s Ich und Du (1922) into Lithuanian and the author of numerous articles in philosophical journals and collections of essays, Sodeika has richly contributed to a study of dialogue and intersubjectivity. He is the first Lithuanian theorist to have discovered and interpreted modern Jewish philosophy, describing it as a challenge, if not an alternative, to the predominant currents of modern Western philosophy. However sublime and distant from practical philosophy, Sodeika’s theorizing is not completely devoid of some undertones of the philosophy of culture or the philosophy of art: in his essays, Sodeika has touched upon literature and music, thus joining a time-honored trajectory of Lithuanian philosophy. Despite the presence of the aforementioned thinkers of European stature, the overall situation of present Lithuanian philosophy hardly calls for celebration. Detachment from international intellectual life and major debates continue to be its principal weakness. This sort of self-inflicted isolation goes so far as to leave Lithuanian academic philosophy without peer-reviewing procedures: even the most qualified and professional among present Lithuanian philosophy professors are very poorly published in international refereed journals or otherwise presented to the international academic community. A good part of Lithuanian philosophy still remains surprisingly selfcontained, self-centered, and inattentive to major intellectual challenges of the second half of the twentieth century, not to mention the reluctance of many Lithuanian philosophers to engage in a dialogue with their colleagues from other humanities and social science disciplines. It is little wonder then that the

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literature on Lithuanian philosophy, written in major European languages, is virtually non-existent. Alas, the same is true of Lithuanian philosophical literature itself. Another weak point is the virtual absence of schools of thought. There is not a single school of phenomenology or hermeneutics, although, as we have seen, it is very easy to list several names of philosophy professors who are exceptionally qualified in these fields and who are, at the same time, original thinkers. Nor does it make sense to talk about any school of analytic philosophy, although it made a very good start in the 1980s. This kind of nearly monadic existence seems to have penetrated present Lithuanian academic philosophy, and no one considers it abnormal. Small wonder, then, that Vytautas Kavolis described the stunning inattentiveness to one another’s work, along with the propensity to ignore anything that is not related to one’s reference group, as a form of modern barbarity. Still, the beginning of the new Lithuanian philosophy was rather impressive. Suffice it to mention that the revival of philosophy was instrumental in shaping the national liberation movement, Sąjnjdis, and, eventually, in achieving the independence and freedom of Lithuania.14 Philosophy lecturers and professors, such as Arvydas Juozaitis, Romualdas Ozolas, Vytautas Radžvilas, Bronius Genzelis, Bronius Kuzmickas, Arvydas Šliogeris, and others, may well be said to have initiated and shaped that movement. Ironically enough, after 1990, Lithuanian philosophy lost its crucial role in Lithuanian politics and culture, partly because of the withdrawal—this time voluntary, rather than compulsory—of the former intellectual heroes from academic life and theoretical debates. A hypothesis could be that the temporary revival of Lithuanian philosophy was part of the process of general emancipation and liberation of society. In those days, philosophy was able to give many young and ambitious people what was impossible to achieve in politics—namely, a sense of social significance, recognition, and personal dignity. Most telling is the fact that following the collapse of the Soviet Union not a few philosophy professors in Lithuania gave up their former disciplines and reestablished themselves either as politicians or as political analysts and columnists. Philosophy, in a captive society, proved to have been a call for political action, a gradual emancipation of political will and moral consciousness, or, simply, a political power project, rather than a silent dedication to an ideologically and politically neutral description of human experience. 4. The Second Voice of Lithuanian Culture Lithuanian intellectual culture has an important branch outside the country, which, though rooted and developed in other societies and cultures, maintained and kept Lithuanian theoretical thought alive for a long time. Even

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if this is less true of great philosophers who were born and brought up in Lithuania, and who left the country in their early days, such as Emmanuel Lévinas and Aron Gurwitsch, it is possible to list several Lithuanian émigrés who never lost touch with Lithuanian intellectual culture. Some of those great philosophers of the twentieth century, aware of their Lithuanian origins, may never have engaged in a theoretical dialogue with, or critical questioning of, Lithuanian culture, remaining international figures of whom Lithuania has always been proud. Emmanuel Lévinas and Alphonso Lingis should be mentioned first in this regard.15 Others were, and continue to be, active in Lithuanian culture: Vytautas Kavolis, a theorist of civilization and a sociologist of culture; Algirdas Julius Greimas, a semiotician and literary scholar; Aleksandras Shtromas, a political theorist; and Algis Mickunas, a phenomenologist. Kavolis, Greimas, and Shtromas (recently deceased), spent much of their time, respectively, in the United States, France, and Great Britain (after fifteen years in Britain, Shtromas was active as a political science professor in the United States). All of them, though not academic philosophers sensu stricto, made a great impact on Lithuanian philosophy.16 Mickunas, a philosophy professor at Ohio University, USA, is arguably the most renowned among the émigré philosophy professors. Both branches of Lithuanian intellectual culture—one based in Lithuania, another maintained by émigré scholars through their Lithuanian connection— have long been out of touch with regard to one another, and quite understandably so. Whereas modern Lithuanian philosophy, as we have seen, came into existence as part of a larger national project, becoming a route to the political and cultural modernity of the nation, Lithuanian émigré philosophers—along with other émigré humanists and social scientists—established themselves as members of the international academic and scholarly community, rather than as intellectual or cultural heroes. On the other side, émigré scholars never experienced the brutal interventions of ideological politics into the realm of theoretical ideas and scholarship that their far less fortunate fellow Lithuanians in Soviet Lithuania did; nor did they ever undergo such distortions of intellectual culture as were commonplace in their occupied and annexed homeland. One can easily imagine, then, the degree and scope of the “civilizing and enlightening mission” of émigré scholars that was undertaken after 1990, causing much anger and resentment among Lithuanian academics. Whatever the reactions and tensions in independent Lithuania, émigré theoretical thought has made a major contribution to what Tomas Venclova, a national poet and literary scholar who teaches literature at Yale, called the “second voice of Lithuanian culture.” However, the “discovery” of émigré thought that occurred in Lithuania after 1990 has not changed the character of the Lithuania-based community of philosophy professors too much. At the same time, it becomes increasingly

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obvious that only a critical dialogue with émigré theoretical thought can revive and inspire present Lithuanian philosophy, providing it with a wider interdisciplinary perspective, a new frame of reference, critical selfreflexivity, and accountability. Paradoxically enough, the politically charged atmosphere of the 1980s accomplished what is so difficult to achieve today—namely, an awakening of the critical and liberating potential of modern philosophy. Modern Lithuanian philosophy needs—much more so than ever before—a critical self-discovery through an intense dialogue with its second voice and collective alter ego, an awakening touch of the morally committed and intellectually inclusive voice of culture, to wake up for a new existence.

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Chapter Two The Second Voice of Lithuanian Politics and Culture: Sketches for Three Moral Biographies Nationalism is not necessarily an evil phenomenon, and neither is it about to end in our globalized world; this is the most important lesson that we can draw from a close examination of the works of Lithuanian liberal émigré scholars. There are many reasons to believe that general theorists of nationalism—Anthony D. Smith, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Ernest Gellner, among others—overlooked the possibility of deriving a critique of society and culture from the ethic of nationalism, which is a key aspect of the symbolic organization of nationalism. In Central and Eastern Europe, liberal nationalism has become a crucial framework for the modernizing critique of society and culture, not to mention its merits in disclosing totalitarianism. The ethic of liberal nationalism cannot be confounded with the blood-and-soil, ethnic-cleansing nationalism. Nor can nationalism as such be reduced solely to the rise of the industrial and standardized world. An identity building phenomenon, nationalism sustains the modern intellectual and moral sensibilities. This chapter attempts to provide a discursive map of Lithuanian liberal nationalism by focusing on three eminent Lithuanian émigré scholars— Vytautas Kavolis, Aleksandras Shtromas, and Tomas Venclova. They are all a perfect embodiment of what has been termed by Tomas Venclova the second voice of culture, the voice which acquires crucial significance when the first voice either remains silent or sings the wrong and imposed melody. Portraying these dissenters and critics of society and culture, we can reveal three modes of being of liberal nationalism as social and cultural criticism. 1. Vytautas Kavolis: Liberalism and the Politics of Critical SelfDiscovery Vytautas Kavolis appears as one of those twentieth-century intellectuals whose critical thought was in constant interplay with the subjects chosen by them for analysis, and whose disciplinary choices or methodological preferences were derived from, and suggested by, their existential and social experiences. The ways of looking at society and culture conceptualized and articulated by Kavolis obviously reflect his passionate striving for active participation in, and even symbolic correction of, social reality. This is borne out by Kavolis’s numerous texts dealing with Lithuanian history as well as with present culture, in which he explained where, how, and why his country failed to embrace the norms and values he so passionately advocated: the denial of any kind of collective oppressiveness and consensus gentium-type morality—as opposed to the principles of individual responsibility, reason and conscience; critical self-reflexivity of a society and its culture—against any sort of self-centeredness and self-righteousness;

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intellectual and moral sensibility towards the Other—against the sense of fatal innocence and victimization; morally committed individualism—as contrasted to individual and collective forms of anomie. Kavolis’s critical insights into the nature of clichés and even the reactionary attitudes of Lithuanian immigrants in the United States (ranging from antisemitism, so widespread in twentieth-century Lithuania, to the lack of intellectual and moral sensibility in general), deeply permeated and penetrated by his own experiences, shed new light on sociology itself as a phenomenon bridging thought and action. Vytautas Kavolis was born on September 8, 1930, in Kaunas, Lithuania. In 1945, the fifteen year-old boy and his parents fled to Germany and joined countless Lithuanian refugees known under the generic title of DP, that is, displaced persons. Having left their country occupied by the Soviet Union, the family spent four years in various refugee camps. Then the family moved to the United States where Kavolis pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Chicago. His graduate training took place at Harvard University. In order to imagine the context of Kavolis’s academic relations and personal acquaintances at Harvard, it suffices to note that Pitirim A. Sorokin and Talcott Parsons were among his professors, Edward A. Tiryakian and Zbigniew Brzezinski—among his fellow graduate students. From 1964 to 1996, Kavolis taught sociology and comparative civilizations at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania where he was promoted to the title of Charles A. Dana Professor of Comparative Civilizations. The years of Kavolis’s youth and maturity are equally marked by his attachment to Lithuania. Yet, as opposed to conservative Lithuanian immigrants in the United States who were nostalgic about inter-war Lithuanian state and identity politics, Kavolis moved the center of his intellectual and cultural concerns to a future vision of Lithuania and its culture. In his political and moral imagination, Lithuanian culture was projected as Western-oriented, liberal, open, critical, self-reflexive, and equally sensible to itself and to the great themes or political/moral issues of the twentieth-century world. Although Kavolis never applied for American citizenship, thus keeping his fidelity both to the idea of Lithuanian statehood and to his own cultural identity, his political and moral stance was far from plain patriotism. Kavolis’s stance can only be described in terms of a critical and even severe examination of what he passionately identified himself with— Lithuanian modernity, its consciousness, and culture. Kavolis always remained an American academic by his professional vocation and theoretical context, but a Lithuanian by virtue of his choice of being a social and cultural critic. When his native Lithuania regained its independence in 1990, he was active in numerous academic programs and research projects at Lithuanian universities. In 1993, Kavolis received Lithuania’s National Prize for Culture

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and Art for his books on modernity and contrasting models of selfunderstanding in Lithuanian culture.1 In 1995, Kavolis received an honorary doctorate from the University of Klaipơda. Yet the discursive map of Kavolis’s social and cultural criticism, likewise his intellectual portrait in the broader sense, would be missing a main feature if we were to pass by another key aspect of his personality and of his activities. Kavolis seems to have never been a disconnected academic solely locked within a narrow world of academic references and connections. I am referring not only to Kavolis’s intellectual and moral commitment to Lithuanian culture but also to his need for active participation in, and symbolic correction of, Lithuanian society and culture. In other words, he needed not only to construct cultural theory but to symbolically construct dynamic cultural practice as well—a cultural practice that he could symbolically complement, correct, or at least affect through his explanatory framework, interpretive skill, incisiveness, and impressive power of analysis. After all, Kavolis was always striving not for the formation of his referent group in the strict sense but for the formation of his Seelengemeinschaft, that is, a community of souls providing some intellectual and emotional intimacy of human connection. As a cultural theorist, Kavolis always tried to transcend purely theoretical constructs, in order to enter the dynamics and mundane reality of his own culture, and, then, to experience and describe them from within. This is why Kavolis came to define Lithuanian culture in terms of a cultural workshop, thus bridging the dimensions of cultural theory and cultural practice. In doing so, he was tracing and critically examining, in his own culture and its political/linguistic practices, those forms and models of universally valid human experience that have been suggested by his comparative studies and theoretical reconstruction of society and culture. Exactly the same might be said about Kavolis as sociologist. He was quite active in the construction of Lithuania’s social and cultural reality, thus transcending the limits of social analysis and trying to find out whether his imagined—for such a long time—community was constituting itself as society par excellence (i.e., as a common political and legal framework for the self-activating public domain moved by political and moral commitment and by human trust, rather than as a mere arithmetic totality of atomized and victimized human individuals). At this point, Kavolis appears to have been a nearly quintessential intellectual. His life and intellectual/moral stance may well illustrate the notion of intellectuals as the agency of consciousness. Kavolis was an intellectual by definition, a man of movement for whom his group was of great importance in experiencing a collective identity/group commitment or cultivating a strong sense of “us” against “them.” Without his vigorous journalism, persuasion, political propagandizing, polemical passion, and even ruthless irony targeted at the conservative part of the Lithuanian immigrant community in the United States, Kavolis would be unthinkable. His group

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was of great importance also in disseminating his moral and political imaginations, as well as for implementing his ideas. Every intellectual movement comes into existence through a kind of selflegitimizing discourse, or rather, meta-discourse, from which results such phenomena as: theoretical strategies; methodological preferences and disciplinary choices; the proliferation of the social sciences and/or the humanities; keywords (such as “the people,” “freedom,” “toleration,” “justice,” “equality,” “liberalism,” “human rights”); and the discourse—that is, the complex of the modes of speaking and thinking—of something that is equally important for all members of a given group or movement. Such a meta-discourse, or background consciousness, containing the signifying centers of social reality, on the one hand, and the strategies or modes of speaking of them, on the other, calls for a Grand Text. It may well be a program document, manifesto, encyclopedia (as in the case of the Encyclopédie of the French Enlightenment movement), or journal (as in the case of nationalist movements and their journals the Aušra [Dawn] and Varpas [Bell] on the eve of the emergence of modern Lithuania). For Kavolis, the Santara-Šviesa [Concord-Light] federation—that is, the cultural union of Lithuanian immigrant liberals in the United States headed by Kavolis—virtually became his intellectual/cultural movement and Seelengemeinschaft, whereas the vision of modern, liberal, and Westernoriented Lithuania, accompanied by the search for a new political and cultural discourse capable of contextualizing and articulating Lithuanian liberalism, served as the aforementioned meta-discourse. Subsequently, the Metmenys [Patterns]—that is, the cultural journal of the Santara-Šviesa movement edited by Kavolis from 1959 to 1996—became his Grand Text. Sadly and symbolically, Kavolis died on June 24, 1996, immediately after the annual conference of Santara-Šviesa in Vilnius, Lithuania. Existential, cultural, and ideological links between Kavolis and SantaraŠviesa reveal Kavolis to have been a man of political and cultural dissent. The pattern of thought that was to be fully developed by Kavolis arose first in the student group Šviesa, formed in Germany in 1946, and then in the American student group Santara, formed in 1953. An ambitious student movement, Santara came to formulate new goals for Lithuanians living abroad. Together, Santara and Šviesa initiated a new policy whose essence lay in establishing better communications with Lithuania. The purpose of their pragmatic policy was threefold: to learn more about actual conditions in the homeland, to open Lithuania up to modern Western intellectual currents, and to confirm the thought that there was in fact but one, united Lithuanian culture. Santara-Šviesa evoked much controversy in the Lithuanian immigrant community dispersed all over the world. First, in the context of the mainstream of conservative Lithuanian culture dominated by the politically and intellectually influential Catholic Church, liberalism inevitably meant strong opposition to the Catholic Church.

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It is little wonder that liberalism, in inter-war Lithuania and in the postwar Lithuanian immigrant community, was associated with anti-clericalism, agnosticism, and radicalism, a typical case in a Catholic culture. It was the way in which conservative Lithuanian immigrants started identifying the beginnings of the “suspect and alien ideas,” thus implying guilt by association. In fact, Santara-Šviesa raised the idea of Westward-looking, fully emancipated, liberal-democratic, inclusive, and cosmopolitan Lithuanian-ness as their banner. However, there was one more good reason for controversy. Whereas the vast majority of Lithuanian immigrants in the United States were convinced that there should be no ties between their community and occupied Lithuania, Santara-Šviesa, in the 1980s, began inviting Lithuanian artists and scholars to participate in its annual conferences in the United States. Moreover, members of this cultural union launched a book-and-magazinesmuggling campaign in Lithuania, quite a risky and dangerous undertaking in those days. They took it for granted that Lithuania would sooner or later regain independence and that the lessons of liberal democracy and pluralism were of decisive importance for Lithuanian consciousness and culture. This is how the Metmenys and other liberal émigré journals and magazines reached more than a few Lithuanian intellectuals. Those actions had sharply divided the Lithuanian community in the United States. Whereas the mainstream of Lithuanian immigrants held that every single contact with Soviet officials and high-ranking compatriots was, in effect, unacceptable on political and moral grounds (as legitimizing the Soviet regime in Lithuania) and that there was no Lithuania any more but the Lithuanian communities in foreign countries, Santara-Šviesa proclaimed its slogan, “Face to Lithuania,” thus assuming the fact that the Lithuanian communities abroad were all branches of the sole tree which was nowhere else but in Lithuania. Constantly abused and labeled by the conservative immigrant press either as KGB spies or as “a bunch of godless pinkos,” Kavolis and his friends from Santara-Šviesa had reached a much wider audience among the Lithuanian intelligentsia than all the militant immigrant fighters for Lithuania’s independence and freedom combined. The final outcome was that SantaraŠviesa, not others, had eventually made a profound impact on the beginnings of modernizing and liberal nationalism in Lithuania, a process that reached its climax after 1990. Santara-Šviesa appears as a sui generis phenomenon in the modern political and cultural history of Lithuania. It was a loose organization. Small wonder, then, that it puzzled not only other émigré organizations, but Soviet Lithuania’s officials, too. Soviet authorities had particular misgivings about Santara-Šviesa, which, in a concept formulated by the KGB, was “an organization without an organization.” There was simply no clandestine organization to penetrate and misinform. Instead, all participants and observers of the Santara-Šviesa annual

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conferences were allowed and even encouraged to discuss every single issue concerning its book-publishing strategy, forthcoming conferences and other cultural events, or the overall intellectual stance shared by Santara-Šviesa. Moreover, all present, regardless of their political allegiances and convictions, were encouraged to vote in making decisions. The character and political orientation of Santara-Šviesa might best be described by recalling the war cry raised by Kavolis: “Revisionists of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your orthodoxy!” Small wonder, then, that the KGB viewed Santara-Šviesa’s ideas as subversive to the Soviet system; it particularly disliked the group’s mocking slogan, “Revisionists of the world, unite!” It suffices to glance at the way Kavolis had been leading the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (1977–1983) to prove that he had always been an intellectual with a program, a man of the movement par excellence. In the Unites States (and in the Anglo-American world in general), the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) had become, for Kavolis, his intellectual movement and Seelengemeinschaft, while his international meta-discourse might have been defined, in his own terms, as the search for the “multicivilizational universe of discourse” in the social sciences and the humanities.2 The Comparative Civilizations Review, the ISCSC journal edited by Kavolis, served for him as the Grand Text, even in the sense of a historical narrative. The movement of North American civilizationists, initiated by Sorokin and then essentially influenced by Benjamin Nelson and Kavolis, seems to have been perceived by Kavolis as the collective alter ego of the SantaraŠviesa movement. The latter Kavolis named, not in vain, the Institute for Multidisciplinary Studies; thus his intellectual and moral commitments coincided. Exactly the same may be said about the invisible kinship between the Metmenys and the Comparative Civilizations Review journals. Indeed, Santara-Šviesa and the ISCSC, in Kavolis’s life, were communities of affinity in terms of his life-long search for ways of understanding the Other in the idiom of self-and-civilization. Kavolis’s social and cultural criticism would be unthinkable without those methodologies that have been elaborated and vitalized by him—civilization analysis (along with Benjamin Nelson, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Louis Dumont) and the history of consciousness (among his predecessors and co-contributors in theoretically constructing this interpretive technique and methodology, one could list Philippe Ariès, Michel Foucault, Louis Dumont, and Hayden White). The former provides a framework within which the key components of every sociologically identifiable civilization—of its social structure and symbolic organization—can be traced, in order to uncover the flux of symbolic meaning; whereas the latter employs in-depth structural exploration of the dynamics of the tendencies of consciousness and of the predominant ideas in a given society or culture or historical epoch.3

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They both bring us to a proper understanding of what has been suppressed in one civilization but more or less released and developed in others, let alone the models of self-understanding and the ways of the perception of the Other. Kavolis’s articles and books are full of maxims and allusions. His ironic notes and caustic lines, referring to the mainstream of Lithuanian linguistic politics and intellectual culture, are targeted at what he fought passionately and uncompromisingly all of his life—the symptoms of integral and radical nationalism; antisemitism; xenophobia; antimodernist political and cultural rhetoric; anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-Western attitudes in twentiethcentury Lithuania. At the same time, his elegant and insightful critiques touched a nerve of Lithuania’s political existence and intellectual life: Kavolis made himself clear regarding such peculiar traits of Lithuanian politics and culture as the conflation of political and moral terms, and the resulting propensity to view political problems as moral ones; moral monopolies resulting in competition over who is the most patriotic; a deep sense of self-righteousness; selfcenteredness and total indifference to the major intellectual themes and moral issues of the twentieth century. For instance, Kavolis writes that the never-ending debates about the uniqueness of Lithuanian culture and spirituality sound like a parochial church choir in nineteenth-century Lithuania. Elsewhere, he calls into question the existence of Lithuanian society as such. Kavolis suggests that society, in the deeper sense, signifies the ability of its members to activate and critically question themselves and the object of their common loyalty and joint dedication, not to mention the ability to employ a common moral vocabulary containing keywords for integrity and decency—things that, according to him, are missing in Lithuanian politics, culture, and mundane existence. Kavolis concludes that the inability of a society to make principal ethical distinctions not only undermines its independence and freedom, but also jeopardizes its social and moral order. He describes Lithuanian cultural congresses in exile as feasts of exhibitionism. Of racists among Lithuanian immigrants in the United States, Kavolis wrote that immigrants often adopt the worst traits of their new countries, and that in doing so, become caricatures of humankind. A major contributor to new methodologies and perspectives in the social sciences and humanities, Kavolis came to provide not only a new theoretical vocabulary, but also an interpretive framework for the most elusive, though dramatic and even tragic, aspects of human experience and existence. In so doing, Kavolis was not only writing his diary and moral autobiography, but also mapping his culture and imagined community of memory and participation. He contributed greatly to the creation of a new kind of scholarship, the scholarship of the twenty-first century—not bureaucratically “rationalizing” and dividing the human world and social reality, not dogmatically rigid and

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unreflective, not soulless and totally insensitive about its social effects or political and moral implications, but reflective, ironic, critical, attentive to every single detail of human existence, and perfectly aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the human world. It is a scholarship that comes to bridge not only the social sciences and humanities disciplines, but also the distinct modes of discourse and of selfcomprehension. Such a social science with a human face was among Kavolis’ main ambitions. And this is Kavolis’ legacy of the politics of critical self-discovery. 2. Aleksandras Shtromas: Liberal Conservatism and the Politics of Dissent Aleksandras Shtromas, a British-American political scientist, passed away on June 12, 1999. From 1973 to 1989, Shtromas lived in Great Britain teaching and researching at the Universities of Bradford and Salford. From 1989, he served as Professor of Political Science at Hillsdale College in Michigan, USA. A major figure in the political science world, an erudite writer, and an ambitious thinker, Shtromas had several planes of identity and moral existence. A human rights activist and political dissident, and a dedicated fighter for the cause of Lithuania’s independence, Shtromas is reminiscent of the most glorious traditions of the epoch of the springtime of the peoples. Although neglected and even ignored for a long time by mainstream British and American academics as a maverick and dissenter, he managed to reach the heights of international recognition as a brilliant and talented scholar and as a mesmerizing orator. Yet the academic positions Shtromas held reflect merely several episodes from his remarkable, if not to say incredible, biography. Aleksandras Shtromas (Štromas) was born on April 4, 1931, in Kaunas, Lithuania. A then bilingual boy—Lithuanian and Russian were his native languages—he attended a Catholic school, the gymnasium of the Ateitininkai organization in Kaunas, where Vytautas Kavolis and Julius Šmulkštys, who would become an émigré political scientist in the United States active in Santara-Šviesa (Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, a former political adviser to President of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus), were among his classmates. After Shtromas’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1973, his life-long friends and classmates would see each other every year, because Shtromas joined Santara-Šviesa and started participating in its annual conferences in the United States. Shtromas reached his teens in 1944, Kavolis in 1943, when the most horrible events of the twentieth century took place in Europe. Shtromas witnessed the clash of the twin totalitarian regimes, which occurred in his country. In 1940, the Red Army invaded Lithuania only to retreat in 1941 when the Nazis came in, which meant a double tragedy for Lithuania. First, Lithuania

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lost its independence for the next five decades. Executions, mass deportations, and exodus of the most prosperous and educated people—all these calamities were still to come in 1945 when the Soviet Union re-occupied and re-annexed Lithuania, but the destructive military operations and sinister political manipulations of the Soviets in 1940 left Lithuanians bitter and in shock. The year 1941 became the most tragic and infamous page in Lithuanian history: the Holocaust commenced, claiming the lives of more than 200,000 Lithuanian Jews. In one of the first slaughters of Lithuanian Jewry, the Lietnjkis garage massacre orchestrated and operated by Lithuanian collaborators with the Nazis, Shtromas’s father, Jurgis Štromas, was killed. One of the most tragic and paradoxical things about his father’s fate was that he was a completely assimilated Lithuanian Jew, passionately attached and loyal to Lithuania. Although Jurgis Štromas, particularly after 1933, increasingly became sympathetic to Communism as the supposedly sole alternative to the rising National-Socialist and Fascist regimes in inter-war Europe, he was explicitly pro-Lithuanian. It was not in vain that in 1920 Jurgis Štromas served as chargé d’affaires of the newly established Republic of Lithuania in Berlin, Germany. Later he served as a high-ranking official in Kaunas. Deaf and blind to these elusive nuances of the fate of assimilated and modernized European Jews, death found him in Kaunas in the first days of the Second World War, and he died as a Jew. During 1941–1943, Aleksandras Shtromas and his family members were inmates of the Vilijampolơ Ghetto and concentration camp near Kaunas. In 1943, he escaped from the concentration camp in an almost miraculous way. Shtromas and his sister Margaret survived the Holocaust, but their mother perished in the Stutthof concentration camp. Shtromas’s mother, Eugenia Kozin-Štromienơ, was born and raised in St. Petersburg. She met Jurgis Štromas in Berlin during his diplomatic service. A Russian-speaking woman of Jewish descent, completely assimilated into Russian society and the culture of the ancien régime, she was not only hostile to the Bolsheviks, but also contemptuous of the humiliating ghetto existence and Jewish separatism. Symbolically and tragically, she died in the Nazi concentration camp, taking her own life three weeks before the liberation of the Stutthof inmates. During 1943–1944 Shtromas lived in Kaunas with the Macenaviþius family, a Lithuanian Christian family who hid and rescued him. After the war he was adopted by Antanas Snieþkus, the First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party (CPL), and his wife Mira Bordonaitơ. Yet their paths would soon diverge. Sympathetic to the Red Army and to the “right cause of universal freedom and justice” during the war, an attitude that was quite natural and understandable given the circumstances of the political climate in pre-war and wartime Europe, Shtromas radically changed his attitude to the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism after Stalin’s death in 1953. When, in his 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party (CPSU), Khrushchev denounced the “crimes of the Stalin

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era” and condemned Stalinism as a sinister form of the cult of personality, many young idealists were shocked. Some of them still believed in the possibility of socialism with a human face—a great, though unfulfilled and, therefore, false, promise of Khrushchev’s politics of thaw. Shtromas was among those who chose to join the movement of political dissent, thus denouncing the criminal and cynical nature of the regime and demanding the respect of freedom of conscience and human rights in general. Later on, his newly formed political views and moral allegiances would greatly disappoint Snieþkus, though to his credit we have to admit that he did his best to understand and tolerate Shtromas’s existential choice. Shtromas’s odyssey began in 1948 when, having spent the academic 1947–1948 year at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, he was admitted to the Law Faculty at the University of Moscow. Having graduated from the University of Moscow in 1952, Shtromas spent some time in Lithuania working as a defense lawyer and part-time lecturer in various higher education institutions. From 1955 to 1959, he pursued postgraduate studies and research at the All-Union Research Institute of Legal Sciences and at the Special Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in Moscow. From 1959 to 1973, Shtromas lived and worked successively in Vilnius, Ivanovo, and Moscow. It was a decisive period in his life: he actively joined the most prominent Soviet political dissidents. Through joint devotion, a common raison d’être, and a shared value-andidea system, Shtromas developed a life-long friendship with Tomas Venclova. Leonid Pinsky, a scholar of Renaissance literature and Shakespeare, and Grigory Pomerantz, a philosopher and scholar of Oriental cultures, had a great impact on Shtromas. At the same time, Shtromas knew personally and sometimes cooperated with Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, and Vladimir Bukovsky. Alexander Galich and Alexander Ginzburg were his close friends. Having experienced political persecution for his dissident activities, Shtromas finally had to face the consequences of his political and moral choice. In 1973, he was forced to leave the Soviet Union. Shtromas chose the United Kingdom, where he was able to join his sister (later Lady) Margaret Kagan. Here he started his second academic career. From 1974 to 1977, Shtromas was Senior Research Associate in Peace Studies at the School of Peace Studies of the University of Bradford. Despite his academic credentials and brilliance, he was rejected for a permanent position. No doubt his outspoken anti-Communism and critical views of the Western peace movement (including much of the new academic discipline of Peace Studies) made him a rather awkward member of the new Department. Moreover, the University’s valued exchange agreement for Russian language

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students with academic institutions in the Soviet Union might have been placed in jeopardy by Shtromas’s continued employment at the University. It is important to remember that Shtromas was a high-profile dissident, who frequently broadcast on Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, and who was especially vilified in the official Lithuanian media. His merits were quickly realized elsewhere, however. He was welcomed by David Marquand to a more conventional university department, which Marquand created at the University of Salford following his return from Brussels (where he was Roy Jenkins’s right-hand man at the European Commission). From 1978 to 1983, Shtromas was Lecturer in Politics at the Departments of Sociological and Political Studies (1978–1981) and of Politics and Contemporary History (1981–1983) of the University of Salford. In 1983, he was appointed Reader. In 1989, Shtromas moved to the United States where he received his tenured appointment as Professor of Political Science at Hillsdale College in Michigan. A member of many British and international learned societies and associations, Shtromas enjoyed international recognition and cooperated with many prominent British political theorists and social scientists, such as Leszek Koáakowski, Kenneth Minogue, David Marquand, and Bhikhu Parekh. Among leading academics in the United States, whom he could call his friends, were Sidney Hook, Robert Conquest, Morton Kaplan, Robert Faulkner, and David Singer, among many others. Immediately upon his arrival in the UK, Shtromas started lecturing, writing, and broadcasting on the inexorable collapse of the Soviet Union. Resting his analysis on the assumption that Communism is simply unable to provide any viable social and moral order, he gave numerous examples of the profound intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union. The British audience must have been astonished to learn that nobody in the Soviet Union took Marxism-Leninism seriously. The vast majority of the Soviet intelligentsia, as Shtromas pointed out, had become skilled at ideological cat-and-mouse and hide-and-seek games, constantly wrestling with the Soviet Newspeak and censorship, and employing an Aesopian language and sophisticated literary devices to survive and remain as decent as possible in a world of brainwashing and cynical lies. This was not in tune with the Western image of the Soviet and East European intellectual, perceived either as a fool and single-minded fanatic or as a cynical opportunist. Shtromas was convinced that the breakup of the Soviet Empire would not be long in coming, and stressed the imperative task for the West to be prepared for such a fundamental change in world history. In this, he was unique in the political science world. Although Dr. Rein Taagepera, Professor of Political Science at UCLA, an Estonian émigré scholar in the United States, at this point, also deserves

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honorable mention (Taagepera was theoretically modeling the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, too), Shtromas was the only political scientist in the world who took an empirically elusive disintegration of the Soviet Union, as early as the late 1970s, as an ongoing process.4 For Shtromas, the 1991 fall of Communism, though a great challenge for the mainstream of sovietologists and political scientists in North America and Western Europe, was nothing more than part of the fundamental change in the world order that he anticipated and predicted. Shtromas’s anti-Communism, as well as his uncompromising struggle with Soviet totalitarianism, which he explicitly regarded as a crime against human individuals, historically rooted and culturally formed communities, and humanity, had quite complex implications for his academic career and also for his reputation among his fellow political scientists. Frequently misinterpreted and misrepresented in the political science world dominated by the Left, Shtromas used to be labeled both as a “reactionary” and as a “right-wing hawk.” In fact, he was neither. The point was that Shtromas’s propensity to mercilessly disclose the blindness and naiveté of his colleagues regarding the alleged humanity and justice of Communism as an important alternative or even as a rival civilization, as well as his massive attacks on the double standard in assessing National Socialism and Communism, irritated more than a few. Suffice it to recall Shtromas’s brilliant eloquence and his delight in being deliberately provocative and challenging. There was little, if any ground at all to regard Shtromas as a singlemindedly ambitious critic of liberal values. Indeed, he empathized both with rational and moderate right-wing political forces and with conservative political thought, which he perceived as more deeply rooted in history and common sense philosophy. Yet very few are aware of the fact that Shtromas was very liberal and generous in his attitude to nationalism, identity politics, and modes of selfcomprehension, not to mention his overall Central and East European intellectual and moral sensibility. Shtromas might best be described as a liberal conservative. In his ability to decipher the symbolic codes and interpretive undertones of Central and East European consciousness, politics, and culture, Shtromas was second to none. Being at home in many languages and cultures, he deeply penetrated every single aspect of the characteristic Central and East European fights for freedom and self-determination. An astonishingly prolific writer—he authored numerous monographs, book chapters, scholarly articles, and essays—Shtromas will be perhaps best remembered for his fundamental studies in political change in the Soviet Union, such as Political Change and Social Development: The Case of the Soviet Union, and the voluminous The Soviet Union and the Challenge of the Future (4 volumes, co-edited with Morton Kaplan), as well as for his unsurpassed articles on Soviet dissidents and on political dissent in the Baltic

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countries.5 At the same time, Shtromas was a major contributor to criminology and the forensic sciences, the areas of his expertise and achievement in the Soviet Union. A Holocaust survivor, dissenter, and iconoclastic intellectual, Shtromas, throughout his lifetime, remained a man of openness and of multiple and communicating identities. Kavolis’s words on identity as a dialogue-based framework for self-discovery and for the discovery of the Other fit Shtromas perfectly.6 Shtromas regarded himself both as a Jew and as a Lithuanian, an identity pattern which is so familiar and understandable to Central and East European Jews, though a rarity in nationalist Europe permeated by the idea of single identity and loyalty. At the same time, he was very much at home in Russian literature and cultural history. While being very attached to his native Lithuania and passionately identifying himself with Central and Eastern Europe, Shtromas appreciated many traits of American politics and intellectual culture, and also had much admiration and affection for Great Britain. Shtromas’s immense erudition and interdisciplinary brilliance made him an unusual political scientist. His capability, from a very young age, to recite by heart the masterpieces of English, French, Russian, and Lithuanian poetry, as well as his overall expertise in world literature, theater, and fine arts, struck and fascinated his colleagues and friends. His knowledge of philosophy and sociology was superb. A devout reader and staunch defender of Kant, he passionately advocated the principle of self-determination, which should be applied to every nation, culture, and individual. Small wonder, then, that Shtromas’s incisive social and political analyses were often complemented by his elegant insights into elusive phenomena of Central and East European consciousness and cultures hidden from the sight of the mainstream of political scientists and analysts. In twentieth-century Lithuanian intellectual culture, including Lithuanian émigré academics, there was no political thinker of his stature. Aleksandras Shtromas came to join the honorable company of the most eminent critics of totalitarianism, ideocracy, brainwashing, and manipulative exchanges, the company which includes, among others, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Karl R. Popper, Raymond Aron, Alain Besançon, Leszek Koáakowski, and Ernest Gellner, who did academically and theoretically what Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Czesáaw Miáosz, Milan Kundera, and Tomas Venclova did by means of fiction, literary criticism, and political essays. Shtromas’s Santara-Šviesa connection included one more important acquaintance, which sheds new light on his role in the major political processes in Lithuania after 1990. Very much at home and celebrated in the Lithuanian diaspora around the world, in Chicago Shtromas became a close adviser and friend of Valdas Adamkus, who was elected President of Lithuania in 1998. An internationally recognized environmentalist who spent much of his time in the Unites States, Adamkus was a life-long friend of

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Kavolis, and also one of the founders of Santara-Šviesa. Shtromas urged Adamkus to run in the presidential campaign in Lithuania, and acted as his adviser all the time. Last but not least, Shtromas was involved in drawing up a new constitution for his native country. A man of ideas and action, Shtromas was able to bridge the world of ideas and the world of public affairs. The ethical message of Shtromas is also of great importance. His humanity and sensitivity were instrumental in constituting his scholarship. Like Kavolis, Shtromas regarded his research and lecturing as a significant part of his moral autobiography. A maverick and dissenter by moral choice, he was incompatible with hypocritical and cynical power games, demagoguery and manipulative exchanges, contempt for humanity, or ideological zeal and fanaticism of all shades. For sinister things originate in obscure thought and an ambiguous soul. Shtromas powerfully stood against all forms of modern barbarity, not only as a humanist thinker, but also by virtue of the clarity of his thought. An EastCentral European thinker and writer capable of participating in several cultures and modes of discourse, Shtromas—by virtue of his intellectual breadth, clarity of thought and expression, and humanist concerns—was never confined to specifically Jewish causes. In this, he reminds us of the best traditions of Central and East European Jewry, who chose the frontier of modernity as a form of existence, and who also stood for all possible forms of human sensibility and fulfillment. He regarded nations as moral actors in history and violently objected to group, national, and cultural stereotyping. A Holocaust survivor perfectly aware of antisemitism in his native country and beyond, Shtromas was convinced that Germanophobia, Russophobia, Polonophobia, or Lithuanophobia, are no better than Judophobia. The Rabbi Joseph Klein Lecture, “The Jewish and Gentile Experience of the Holocaust: A Personal Perspective,” which Shtromas gave on April 10, 1989, at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, was one of the most provocative and controversial public performances Shtromas ever gave during his career, making clear his viewpoint that no nation has the right to indict and judge other nations as collective criminals, and that contempt for the countries where the Holocaust occurred multiplies and strengthens mutual hatred and demonization. The propensity to demonize other nations and cultures, according to Shtromas, is the most painful trauma inflicted by the Second World War on many nations.7 However, this crucial aspect of Shtromas’s critical scholarship and iconoclastic personality has yet to be discovered by intellectual historians and political scientists, since it is inseparable from his legacy of the politics of dissent. The same might be said about Shtromas’s reflections on the metaphysics and ethics of the Holocaust that reveal him to be a great political and moral philosopher who has yet to be discovered by social scientists and humanists alike.

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3. Tomas Venclova: Ethical Universalism and the Politics of Dialogue Tomas Venclova may well be regarded as the most influential social and cultural critic in twentieth-century Lithuania. Having passed from intrastructural to extrastructural dissent, he repeated the sequence of the phases of political dissent so aptly described by Shtromas.8 A national poet of Lithuania, a liberal critic of conservative nationalism, and a brilliant essayist, Venclova may be said to have quite legitimately joined the honorable company of the most prominent critics of society and culture in Central and Eastern Europe, such as Czesáaw Miáosz, Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, and Joseph Brodsky.9 As a critic of Communism, and as a human rights activist, he was a major figure in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union and beyond. Yet Venclova’s critiques and humane concerns far transcended the limits of conventional political dissent and entered the discursive universe of the critical questioning of his society and culture. Prejudice, superstition, irrational fear of modernity, antisemitism, xenophobia, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness are keywords to define the object of his criticism targeted at Lithuanian society and culture. Tomas Venclova was born on September 11, 1937, in Klaipơda, Lithuania. His father, Antanas Venclova, was a famous Soviet Lithuanian poet and writer, and even a high-ranking official within the Soviet power structure. Of his father, Tomas Venclova wrote: My father, Antanas Venclova, was a convinced communist. I have respected him and I continue respecting him as a human being. It was from him, among others, that I learned to be loyal to my principles. But as I observed life and took part in it, I early formed a world-view different from that of my father. My later experience merely served to confirm it. This was not a secret to my father or to anybody else.10 Venclova wrote these words in his famous letter to the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, dated May 9, 1975. They clearly indicated his political and moral stance. Unwilling to continue his life and work in the Soviet Union where he felt “barred from any more extensive and public literary, scholarly and cultural activity,”11 Venclova asked to be allowed to go abroad with his family. The similarity of Shtromas’s and Venclova’s biographies lies in the fact that both broke away from ideological and political allegiances that were more or less rooted in their families. Both grew up in a safe and secure world of privileges and stability; yet both rejected that world. Venclova grew up surrounded by books and literary debates. His milieu was permeated by world literature and intellectual culture.

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Whereas Shtromas, who was six years older and with whom he would develop a life-long friendship, survived the Holocaust and early experienced the clash of the most cynical, criminal, and murderous political regimes of the twentieth century, Venclova remained, for a long time, disconnected from the brutality of political reality. Small wonder, then, that he entered this as a total stranger, judging it by the intellectual and moral standard of the other-worldly reality, a world of literature and humanistic studies, the realm of Bildung and das rein Geistige where he was much more at home than in the barbarous world outside his library. As Shtromas incisively noted, in Venclova’s world of self-cultivation and self-dedication, Lithuanian ethnocentrism was unthinkable.12 The same might be said about Lithuanian nationalism, which was regarded by Venclova’s father and other people of his circle and ideological background, as a sign of Lithuanian provincialism and of those allegedly reactionary attitudes that were deeply rooted in inter-war Lithuania. What Venclova formed on his own, very early, was his ethical universalism – a profound sense of universally valid moral values that later would turn out to be irreconcilable and incompatible with Communist ideology. Having graduated from the University of Vilnius in 1960, Venclova later was appointed a lecturer in literature, linguistics, and semiotics at his alma mater. At the same time, he began translating American, English, Welsh, Irish, French, Greek, Russian, Polish, and other continental European literature into Lithuanian, quite early establishing his reputation as a master of the translation of modern literature. In the area of the translation of twentiethcentury literature, Venclova has always been and still is regarded as secondto-none in Lithuania. His interest in semiotics and literary theory led him, in the late 1960s, to the University of Tartu, Estonia, where he attended Yuri Lotman’s seminar on semiotics and structural poetics. From 1966–1971, Venclova pursued his graduate studies in semiotics and Russian literature at the University of Tartu. Yuri Lotman, who was a semiotician and literary scholar of world stature and who was offered full professorship in Estonia after the antisemitic purge in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), attracted more than a few writers and literary scholars from the circles of political dissent. A strong opposition to Marxist-Leninist ideology was therefore paralleled by the quest for an alternative to dialectical and historical materialism as a mandatory methodology in the humanities and social sciences. In those days, such methodological preferences and disciplinary choices as semiotics and structural poetics were an obvious and significant part of dissent. A clue to Venclova’s political and moral choices is found in the fact that he has never been a typical representative of Lithuanian Catholic and nationalistic dissent. However respectful of The Chronicle of the Catholic

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Church in Lithuania, Lithuanian Samizdat, and other forms of political dissent, Venclova may never have fallen into the category of the mainstream of Lithuanian patriotic and nationalistic dissent. Venclova describes his double dissent in the following way: I could regard myself neither as professional writer nor as professional scholar; I was rather professional translator. In the eyes of society and government, I was an obvious non-conformist. I was at odds not only with official values, but also with those values that usually signify, in the Baltic countries and in the Soviet Union, non-acceptance of the regime. For instance, I did not have a strong interest in the new music of the West; nor was I interested in its technology and fashion. And, seriously speaking, I never was a nationalist and xenophobe. The Soviet regime does not regard mundane nonconformity with great suspicion. Moreover, it has even learned how to “co-opt” and integrate such a form of non-conformity. Yet they must have been puzzled with my case. The Lithuanian intelligentsia was not sympathetic to me either.13 In 1960, Venclova met Alexander Ginzburg, who at that time edited an underground literary journal Sintaksis [Syntax] and who was willing to publish a special issue of the journal in Lithuanian. Venclova gave him some of his poetry to publish in this issue. Around the same time, he participated in establishing a Samizdat publishing group Eglutơ [Christmas Tree] and a literary scholarship and culture studies group. As Venclova remembers it, all these initiatives ended up with interrogations. Happily, it was a post-Stalinist epoch, and nobody was jailed. Although Venclova’s name was put on the KGB blacklist, he was left to his own devices for some time. In 1968, Venclova, along with many Russian dissidents, signed a letter of protest regarding the case of Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov (224 persons signed the letter). This time he was neither interrogated nor otherwise punished, although the real consequences of his dissent were still to come. Venclova’a application for membership in the LSSR Writers’ Union was denied. He was also not allowed to visit Hungary where his book of poetry was about to appear. According to Venclova, the fact that he was the son of Antanas Venclova protected him from greater trouble at the beginning of his dissident activities. Although Antanas Venclova did nothing to promote his son or to secure his position as a poet and translator, the authorities were reluctant to do harm to the son of a prominent Soviet poet and statesman. However, things changed after Antanas Venclova’s death in 1971, which coincided with the beginning of an increasing Brezhnevist reaction. Deeply convinced that much of his creative and intellectual endeavor was simply being ignored, Venclova decided to write the aforementioned letter to the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, a decisive act and a dangerous undertaking in those days.

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Having written this letter, he was certain that a severe reaction by the authorities, including the possibility of being put in jail or a psychiatric hospital, would not be far off. Surprisingly enough, instead of punishment, new job offers came up, such as the translation of Shakespeare’s Tempest. An émigré historian in the United States, Vincas Trumpa, wrote a public letter to Venclova, which was published in the liberal American-Lithuanian monthly Akiraþiai [Horizons]. In this letter, Trumpa warned Venclova about the possible hardships and difficulties of living in the West if he, a Lithuanian poet and an East European intellectual, should leave for the West instead of staying with his people. Trumpa implied that a foreign country would fail to appreciate Venclova’s talents and that he would therefore be unable to fulfill himself, outside Lithuania, as a poet and translator. Moreover, Trumpa’s letter acquired a moral plane suggesting that the real responsibility of a national poet and eminent intellectual was to do his or her best to improve things in his or her country, instead of emigrating. Having mentioned Socrates and Ovid, one of whom preferred death to exile from Athens, and the other, to Dacia, who was banished from Rome to Tomi without being able to choose, Trumpa wondered at the modern poet’s, that is, Tomas Venclova’s, willingness to leave his country without being brutally forced to do so. Venclova’s response to Trumpa, published in Akiraþiai, contains some crucial points of his moral philosophy, the philosophy of ethical universalism and cultural dialogue. Here Venclova passionately and explicitly denies the idea that we can allow moral compromise for the sake of our national culture and its survival. Venclova also addresses the importance of émigré culture and émigré existential experiences, a phenomenon, which he describes as the second voice of culture and which, according to him, acquires crucial significance when the first voice either remains silent or sings the wrong and imposed melody. The following passage sheds new light on Venclova as representing a new type of Lithuanian émigré, who, in the admirable words of Kavolis, comes to choose exile only to be able to speak the truth and maintain fidelity to his ethical principles and moral integrity. Venclova writes: You say that our writers are corrupt and enjoy many benefits of the regime. The writers, who really deserve this title, have, in our country, such existential experiences that I would not wish you to have. You are talking about Socrates and Ovid. Unfortunately, these analogies are misleading. The country in which I live has little to do with Rome, and definitely nothing with Athens. It is an absolutely new phenomenon in world history. I could discuss it in detail, but writers, who are much better than I and with whose works you can easily familiarize yourself, have already done it. I also wonder that you, a historian, did not recall such exiles as Adam Mickiewicz, Herzen, and many Lithuanians. Their way to exile differs much from that of Socrates and Ovid. I am very happy that I

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managed to write without lies for many years (not always, though). It is equally true that I, in doing so, was not alone—in fact, there are a number of people of this sort in our country. Yet, in recent years (roughly, since 1968), non-Marxist and non-dogmatic intellectuals are bound to choose between compromising their conscience and being marginalized. There is an opinion that compromises are justifiable and even indispensable for the sake of national culture. In my view, no demoralization—bearing in mind that compromise is the beginning of demoralization, and sooner or later has very sad consequences—has ever been, is, nor will be of value for culture.14 At that time, Czesáaw Miáosz extended an invitation to Venclova to lecture at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. Venclova fought for one and half years for his right to go to Berkeley. He remembers that period of his life as intense, unpredictable, even pleasant. According to Venclova, the Soviet authorities would have been happy to get rid of him; yet they did not know how to achieve this. The authorities were cornered in this cat-and-mouse game; therefore, something had to be done. In 1976, Venclova joined the Lithuanian Helsinki group, where he participated alongside Viktoras Petkus, a human rights activist in Lithuania. The first conference of the Moscow Helsinki group, which took place on December 1, 1976, in Yuri Orlov’s apartment in Moscow, and where Venclova participated together with many other prominent dissidents, such as his old acquaintance Alexander Ginzburg, was the last thing the Soviet authorities would have tolerated. Suffice it to recall that Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky served, in this Helsinki group initiation conference, as an interpreter from Russian into English. A reaction came swiftly. Some of the Helsinki group members were jailed, others—Venclova among them—thrown out of the Soviet Union. As Venclova would later point out himself, he could only speculate about the reasons behind the decision to allow him to emigrate. According to him, one such reason might have been his family name, quite inconvenient for the Soviet authorities. After all, Venclova’s case was too well known in the West for them to ignore Western political and moral opinion. Most importantly, KGB files provided Venclova’s psychological portrait where he must have been depicted as an indulgent boy of the Soviet privileged class—wishy-washy, vulnerable, and, in a way, unstable. It might have been expected that Venclova, having failed to adjust to a highly competitive and insensitive Western society, would certainly ask for permission to return to the Soviet Union, which would be his grand failure, and moreover the very triumph of the Soviet authorities. Instead, such a naïve and unrealistic portrayal of Venclova proved to have been the grand failure of the authorities, the KGB, and the Soviet press alike. Having spent one semester as Regents Professor of Slavic Literatures in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of

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California-Berkeley in 1977, Venclova received a lectureship in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA (1977–1980). Whereas Czesáaw Miáosz invited him to Berkeley, Marija Gimbutas, the prominent American archeologist of Lithuanian descent, stood behind his appointment at UCLA. In 1978, he was appointed Morton Professor by the Department of Philosophy at Ohio University. In the United States, Venclova started his second and true academic career. In 1993, he was promoted to the title of Professor of Slavic Literatures at Yale. His honorary appointments and titles include lecturing at Harvard University and honorary doctorates from the Maria Curie-Skáodowska University in Lublin in 1991, and from the Jagieááonian University of Kraków in 2000. When Lithuania and Poland, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, became independent and achieved a historic breakthrough in their relations, Venclova’s political voice and humanist message were recalled in both countries. Venclova received the supreme Lithuanian and Polish honors. In Lithuania, he was awarded, in 1995, the Third Degree Order of Gediminas for his major contribution to the improvement of relations between Lithuanians and Poles, and also between Lithuanians and Jews. In 1999, Venclova received the Fourth Degree Order of the Vytis Cross for his dissident activities. In Poland, Venclova was awarded, in 1996, the KrzyĪ Komandorski [the Order of the Commander Cross] for the enhancement of mutual trust and respect between the two nations. In 2000, Venclova received Lithuania’s National Prize for Culture and Art for his poetry and essays of the 1995–2000 period. In the United States, Venclova joined Santara-Šviesa. A close friend of Czesáaw Miáosz and Joseph Brodsky (who dedicated his poetic masterpiece, “Lithuanian Divertissement,” to Venclova, cherishing remembrances of their discussions and evenings in the Vilnius café, Neringa, a favorite place of Russian and Lithuanian dissidents and non-conformist intellectuals), Venclova was much at home in this liberal intellectual and cultural movement of Lithuanian émigrés. It was quite logical that he established a close relationship with SantaraŠviesa. It would be difficult to imagine him anywhere else in AmericanLithuanian circles. Being at odds with the mainstream of Lithuanian immigrants in the United States regarding many points of Lithuanian identity and freedom issues, the liberal and cosmopolitan Venclova was frequently referred to by the conservative part of the Lithuanian community in the United States as a Russophile, Polonophile, and, horribile dictu, a Judophile. Although no one in Lithuania or beyond has ever critically questioned or otherwise doubted his major contribution to the human rights movement and to the Soviet political dissent, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that Venclova has met more sympathy, respect, and understanding in Poland and Russia than in his native Lithuania. However cherished and respected by his friends and fellow dissidents in Lithuania, Venclova has always been

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alienated from mainstream Lithuanian culture and from the Lithuanian intelligentsia. Therefore, it was with sound reason that Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the towering figures in Moscow circles of overt political dissent, once made the joke: “The Lithuanian people—after two thousand years of working so hard on it—gave birth to its first Jew. The name of the Jew is Tomas Venclova.”15 Having established his reputation quite early on as a citizen of the world, Venclova shifted the center of his Lithuanian political and cultural concerns towards core issues in ethics, politics, and the metaphysics of human existence. He might well be regarded as the founder of modern Lithuanian ethical universalism. At the same time, he, along with Kavolis and Shtromas, laid the foundations for the ethic of Lithuanian liberal nationalism. There are many reasons to treat Venclova as a major figure in the philosophy of history and moral philosophy, too. His concept of nations as the moral actors of history is much in tune with the humanistic pathos of Shtromas’s ethical theory of nationalism, and also is reminiscent of the best traditions of German and Russian philosophies of history and culture, and of the dialogue-based ethical personalism as well, the latter ranging from Nikolai Berdyaev to Martin Buber. Venclova’s symbolic citizenship of the world, complemented by his Central and East European intellectual and moral sensibilities, makes him stand close to such great émigré poets and thinkers as Adam Mickiewicz, Giuseppe Mazzini, Alexander Herzen, Joseph Brodsky, and Czesáaw Miáosz. Actually, Venclova is inseparable from the gallery of intellectual and cultural heroes of Central and Eastern Europe. He would certainly qualify for the honorable company of people whom Kavolis described as postmodern nationalists. The problem of the representation and misrepresentation of the Other becomes central in the most internationally acclaimed of Venclova’s thoughtful and penetrating political essays, such as “Jews and Lithuanians,” “Russians and Lithuanians,” and “Poles and Lithuanians.” A brilliant writer, an erudite scholar, and an elegant thinker, Venclova, in the aforementioned political essays, formulates his thought in an exceptionally clear and understandable way, as if deliberately trying to make himself heard and read by a large audience of his compatriots. He is by no means an elitist writer. Doing his best to increase the readership of his essays and to enhance his political and moral appeal to as many people as possible, Venclova radically differs from Kavolis who was, foremost, a sophisticated academic writer. Venclova differs from Kavolis from the point of view of the linguistic expression and composition of the text, too: Venclova places in the body of the text and even italicizes what Kavolis used to relegate to the endnotes of his articles, namely, reference points and allusions concerning Lithuanian antisemitism, xenophobic sentiments, prejudices, and conspiracy theories.

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This is not to say that things that are central to Venclova were of the second order or even marginal for Kavolis. The point is that Kavolis’s political and moral concerns are contextualized within the framework of his broader social analyses and interpretations of culture, whereas Venclova derives all major themes from his direct experience not only as a writer, but also as a human rights activist and political dissident who spent much of his time in Lithuania and Russia. Venclova also differs from Shtromas in more than one way. Shtromas, in his political analyses and passionate essays, placed more analytical and critical emphases on Communism and the Soviet regime than on Lithuanian misrepresentations of other nations and cultures (for instance, anti-Polish, anti-Russian, and antisemitic sentiments), thus showing more forgiveness of Lithuanian prejudices and superstitions than Venclova and Kavolis. And although we can only speculate about the short- and long-term effects of Venclova’s social criticism on Lithuanian society and culture, the charge of being too disconnected from the ordinary readership, or of being inaccessible to a wider audience in terms of his exaggerated linguistic and stylistic sophistication, in Venclova’s case, would be totally unfounded. If Venclova remains a maverick and dissenter even in present-day Lithuania, the reasons lie elsewhere. One of the reasons, most probably, is Venclova’s cosmopolitanism and internationalism—attitudes that are much misinterpreted and misrepresented in present Lithuania. For most Lithuanians—not excluding writers, artists, journalists, academics, public officials, and politicians—internationalism still remains a pejorative term reminiscent of the worst nightmares of Soviet propaganda and political demagogy, and, quite justifiably so if the term is used exclusively in the context of Soviet reality. Alas, an alternative to the Soviet interpretive vocabulary has yet to be worked out in Lithuania. This is also more than true with regard to cosmopolitanism, which is increasingly being depicted as a threat to Lithuanian identity and national culture, thus using the term as a mere euphemism for the supposedly “Jewish insensitivity and indifference” to the utmost Lithuanian patriotic concerns and providing quite rich soil for similar gems of group stereotyping and antisemitic wisdom. For the vast majority of present-day Lithuanian intellectuals, the internationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism of Venclova and his fellow dissidents sound more than odd and are simply inconceivable. To blame them for this is the same as to blame people for being unable to speak a foreign language. It is little wonder that Venclova openly challenges a sort of reverse Soviet demonology, or even a bizarre combination of Soviet mentality and demonological nationalism, by severely criticizing anti-Polish, anti-Russian, and antisemitic sentiments and prejudices in Lithuania. The most important of the philosophical and political implications of Venclova’s social criticism is that he reconciles Lithuanian nationalism with

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ethical universalism. It was not accidental that Shtromas analyzed Venclova as the founder of modern Lithuanian universalism. In addition, Venclova may well be regarded as one of the founders of Lithuanian internationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. If liberal nationalism can be defined as a form of social criticism, this is more than true of Venclova’s essays and critical scholarship. In the context of Venclova’s works, Lithuanian mainstream nationalism appears as a deviation from the values and ideas recognized and fully endorsed by the ethic of liberal nationalism, that is, the initial stage of Lithuanian nationalism and of other Central and East European nations’ nationalisms. Having started as a lonely moralist and representative of the conscience of Lithuania, Tomas Venclova joined the company of the cosmopolitan exiles of Central and Eastern Europe whose works, lives, and personalities contain significant alternatives and challenges to the politics and cultures of their native countries.

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Chapter Three Vytautas Kavolis: Toward a Polylogue of Civilizations Present-day civilizational analysis differs greatly from the classical exponents of the comparative study of civilizations, such as Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, or Pitirim A. Sorokin. In social philosophy and sociology, the civilizational dimension is regaining its significance, which has been lost since Max Weber. Civilizations as the largest comprehensible and theoretically identifiable units have been analyzed in the works of such major civilizational analysts and theorists of comparative civilizations as Norbert Elias, S. N. Eisenstadt, Louis Dumont, Benjamin Nelson, Ernest Gellner, and Vytautas Kavolis. They are all interdisciplinary scholars, whose work would be unthinkable without their efforts to bridge the humanist and social science disciplines, using the comparative perspective as a means of building up an inclusive theory of the social sciences and humanities. The exponents of civilizational analysis and of the history of consciousness—the latter represents a congregation that includes Philippe Ariès, Michel Foucault, Vytautas Kavolis, Hayden White, and Louis Dumont, although its origins might be traced back to Geistesgeschichte—as predominant methodologies in the context of the comparative study of civilizations, are perfectly aware of the fact that the concept of civilization can serve as a means of symbolic and real exclusion, not only inclusion. This is why it significantly enhances our intellectual responsibility and attentiveness to the political and moral implications of the ways we understand ourselves and others. The following theoretical foci represent the conceptual frame within which current exponents of civilizational analysis tend to describe civilizations: (1) civilizations as consisting of social structure and symbolic organization; (2) civilizations as symbolic designs (such as symbolic authority, power, configuration of values and ideas, and the like); (3) civilizations as explanatory and interpretive frameworks within which people search for concepts and frames of meaning to explain themselves and the world around them; (4) civilizations as world religions/great spiritual traditions; (5) civilizations as the links bridging the realms of the secular and the sacred; (6) civilizations as theories dealing with world history and with the phenomena of consciousness and culture in terms of coherence; (7) civilizations as mentalities/histories of mentalities; (8) civilizations as the relationships between theories and practices; (9) civilizations as the ensembles of interrelated and complementary cultures in terms of style and common values;

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Leonidas Donskis (10) civilizations as the controlling principles of social/political action and of creative endeavor (among early, or “classical,” theorists of civilizations who substantially contributed to the study of the controlling principles of comparative civilizations, Oswald Spengler and Pitirim A. Sorokin should be mentioned first; among current civilizationists, we could list Louis Dumont, Francis L. K. Hsu, and Takie Sugiyama Lebra).1 1. Vytautas Kavolis’s Concept of Civilization

Kavolis’s intense, thorough, and impeccable scholarship allows us to theoretically reconstruct the discursive map of the concept of civilization. His theoretical concerns and frame of reference range from the classical exponents of sociological thought and civilization theory (Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Pitirim A. Sorokin, and Norbert Elias) to the mainstream of the contemporary Anglo-American and European social scientists and humanists. In his contributions, Kavolis names Benjamin Nelson as a major contributor to the civilization-analytic perspective, although it is beyond any shadow of a doubt that Kavolis’s own name and scholarship have become inseparable from this perspective and from civilization theory. It is very important to theoretically reconstruct and describe in detail Kavolis’s concept of civilization, since his theory of nationalism can only be properly understood within the framework of his civilization theory. In his last book, Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture, which may be regarded as his major contribution to civilization theory, Kavolis defines the civilizational approach in the following way: The civilizational approach differs from other schools of thought in sociology in taking as its primary object of study the symbolic designs within which social action is located. These designs are examined in their empirical specificity, in their historical trajectories, and in comparative perspective as frameworks from which human actors derive their conceptions of action, of its purposes, and of themselves. . . . Civilizational sociologists seek to understand how these designs evolve and are put together within a civilization (the largest comprehensible unit of sociocultural study)—and how people draw upon them in constituting their actions both in the ordinary circumstances of their lives and in the critical junctures of their histories. Civilizational sociologists claim that this approach is necessary for an adequate understanding of major sociological processes, such as political transformations, religious and economic “rationalizations of the world” and antimodernist reactions to them, and shifts in self-comprehension.2

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Having defined the civilizational approach, Kavolis engages in mapping two modes of being of civilizational sociology. The analysis of Louis Dumont and S. N. Eisenstadt’s theories of the rise of modern individualism enables Kavolis to make the important distinction between nomothetic and ideographic approaches to the comparative study of civilizations—arguably, a pivotal issue in the philosophy of the social sciences since the neo-Kantians. This last major contribution of Kavolis to civilization analysis raises a number of questions crucial for the social sciences and humanities, ranging from the paradigms of order and the coherence of cultures to the models of collective identity and civilizational processes in contemporary Eastern Europe.3 In tracing the ancient and modern images of order and disorder, Kavolis comes to reconstruct the symbolic designs, or paradigms of order, within which the historical and cultural imaginations, blueprints for social and moral order, political power structures, and institutional networks operate over time. The paradigms of order are: “the lawful and spontaneous natures,” “the order of the factory,” and “the order of the work of art.” The concept of “lawful nature” sheds new light not only on the mediaeval practices of exorcism, witch hunts, the struggle against earthly representations and agencies of evil, demons, fiends, and maleficia, but also on Sigmund Freud’s dictum, “Biology is destiny,” not to mention the dichotomizing of the realm of cultural and moral categories into “righteousness” and “transgression,” “purity” and “pollution,” “sanity” and “madness,” “true consciousness” and “illusion.” Hence, Kavolis offers a remarkable insight into inversions of structure that occur within lawful nature: Where either hierarchy or dichotomy is present, the possibility of inversion—turning the world upside down, sanctification or transgression, Satanization of an earlier set of deities, the aesthetics of ugliness, resurrection from the dead, the perception of “madness” as a superior kind of “health”—is always a live possibility, whether tempting or threatening. . . . Inversion of structure is possible only within lawful nature. (p. 63) Having started from his illuminating and elegant insights into the nature of the mediaeval feasts of fools, carnivals, and other anti-structural phenomena (in this, Kavolis relies on such scholars as Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin), Kavolis examines the concepts and patterns of chaos and order in Hinduism, in Chinese religions and social thought, in Judeo-Christian cosmology and theology, and in Marxist social philosophy. Kavolis’s analysis of the order of the factory reveals the roots of magical and technocratic consciousness, of the sociological concepts of “megamachines,” and of the notions of economic and technological efficiency. The historical roots of the factory conception of order may be sought in magic, in the sociological “mega-machines” by which the ancient civilizations accomplished the building of pyramids and irrigation works,

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Leonidas Donskis in Chinese Legalism, and especially in the Christian God’s assignment to men of the obligation to transform the face of the earth in accordance with divine specifications. . . . The machine, in much of its earlier history, and in the notion of the machina mundi, was used as the explanation of how the universe, or a particular part thereof, operates, not as the instrumentality for changing it. . . . It was a revolutionizing of this view of the machine attained under the influence of spiritual presuppositions—of which Puritanism has been in modern times perhaps the most outstanding —that made it the technological foundation of the factory. The early technologists have been interpreting the world, the ideologists first thought of changing it. (p. 71)

Thus, an elegant allusion to Karl Marx’s 11th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach —“Up till now the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it”—underlines Kavolis’s great theoretical ambition to grasp how the great ideas, concepts, explanatory systems, and interpretative frameworks come to shape social reality by transforming themselves into ideological programs, political doctrines, technological innovations, and finally, into paraphernalia of a mass anonymous society—a world of factories, offices, bureaucracy, and “rationalization.” The question arises: What kind of symbolic design or pattern of civilization or interpretative framework might be identified behind the rise of capitalism and the genesis of modern bureaucracy? As Kavolis clearly demonstrates, the efficiency, within the symbolic framework for the order of the factory, is achieved at the expense of other crucial social and moral faculties of human existence. When social action is oriented to the symbolic framework of the factory, it has an immense capacity of producing specified types of effects (whether victories in sports or in warfare, capitalistic affluence or revolutionary reconstruction of society), but it does so at the cost of destroying the larger natural, social, and moral contexts within which the desired changes are located. (Ibid.) By employing the factory metaphor, Kavolis attempts an in-depth exploration of the difference between a totalitarian factory and the plural factories of the free market. Finally, an analysis of the paradigm of the order of the work of art allows Kavolis to present his remarkable insights into the structural isomorphisms and similarities between the modern artistic enterprise and its ideologies—“in which the artist is still dimly perceived as the secularized shadow of the Judeo-Christian Creator God” (p. 80)—on the one hand, and the “aesthetization of politics” inherent in authoritarian or even totalitarian political images and practices, on the other (p. 78). We can recall here the phenomenon of the “aesthetization of politics” as deeply

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characteristic of Italian fascism, the latter having been enthusiastically endorsed by a number of eminent Italian artists of that time. Kavolis was at his best when he successfully combined his theoretical sophistication, analytical incisiveness, empirical evidence, and existential experience derived from what he recognized as his cultural background. It is little wonder that Kavolis’s insights into the models of collective identity, social movements, and civilizational processes in Eastern Europe are, in a way, reminiscent of the brightest examples of the comparative study of Central/East European nationalism and of European studies in general. The way in which Kavolis describes the former Soviet Union as a failed project of modernization, and Communism as a rival civilization, is worthy of the best passages of Raymond Aron, Alain Besançon, Ernest Gellner, Leszek Koáakowski, and Czesáaw Miáosz. The Soviet Union has for seventy years endeavored to produce a new civilization by establishing a secular version of the religion-above-culture paradigm as its center. The result was a pattern most similar, among contemporary civilizations, to that of the Islamic world, except that (1) a secular religion was placed in the position of super-ordination to all culture, and (2) this secular religion was, in contrast to Islam, not deeply embedded in the attitudes of the “masses” or the “intellectual elites.” It therefore has remained an artificial entity, not a “genuine civilization” capable of attracting adherence even without the use of violence; a failed effort in a boundary region of the West to become a civilizational alternative to it. . . . This pattern has now collapsed. But will Eastern Europe move toward the modern West, in which ontological hierarchy has been replaced, beginning in the seventeenth century, by a polymorphous political-moral-aesthetic polylogue as the main integrative device? Or will Eastern Europe remain a culturally distinctive region, with another, perhaps more “traditionalist,” ontological hierarchy acquiring hegemony? (pp. 153–154) Every passage from Kavolis’s books, every piece of his iconoclastic and critical scholarship stands as his silent intellectual and moral autobiography. Kavolis’s theoretical views and insights, methodological preferences and disciplinary choices not only reflect his value orientation, convictions, and individual experience, but also underlines and redefines what is at the core of the civilizational perspective and of the critical study of modern society and culture. The sociologists who have taken civilizations rather than nation states, world-systems, communities, or interacting individuals, as their units of analysis have all been deeply concerned with contemporary life. Indeed it was through their efforts to explain the distinctive characteristics of contemporary life that they have been led to the comparative study of

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Not only Kavolis, but also Max Weber, Louis Dumont, Ernest Gellner, S. N. Eisenstadt, and other towering theorists of civilizations subscribed to this point of view. Indeed, the ambition to conceive of the nature of modern life is a major inspiration for the comparative study of civilizations. So, too, I add, is discontentment in one’s own milieu, and the striving for the critical questioning of one’s own society and culture, in order to reveal where, why, and how they failed to embrace the ideals, values, and norms of universal humanity. The search for the intellectual and moral sensibilities capable of discovering the Other is therefore inseparable from the awakening, both in oneself and others, of conscience and self. The immense scope of Kavolis’s work ranges from such boundary disciplines as the sociology of fine arts and cultural psychology to sociological theory, the sociology of culture, social theory as a modern critique of society and culture, and civilizational theory as a theoretical framework for a meta-theory of the social sciences. Having said that, I hasten to add that Kavolis, while trying to work out a general theory of the humanities and the social sciences, never acted as a single-handed generalist interested solely in how to build a sort of disconnected, albeit plausible, theory, say, in civilizational analysis or history of consciousness. Instead, Kavolis did his utmost to link his methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives in the social sciences to the humanities. The same applies to Kavolis’s effort to establish the relationship between his theoretical and cross-cultural sophistication and the empirical evidence he sought in art history, cultural history, mythology, and the history of ideas. For instance, Kavolis’s work in cultural psychology provides a subtle and penetrating analysis of the models of evil as paradigms of secular morality and of the models of rebellion as contrasting modes of cultural logic. In doing so, he offers his insights into the emergence of the myth of Prometheus and that of Satan. Whereas Prometheus emerges in Kavolis’s theory of the rise of modernity as a metaphor of technological progress/technologically efficient civilization combined with a kind of sympathetic understanding of, and compassion for, the urges and sufferings of humankind, Satan is interpreted by him as a metaphor of the destruction of legitimate power and of the subversion of the predominant social and moral order. In this manner Kavolis developed some of his most provocative and perceptive hints as to how to analyze the symbolic logic of Marxism and all major social or political revolutions—aspects of which are at some points Promethean, and at others Satanic. Each modernity—for Kavolis spoke of numerous and multiple “modernities,” each of them as ancient as civilization itself—or civilization-shaping movement, if pushed to the limit, can betray its Promethean and/or Satanic beginnings.4

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A valuable implication for literary theory and critique, this standpoint underlined Kavolis’s insights into Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. With sound reason Kavolis noted that even the title of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, was deeply misleading—the obviously Satanic character, Frankenstein, who challenged the Creator of the universe and of the human being, was misrepresented there as a sort of modern Prometheus. A scholar capable of employing and revising many theoretical approaches and methodologies, Kavolis worked out, among other things, the phase-cycle theory of artistic creativity, an interesting case of the cyclical theory of culture which deserves honorable mention among other major cyclical theories of history and culture in the twentieth century, such as those of the morphologists of culture—Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Pitirim A. Sorokin, and A. L. Kroeber. In his book, History on Art’s Side, Kavolis analyzed the social and psychohistorical dynamics of artistic creativity, revealing why and how the outbreak of creative energy and vitality may follow periods of rapid social change or even the economic and political decline of society—a hypothesis that could be richly supported by the historical evidence; suffice it to recall the flowering of literature, theater, and visual arts in post-revolutionary Russia. In so doing, he shed light on how the economic-action cycles, politicalaction cycles, ideological-action cycles, and communal-action cycles corresponded to the achievement-motivation cycles and culture-mentality cycles, changing the climate in society and affecting artistic creativity.5 2. Criticism, Tolerance, and Openness: Toward a Postmodern Nationalism One of the most profound and illuminating of Kavolis’s insights into the moral origins of the nationalist critique of nationalism, that is, the social and cultural criticism which occurs within the framework of the nationalist moral culture, reveals a hardly identifiable basis for the politically and morally committed criticism of the twentieth century. Kavolis’s notion of the moral reciprocity between the individual and his or her community, as well as his idea of the mapping of the modern intellectual and modern sensibilities through the individual’s imagined community or society or culture, is a logical continuation of his conception of modern individualism. As an impulse which enables a human individual to differentiate him/herself from the collective and stand for his/her personal faith, individualism has been a potent explosive constantly threatening the rigidity of fossilized dogmas. If the community, before individualism came into existence, was a once-and-for-all structure locking up the

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While working out a theory of morally committed individualism, Kavolis clearly defines the concept of tolerance, which is a significant part of his liberal social and political philosophy. For Kavolis, tolerance was too important a moral and political phenomenon to be lightly reduced to theoretical curiosity or to what he described in terms of indifference as a symptom of social pathology. Elsewhere he defines indifference as a form of modern barbarity. As the moral and political commitment to stand for everyone’s right to freely decide how to express him/herself and how to be a human individual, tolerance has nothing to do with moral relativism and indifference to ethical issues—it was Kavolis’s conscious response to the charges of moral relativism and indifference, the constant and unfounded charges against liberals deeply rooted in twentieth-century Lithuania and, in particular, among conservative Lithuanian immigrants in the United States. Kavolis’s insights into heroism and humanism as moral stances provide an interpretative framework for tolerance, too: If the hero is accountable to his consciousness, which represents abstract values, the humanist’s conscience assumes the responsibility for fleshand-blood human beings with whom he or she lives in community. It is not enough to passively tolerate everything around, including dogma, which is always wrong; and blood, even if the blood is of those we do not love; and racist hatred. If tolerance is not a symptom of the pathology of indifference, it should be defined as the commitment to actively stand for everyone’s right to have his or her truth and individual existence. It is also the commitment to stand against anybody who wants to control the other’s individual existence and penetrate it with the propagandist’s fingers, no matter which doctrine the propagandist preaches.7 Thus conceived, tolerance may well be translated into the discovery of the Other when studying non-Western societies, cultures, and civilizations. This is exactly what happened in Kavolis’s comparative studies. His crucial idea that all theoretically identifiable civilizations, in addition to their cosmologies and ontological conceptions, have the notions of conscience and self, rests on the philosophical assumption that self-discovery occurs only through the discovery of the Other. Tolerance is another name for dialogue. Tracing Kavolis’s conception of tolerance, we can map its crucial moral and political implications for what he took as the polylogue of civilizations. Such a discursive map would be incomplete without taking into account the discourse about identity, freedom, and nationalism, the latter having been perceived by Kavolis as a symbolic design of modern civilization and as a pattern of consciousness.

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The intense polylogue of moral cultures, modes of self-comprehension, critical intellectual discourses, value orientations, political systems, aesthetic sensibilities, theoretical vocabularies, travelogues, and moral biographies, in order to (re)discover and conceive of oneself in the idiom of self-andcivilization—this is precisely how Kavolis imagined what he once termed a multicivilizational universe of discourse. From this theory follow his ideas of local sensibility and intellectual empathy when dealing with non-Western or peripheral-Western—for instance, Eastern European—symbolic designs and structures of sentiments. Having defined the integrating principle of modern Western civilization as the polymorphous moral-political-aesthetic polylogue, Kavolis asks if Eastern Europe can be expected to come to rely on such a principle. In doing so, he deeply penetrates the Lithuanian discourse of identity and freedom by recalling the Herderian notion of the nation as the collective individual, still a crucial aspect in the discourses of collective identity and political liberty in Central and Eastern Europe. According to Kavolis, in Eastern Europe, [t]here is more emphasis than in Western Europe or especially the U.S. on the moral reality of historically durable “collective individualities”— nations, religious communities, and so on. (In these respects, as well as in some others, there are similarities with Latin America.) In Eastern Europe, it is not only individuals but also nations that claim “inalienable rights,” the latter with more assurance of the justice of the claim (since the individual, not the nation, can be accused, at least by individuals composing it, of selfishness). Desovietization revives a sense of connectedness within natural-historical collectivities.8 Being perfectly aware of how deeply the Herderian discourse is grounded in the Lithuanian and Central/East European discourse of identity and freedom, Kavolis found himself quite skeptical about the propensity of the authors of general theories of nationalism to view nationalism either with some hostility, as an unpleasant and temporary aberration of modern Europe, or with anticipation of its inexorable demise within the framework of supranational political and legal systems. Such a myopic standpoint, in Kavolis’s opinion, overlooked crucial aspects of nationalism as a civilizational process, let alone the ability of nationalism to shape social reality and consciousness. What is the point in fiercely attacking, demonizing, or otherwise discrediting nationalism, which is just another term for the cultural modernization of Central and Eastern Europe? Kavolis concluded that it would be much wiser to modernize nationalism by opening up its liberal and inclusive traits, instead of conflating the liberal and modernizing nationalism with the blood-and-soil, ethniccleansing nationalism.

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However, the question remains whether the process of political and cultural emancipation of post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe is in tune with the liberal-democratic sensibilities. Having stressed the importance of the process of desovietization which comes to revive, in Eastern Europe, a sense of connectedness within natural-historical collectivities, Kavolis comes to draw a dividing line between Central Europe and Eastern Europe on the grounds of the presence of what he qualifies as moral monopolies, a threat to political tolerance and, by and large, to liberal democracy, too: This goes along with what are at present peculiarly East European consensual pressures, tendencies to reject on moral grounds those who disagree on political or even strategic matters. This deep cultural tendency is somewhat offset by the more superficial current political reputation (as something “Western” and therefore superior) of tolerance. Political tolerance is perhaps strong enough to have a chance at competing with the moral monopolies only in Central Europe from Hungary to Estonia. It is fragile but of growing strength in Russia. The deep tendency toward moral monopolies undermines the possibility of replacing a rules-oriented by a freedom-oriented moral system. (The sole surviving Western European approximation to a society in which a moral monopoly asserts itself somewhat effectively is Ireland.)9 Bearing in mind the historically rooted trajectories of consciousness in Central and Eastern Europe, Kavolis worked out a theory of postmodern nationalism perceived as an attempt to reconcile what has been separated by modernity. At the same time, the idea of postmodern nationalism served, for Kavolis, as an interpretative framework for the split between the modernist and the antimodernist. He applied the concept of the postmodern to the process of desovietization, too: If desovietization, in its diversity of forms, continues relatively unhindered and does not become complacent with its own rhetoric, it has the potentiality of becoming a first-rate (that is, “enriching”) civilizational movement. If the concept of the “postmodern” can still be retrieved from the cultists who have made it a monopoly of their own exuberance, desovietization could even be considered, in some of its cultural emphases, as “postmodern.” (I conceive of the “postmodern” not as antimodernist, but as the building of bridges between the “modernist” and the “antimodernist.”)10 Here we have the nexus of Kavolis’s intellectual program. Modernity has come to split up the human world. However, the point is to reconcile those provinces of human existence and distant faculties of the human soul that have been separated by modernity. Kavolis seems to have penetrated the core of modernity and its challenge by offering his inclusive theoretical alternative.

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What is the proper reaction to the challenge of modernity? How should it be accepted? This critical focus sheds new light on postmodernism as one of the possible responses to the fundamental theoretical alternative and existential dilemma formulated by Kavolis. He considered postmodernism to be a possible way to reconcile those things that have been taken by modernity as incompatible in principle, rather than as a mere theoretical trend in fashion. What is the most effective way to reconcile and bridge what has been ruthlessly separated by modernity: truth and value; rationality and emotional intimacy; expertise and sensitivity; hierarchy and equality/individualism; tradition and innovation; the classic canon and the released creative experiment; metaphysics and phenomenalistic science; a particular individual and community; a particular community and universal humanity? One of the possible ways would be to suggest a return to metaphysics and religion (or the traditional concept of transcendence, to use Kavolis’s term)— the phenomena that have been, from the point of view of the split between truth and value, neutralized, relativized, and consequently placed by modernity on the margin of consciousness and existence. Another way, suggested by the sequence and logic of Kavolis’s thought and by his ambitious epistemological program for the social sciences and the humanities, would be an attempt at analytically embracing and, by attaching the dimensions of value and meaning, encompassing the totality of human experience through the comparative study of civilizations. The latter implies the analysis of the flux of symbolic meaning and of the change of the structures of consciousness over time in Western and non-Western civilizations, by capitalizing on the civilization analysis and the history of consciousness. Small wonder, then, that Kavolis, in his article “Nationalism, Modernization, and the Polylogue of Civilizations,” defines nationalism in the following way: Nationalism is a conception of the cultural identity of a nation which becomes a mobilizing political program even when the nation is (as to some extent it always is) in the process of being invented. National identity is what, unless it is either culturally put into question or politically endangered, does not need to be explicitly declared about one’s sense of being more at home in one this-worldly community of participation and historical experience than in any other. The close alignment of culture with politics is perhaps the most general source of the dangers which nationalism has presented not only to the world, but to the members of the nations it sought to represent, to revive, or to “build.” This alignment gives to nationalism a deeper, quasi-religious kind of power, an ability to overwhelm, which “normal” political forces generally lack. It leads to the exploitation of culture by politics.11

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In his short, sharp, and precise formulations regarding the symbolic codes and the structures of meaning within nationalism, Kavolis reveals what other theories of nationalism are missing. Not only does Kavolis show the modernizing and liberal potential of nationalism, at the same time clearly pointing out its dubious and dangerous points that largely depend on the political, historical, and cultural context within which a given nation or community builds or revives itself; he also shows the similarity between nationalism and other civilization-shaping movements, from romanticism to feminism. Kavolis succeeded where other students of nationalism failed. From the point of view of the link between theoretical sophistication and empirical evidence in viewing nationalism as a major civilization-shaping force, Kavolis far surpasses other theorists of nationalism. Democracy in particular benefits from loosening the connections between culture and politics, so that important symbolic quests cannot be monopolized by particular political forces. Like religion, national identity operates optimally in a democratic setting when its distinguishing marks are distributed over a range of political organizations and over a series of cultural programs, the two distributions far from coinciding with each other, and not divided rigorously along the lines of “majority” and “minority” groups. In what follows we will be mainly concerned with nationalisms as conceptions of collective identity—in their cultural rather than political aspect. In its cultural form, nationalism is similar to other civilization-shaping movements of the last two centuries—from romanticism to feminism—in that it relates to all levels of modernization of culture. In nineteenth-century Germany and Eastern Europe and the present-day Near East, nationalism tends toward the archaic. American nationalism and, to a lesser extent, mainstream French nationalism since the Revolution have been modernizing. The crucial issue in distinguishing modernizing from archaic nationalism is whether one derives society from individuals having “human rights” or perceives individuals as embodiments of the “collective soul” of the nation.12 In his thorough analysis of the four types of nationalism (archaic, modernizing, antimodernistic, and postmodern), Kavolis describes Central and Eastern Europe as a laboratory of the diverse trajectories of the “modernization of nationalisms.” “In Central Europe, Hungarian nationalism has probably changed most since 1939, toward the modernistic model, Yugoslav nationalisms have changed least” (p. 135). The incisiveness of Kavolis’s analysis is striking—in his analytical study written in 1991, Kavolis predicted the Yugoslav tragedy. Interestingly enough, the difference between conservative nationalism and liberal nationalism is still overlooked by the current social sciences and critical scholarship in general. As noted, liberal nationalism allows room for

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cosmopolitan stances and multiculturalism in politics and public discourse, as well as the modernizing critique of politics and culture it employs. However insightful, the authors of general theories of nationalism—in particular, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony D. Smith, and Benedict Anderson—failed to take into account the importance of national cultures for the political and institutional settings for liberal democracy and the enormous modernizing potential of Central/East European nationalism. Finally, they overlooked the ethic of liberal nationalism and its implications for public discourse and social criticism. The merits of liberal nationalism in disclosing totalitarianism are too obvious to need emphasis. It suffices to recall Czesáaw Miáosz, Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Tomas Venclova, and other eminent Central European critics of totalitarianism, ideocracy, xenophobia, and manipulative exchanges. Of Gellner and Hobsbawm, Kavolis wrote: The general theories of nationalism. . . fail to take into account the importance of national cultures in producing different kinds, or symbolic designs, of nationalism. This has the unjustifiable practical consequence that all nationalisms are treated alike—usually, by most social scientists, either with some hostility or with anticipations of their demise. (p. 142) It makes sense to stress the emergence of what might be described as postmodern nationalism, which, according to Kavolis, “would allow for and recognize the human quality of openness and the cultural characteristic of translucence. . . a Milosz-like commitment to one’s own nation permeated with a responsiveness to others, a sense of multiple, communicating identities” (p. 136). Kavolis identifies a postmodern nationalism in some leading figures of political dissent and emancipation in Central and Eastern Europe. He suggests that anticipations of postmodern nationalism could be found as early as in Giuseppe Mazzini. In bridging the longings of both modernism on the one hand and archaizing antimodernism on the other, postmodern nationalism would also serve as a framework for the polylogue of civilizations. Kavolis notes that “postmodern nationalism conceives society as a non-exclusive, openfrontiers, polyphonic, ‘multicultural’ co-operation integrated by a shared sense of adequacy, an Angemessenheit ” (p. 136). Defining postmodern nationalism and rethinking civilization-shaping processes in Central and Eastern Europe, Kavolis was not only describing his future vision of Lithuania. In so doing, he was also finishing his moral autobiography. The concept of postmodern nationalism, as well as the idea of postmodernism as the bridge between modernistic and antimodernistic aspects of human existence, sheds new light on why and how Kavolis arrived at the comparative study of civilizations. To stand for every single aspect of human diversity, identity, and freedom; to realize that without you and your community of memory and participation

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humanity would be incomplete; to bridge your individual existence with the societal life of those who, however self-centered and insensitive, need your voice the most; to identify and fight every trace of moral blindness and insensitivity in your community as passionately and uncompromisingly as if it were your own vice; and to be attentive to everything that is happening in the world, for neglect, complacency, and contempt are nothing less than moral provincialism. 3. Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century The endnotes of Kavolis’s immensely rich, theoretically thick, and compact texts were full of metaphors, metonymies, anticlimaxes, antitheses, paradoxes, and other tropes or figures of speech. Analytically accurate, precise, and incisive formulations of Kavolis’s thought in the body of the text were accompanied by numerous footnote allusions, elliptical phrases, short comparisons, critical notes, and erudite references to various episodes from the lives and moral choices of theorists, politicians, writers, and artists. Each of them could have been developed into a separate study. The same might be said about Kavolis’s working hypotheses and definitions of terms—each of them invited a reconsideration of the theoretical perspectives in which those issues and phenomena were, and still are, most frequently viewed. Every statement, definition, or hypothesis in Kavolis’ contributions might have been developed into a monograph. His collage-like insights, maxims, ironic notes, and allusions stand as silent promises of something new to appear in forthcoming writings. At the same time, they stand as an invitation to the universe of dialogue. A deliberately unfinished work of art has its metaphysics and aesthetics, and so does an unfinished and open-ended thought. Kavolis’s maxims and notes may well be compared with the tip of the iceberg beneath which lay the massive foundations of his multidimensional and sophisticated theoretical thought. A major contributor to new methodologies and perspectives in the social sciences and humanities, Kavolis came to provide not only a new theoretical vocabulary, but also an interpretative framework for the most elusive, though dramatic and even tragic, aspects of human experience and existence. In so doing, Kavolis was not only writing his diary and moral autobiography, but also mapping his culture and imagined community of memory and participation. He greatly contributed to the creating of a new kind of scholarship, the scholarship of the twenty-first century—not bureaucratically “rationalizing” and dividing the human world and social reality, not dogmatically rigid and unreflective, not soulless and totally insensitive about its social effects or political and moral implications, but reflective, ironic, critical, attentive to every single detail of human existence, and perfectly aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the human world.

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It is a scholarship that comes to bridge not only the social science and humanities disciplines, but also the distinct modes of discourse and of selfcomprehension. Such a social science with a human face was among the main ambitions of Kavolis. And this is Kavolis’s legacy of the polylogue of civilizations.

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Chapter Four Shtromas vs. Venclova: Loyalty, Dissent, and Betrayal in the Liberal-Nationalistic Moral Imagination It is widely and rightly assumed that loyalty and betrayal are among the key concepts of the ethic of nationalism. A marriage of state and culture, which seems the essence of the congruence between the political power structure and the collective identity, usually offers a simple explanation of loyalty and dissent. Within such an interpretative framework of nationalism, loyalty is seen as a kind of once-and-for-all commitment by the individual to his or her nation and its historical-cultural substance, whereas betrayal is identified as a failure to commit him or herself to a common cause or as a diversion from the object of political loyalty and cultural/linguistic fidelity. However, a great gap exists between different patterns of nationalism. For conservative or radical nationalists, even social and cultural critique of one’s people and state can be regarded as nothing more and nothing less than treason, whilst for their liberal counterparts it is precisely what constitutes political awareness, civic virtue, and a conscious dedication to the people, culture, and state. On a closer look, it appears that the concepts of loyalty, dissent, and betrayal can be instrumental in mapping the liberal and democratic facet of nationalism. 1. Loyalty and Dissent Aleksandras Shtromas became an eminent figure in his native Lithuania, yet Western social scientists have yet to truly recognize this human rights activist, Soviet dissident, and political thinker. He had no doubts about the inexorable collapse of the Soviet Union, resting his analysis on the assumption that Communism was unable to provide any viable social and moral order. The vast majority of the Soviet intelligentsia, as he pointed out, had become skilled at ideological cat-and-mouse games, wrestling with the Soviet Newspeak and censorship, and employing an Aesopian language to survive and remain as decent as possible in a world of brainwashing and lies. This was not in tune with the Western image of the Soviet and Eastern European intellectual, perceived either as a fool and single-minded fanatic or as a cynical opportunist. Shtromas seems to have been the only political scientist in the world who took an empirically elusive disintegration of the Soviet Union, as early as the late 1970s, as an ongoing process. Shtromas’s propensity to mercilessly disclose the blindness and naiveté of his Western colleagues regarding the alleged humanity and justice of Communism as an alternative, or even as a rival civilization, as well as his massive attacks on the double standard in assessing National Socialism and Communism, irritated more than a few.

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Shtromas, while quite justifiably separating Communism from the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary Russia, might have placed more emphasis on Communism as the failed modernization of Russia. Although operating as a secular ideocracyʊto recall a brilliant term first employed by Raymond Aron and then reinterpreted by Ernest Gellnerʊand as a messianic promise of collective salvation, Soviet Communism was always reminiscent of the nearly Byzantine sacrosanct structure of symbolic authority and of the fusion of the sacral and secular elements of power. Modern in intent, yet archaic in its symbolic organization, Soviet Communism is likely to continue puzzling and striking many Western scholars as a false promise of modernity with a human face for a long time to come. Therefore, Max Weber’s comparison of Communism and Protestantism sheds new light on Communism as a failed civilization-shaping movement. Yet Shtromas’s main intention was to show that the Communist ideology, rather than the old-fashioned Russian imperialism and jingoism, was the inner spring of the Soviet regime. In this, he succeeded. He sounds very convincing when pointing out that the West should reconsider the implications of the Communist ideology for world order and world peace, instead of glorifying Communism as an important political and moral alternative to capitalism, and as a rival civilization. While assessing, in vigorous terms, “this self-inflicted blindness of the West,” Shtromas comes to stress the crucial importance of political dissent in the Soviet Union. “The victory over Communism should and will be decisively won by the determined engagement of the West in the battle of ideas, not of arms. The greatest asset in that battle is that Communism as an ideology is already entirely and irreversibly dead within the hearts and minds of the people ruled by the Communists.”1 Shtromas’s idea is, thus, that every Soviet citizen is, at least potentially, a dissident. “In spite of the purportedly monolithic structure of Soviet society and the persistent ability of the authorities to orchestrate ‘unanimous’ support for their every act, it is almost impossible to find any ordinary person in the USSR genuinely committed to the official ideology or truly devoted to the Communist Party and to the Soviet state. Communism and even socialism have become the most discredited words used by the Soviet people.”2 If so, the question arises: How was the Soviet regime possible at all, given its fragility and vulnerability? Shtromas’s answer was that “the Communist regime in the USSR has no genuine supporters and exists only by oppression and inertia.” That is why “its breakup is inevitable.” Hence, Shtromas presented a far-reaching conclusion as the working hypothesis: The slightest instability in the structure of Soviet power could, within a short space of time, cause a complete disintegration of Soviet society. . . without anyone trying to oppose this flow of events or even regretting it

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happening. This alone is sufficient ground to regard potential dissent in the USSR as a phenomenon of crucial importance.3 The incisiveness of this hypothesis is striking. Suffice it to recall the amazing speed, ease, and dynamics of the process of the breakup of the Soviet regime and of the Warsaw Pact alliance to prove Shtromas to have been nearly prophetic in his dynamic premises of, and brilliant insights into, the nature and logic of the Communist regime. Exactly the same might be said about his concept of dissent. Overt dissent in the USSR, as well as the most visible and eminent figures among the Soviet dissidents, was quite well known in the West. What remained beyond reach from without, and elusive for the conventional academic and political perceptions in the West, was what Shtromas defined as “intrastructural” dissent, i.e., latent dissent well accommodated within the framework of existing political conditions and institutional settings. Whereas “extrastructural,” or overt, dissent emerged on the surface of Soviet society, “intrastructural” dissent was deeply rooted in Soviet society, penetrating almost every aspect of societal life. In fact, what Shtromas described as intrastructural dissent was a vague phenomenon ranging from the deeply suppressed, though obvious enough in almost every walk of life, anti-Russian and anti-Soviet feelings among the minority Soviet peoples—more particularly among Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estoniansʊto the ideas of the “humanization of socialism” that date back to 1956. Intrastructural dissent may well be characterized as one of the most mysterious phenomena of consciousness and culture ever analyzed in the social sciences and political essays. Aleksandras Shtromas and Czesáaw Miáosz were the major contributors to the analysis of this puzzling trait of societal existence under totalitarianism. According to Shtromas, intrastructural dissent in the USSR manifested itself in many ways, from the so-called “shadow economy” to attempts by high-ranking Soviet officials to resist Sovietization and Russification by maintaining the national languages and cultures in their respective republics. Here Shtromas refers to nothing other than selfishness, fear, and petty bourgeois aspirationsʊdisguised as a genuine support for the “system”ʊas the engine of intrastructural dissent. Nobody wanted to sacrifice his or her academic career. Nobody was willing to give up the possibility to go abroad and visit Western countries, whatever the cost. Nobody was willing to abandon his or her safety and security. After all, it was all too human and quite understandable to wish for one’s own family’s well-being. The system reached the heights of sophistication in manipulating and appealing to such obvious and harmless human needs. The outcome was that, as Vytautas Kavolis ironically put it, Lithuanians and other peoples under the Soviets “have become skilled at being oppressed.”4

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Some people rose to eminence and recognition desperately hiding their “bad” family trees or “dangerous” international liaisons and backgrounds of their parents. In doing so, they elaborated and polished myriad ways of praising the system and glorifying the wisdom and generosity of the Party, while remaining, deep in their hearts and minds, hostile to the Sovietsʊalas, this quite often used to take the form of an undifferentiated hostility to, and hatred of, Russians—and patriotic to their country. Yet a more noble cause or reason behind such a conformist stance had to be invented. Hence, a justificatory and comforting, though obviously deceptive, theory of the necessity to resist the system by joining it and subverting it from within was developed. The theory was worked out to stress the priority of culture over politics: political regimes come and go, so went this logic, but culture and spirituality last forever. Being, by definition, prior and superior to politics, culture and its continuity must be regarded as the priority of the first order, regardless of what happens in politics, which is always a filthy and cynical thing. What is the point in desperately fighting the mighty and cruel regime, thus provoking more meaningless bloodshed and political repression, but weakening the cultural potential of the nation? Small nations must preserve their traditions and values. Survival of the language and culture, whatever the cost, is the answer. In 1992, this theory of cultural resistance, which earlier was severely criticized and explicitly rejected by Tomas Venclova as amoral, would gain new currency. The then President of Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas, who spent much of his time serving as a high-ranking Communist Party official in Soviet Lithuania, reaching the office of the First Secretary of the CPL, went so far as to openly state that not one of them, i.e., neither he nor his political advisers and former Party friends, ever supported the Soviet regime, and that they were all devoted patriots of Lithuania. This is not to mock Brazauskas, who still remains a highly respected statesman in Lithuania. As an issue able to provoke much polemical passion, intrastructural dissent, after 1990, was still on the political agenda in Lithuania. Due to its ambiguity and complex nature, intrastructural dissent turned out to be able to be politically exploited or otherwise misrepresented. Shtromas adds an important qualification to his analysis of dissent: latent dissenters and overt dissidents are by no means locked up within their onceand-for-all frames of political activity and self-expression. On the contrary, they can freely migrate from intrastructural to extrastructural dissent, save those cases when not a few prominent Russian intellectuals were forced to become overt dissidents. They are “people whom the authorities themselves have pushed into the position of overt dissent.” Of one of them, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Shtromas writes: Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn. His case is probably typical. He used all the means of his power to maintain his official position as a member of the

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prestigious Writers’ Union. Moreover, efforts were made by him and his friends to acquire for him the Lenin Prize which would have substantially strengthened his official position. Only after he had been expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1969, and after all means of publication in the USSR were completely closed to him, did Solzhenitsyn start to act as a deliberate dissident, publishing books abroad and taking part in some of the overt dissident activities. (p. 11) An overt dissident is thus “created” by the authoritiesʊsuch is Shtromas’s interesting and provocative conclusion. This reminds us of how Winston Smith, in George Orwell’s 1984, is, in a way, created by O’Brien. (1984 was among Shtromas’s favorite books.) A latent, or intrastructural, dissenter, Winston Smith is identified by O’Brien as a threat to Oceania’s Ingsoc only to be consciously transferred to the level of extrastructural dissent. Such a deliberate transfer is the only way to clean up Smith’s consciousness, in order to push him to the limit of his dissent and then reindoctrinate him. The climax of this cynical brainwashing is the fact that the dissident treatise The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism is written by O’Brien himself disguised as the patron saint of Oceanian dissent, rather than by the reputed author and overt dissident Emmanuel Goldsteinʊa diabolical technique of manipulation invented by the dystopian mental technicians. Thus, Orwell suggests the idea of something like a double conspiracy in a world of the jackboot pressing down upon the human face, the world where even extrastructural political dissent is fabricated by the authorities and, therefore, serves as a mousetrap for potential, or latent, dissenters. Written in 1948, that is, eight years before the actual birth of the Soviet dissidents, Orwell’s masterpiece anticipated and depicted, with a stroke of genius, some traits of totalitarian reality. Although far from being fabricated or otherwise manipulated, even the towering figures in Soviet dissent were, in a way, created. As Shtromas points out: Sakharov, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Voinovich, Nekrasov, Aykhenvald, mentioning just a few among hundreds of well-known and thousands of less-known names, also became overt dissidents against their will. Many such overt dissidents were “created” by the authorities after 1956. Official criticism of Stalin aroused in many people an enthusiastic response, but the authorities would not tolerate criticism which exceeded officially established limits, and reacted to it accordingly. (Ibid.) Shtromas’s concept of intrastructural dissent may well be compared to Czesáaw Miáosz’s interpretation of Ketmanʊa time-honored principle of Islam (although it seems to date back to ancient Persian culture, and the term itself has its roots in the Persian language), according to which a Muslim is entitled to conceal his or her true faith and temporarily adopt a false one in the

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face of grave danger to his or her dignity and life. In his thoughtful and subtle analysis of the totalitarian system of brainwashing and manipulative exchanges, Miáosz offers a new version of Ketman, translated into a transideological, or even trans-civilization, idiom operating equally well within religious and secular ideocracies. Miáosz’s provocative and thought-stimulating interpretation of Ketman enabled him to reveal various literary devices and interpretative techniques used to conceal one’s true political, moral, aesthetic, and religious views—the devices and techniques invented by Central and East European intellectuals who were desperately trying to survive and act decently in a world of cynical lies and severe censorship. In The Captive Mind, Miáosz analyses the following varieties of modern ideological Ketman: National Ketman; the Ketman of Revolutionary Purity; Aesthetic Ketman; Professional Ketman; Skeptical Ketman; Metaphysical Ketman; and Ethical Ketman. Interestingly enough, the phenomenon of Ketman was discovered and described by the notorious founding father of racist anthropology, Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, a perceptive and interesting, albeit dangerous and sinister, writer, whose Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia made it available to a nineteenth-century European readership.5 Of the incredible world of Ketman, which is beyond the grasp and imagination of Western intellectuals and politicians, Miáosz writes: The inhabitants of Western countries little realize that millions of their fellow-men, who seem superficially more or less similar to them, live in a world as fantastic as that of the men from Mars. They are unaware of the perspectives on human nature that Ketman opens. Life in constant internal tension develops talents which are latent in man. He does not even suspect to what heights of cleverness and psychological perspicacity he can rise when he is cornered and must either be skilful or perish. The survival of those best adapted to mental acrobatics creates a human type that has been rare until now. The necessities which drive men to Ketman sharpen the intellect.6 Miáosz and Shtromas did not raise the issue of the moral implications of such a technique of survival. The aforementioned theory of cultural resistance and linguistic survival at the expense of political freedom may well be defined as the case of National Ketman. However, to judge and dismiss people practicing intrastructural dissent or Ketman as cowards or cynics or fools was the last thing they would have done. Whereas Miáosz was mapping the existence of the split and paranoid ideological consciousness in the countries of the New Faith, Shtromas was tracing the remains of human dignity and decency in a world of social engineering, political and moral cynicism, and unprecedented manipulations.

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Here we are in the dark Kafkaesque world of the weak, cornered, and totally confused human being, the world of alienation and anguish. Yet there is ample ground for hope. Contrary to the Orwellian world of the jackboot trampling the human face, the world where the failure of Winston Smith’s relationship with Julia, and the triumph of O’Brien over the last individual’s striving for freedom, love, memory, and authentic existence signify the end of history—the world of Miáosz and Shtromas comes to witness the triumph of the seemingly little and weak individual over the monster of totalitarian modernity. Miáosz and Shtromas succeeded where Orwell failed. Whilst Orwell was at his best deeply penetrating the reason and conscience of a separate and isolated individual who was desperately trying to maintain his ability to make logical and ethical distinctions (the heroic attempt at common sense, sound reason, and human connection, indeed, as opposed to the crowd of the true believers and ideological fanatics), Central and East European critics of totalitarianism placed much more emphasis on the collective memory and on the crucial importance of the community of memory and participation. It is hardly accidental that Orwell, who failed to appreciate the merits of liberal nationalism both in exposing totalitarianism and standing for human rights (dying in 1950, he was simply unable to do so), relied only on individual memory—too weak a basis for the sense of history. For Orwell, nationalism, as well as its derivative phenomena, such as collective identity and collective memory, remained a vague category. Hence, he showed hostility towards nationalism, and he also had a propensity for according the term an exclusively pejorative connotation. Ascribing to nationalism almost every possible manifestation of group stereotyping, political cleavages, social and ideological divisions, and even chauvinism and racism, Orwell is at risk of losing not only the frame of reference, but also the target of his criticism. However insightful and brilliant his sharp and provocative analysis of what he called “transferred nationalism”—i.e., such transposed forms of exclusive ideology as Communism, political Catholicism, color feeling, and class feeling—Orwell failed to understand and appreciate nationalism as a form of social criticism.7 The trouble with his concept of nationalism is that nationalism begins to mean everything and, in effect, nothing. Although Orwell, as Timothy Garton Ash suggested, richly deserved to qualify for the honorable title of one of the great Central and East Europeans,8 an additional remark is needed here. When depicting totalitarianism or deploring the naiveté and myopia of Western intellectuals concerning their attitude to the most “progressive” part of the world, Orwell reaches the heights of Central and East European intellectual and moral sensibility. Yet on nationalism he writes as a British maverick and dissenter, an enfant terrible of British socialism, who deliberately translates the term into a tool of critique targeted at pre- and post-war British and European political realities.

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So what was the difference between social or civic dissentʊa phenomenon which embraced the whole of Soviet society and which was represented mainly by the Russian nationals themselves – and national dissent represented by the non-Russian nationals? According to Shtromas, The non-Russian nationals, those who are aware of their non-Russian identity (about half of the population of the USSR), are dissidents almost by definition. Their deviance has a distinctive cultural background and is based on positive autonomist ideas. There is no doubt that a conscious non-Russian in the USSR dreams about independence for his people or, at least, of some genuine autonomy. This hope can only become a reality when there is a fundamental change in political conditions in the whole of the USSR; it requires, first of all, the abolition of the present Soviet Empire which deserves the title of “a prison of nations” more than Tsarist Russia ever did.9 Here we have a new theme in Shtromas’s critique of totalitarianism. Social or civic dissent, a phenomenon represented mainly by the Russian intelligentsia, with its emphasis on universal human rights and the political liberty of society as a whole, had little to do with national dissent, which was less universalistic, yet more deeply rooted in religion and collective identity. No wonder that Shtromas, in his analysis of the social and political morphology of dissent, links religion to nationalism as one more facet of dissent. “Like nationalism, religion is, in Soviet conditions, a dissident attitude by its very nature” (p. 14). However, the nationalism of the non-Russian nationals in the Soviet Union, according to Shtromas, was not limited to intrastructural dissent. It also produced some outbursts in the form of overt extrastructural dissent, as was proved by the Chronicles of the Lithuanian Catholic Church, Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian Samizdat, “Helsinki groups” in the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia, etc. In spite of the universalistic character of civic dissent in Russia, both forms of dissent were more or less related to each other. Noteworthy is the fact that The Chronicle of Current Events, which started circulating in Moscow in 1968, was the obvious model for The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania which began in 1972. Russian dissent also produced its national movement. Shtromas points out: In recent years the non-Russian national movements were joined by a Russian national movement which advocates a Russian national revival in terms incompatible with totalitarian Communist rule (A. Solzhenitsyn, I. Shafarevich, V. Osipov and others are the well-known exponents of this movement). It is remarkable that these Russian national forces, with a few exceptions, favor national freedom for all non-Russian nations of the USSR. Under these circumstances, national dissent being “partial” in

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essence (i.e. representing the case of one particular nation rather than that of the whole of the USSR), acquires an overall social dimension relevant to political change in the country at large. As one dissident writer stated: “In the Soviet Union the Marxist slogan: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ has been strangely replaced by a much more practical slogan: ‘Nationalists of all Soviet nations, unite!’ In this united shape, national movements are organically joining the democratic movement in its struggle for freedom and human rights.” (p. 14) Yet the nationalism of the non-Russian movements, by virtue of its ability to enjoy much more popular support and social cohesion than its counterpart in Russia, had an obvious advantage over the noble-spirited, yet disconnected, universalism and secular liberalism of civic dissent in Russia. This is especially true of the marriage of religion and nationalism, so potent in such Catholic countries as Poland and Lithuania, where this alliance came to transform itself into a potent alternative to the regime and its ideology. Although the implications of such an alliance for liberal democracy and pluralism are profoundly problematic, it was operating extremely well as an alternative framework for collective memory and identity and as a mobilizing force. Even the greatest of the Russian dissidents may never have achieved such popular recognition and support. The notorious gap between the Russian intelligentsia and common people, the curse of modern Russia, still remained a deep injury on the body politic inflicted not only by Peter the Great and nineteenth-century Russian political and ideological dramas, but also by the recent fission of the body social inflicted by Communism. Not in vain, comparing dissent in Poland and the Soviet Union (in particular, Russia), H. Stuart Hughes notes: Dissent in Poland could count on the backing of a homogenous peopleʊ overt support from the working class and tacit sympathy among the peasants. In the Soviet Union it was the reverse: the dissidents formed a beleaguered band drawn largely from the intelligentsia and cut off from the mass of the population by a wall of mutual incomprehension. Polish dissent drew on patriotic traditions reaching back nearly two centuries; Soviet dissent smacked of treason. Such held true for the dominant ethnic Russians. Among the minor Soviet peoplesʊmore particularly among Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estoniansʊpatriotic resistance here and there united intellectuals and ordinary folk in a common hatred of Russian over-lordship. But movements of this sort languished in obscurity; it was not they that inspired interest and sympathy in the West. Nor was it religious protest, whether Eastern Orthodox or evangelical Protestant; only the pleas of the Jews found support abroad. Yet even Jewish protest fastened almost exclusively on the issue of emigration; such single-mindedness often sounded like indifference to the wider question of arbitrary rule at home.

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Leonidas Donskis By contrast, the greatest of the Russian dissidents tried to see beyond the plight of their own people to that of the other Soviet nationalities and of humanity as a whole. Their numbers, their eminence, the fact that only they wrote in a major international language, dictated a focus on their struggles and their frustration.10

In his attempt to bridge these disunited faculties of dissent, namely, standing up for human rights and the struggle for the national independence cause, Shtromas was among those unique figures in Soviet dissent who combined, on the one hand, the ideals of cosmopolitan tolerance, liberal democracy, pluralism, and ethical universalism, and, on the other hand, local sensibility and fidelity to the cause of freedom and independence of their native countries. In this, he stands very close to his friends and fellow dissidents, such as Andrei Sakharov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Tomas Venclova. For them, nationalism, disconnected from the sympathetic understanding of the Other and from an overall dimension of human dignity, decency, and freedom, would degenerate into a tribal sentiment and collective solipsism; whereas a universalistic program of the struggle for human rights, if lacking in sympathy and sensitivity to the peoples and their cultures under duress of oppression, would turn into a bloodless and soulless political catholicity. In this political and moral stance, Shtromas and his fellow dissidents are reminiscent of the best moments and the most moving allegiances of the epoch of the springtime of the peoples. The ideals of universal brotherhood and fellowship in a common fight for independence and liberty of the peoples, as the inmost principle, and as the starting point in the ethic of liberal nationalism, were still there. “For your and our freedom!” was the war cry, introduced by the Polish fighters for the Italian Risorgimento movement and then used as a loan slogan not only by the prominent Russian dissidents, but also by the Sąjnjdis members in Lithuania as early as 1988. A liberally minded cosmopolitan and fighter for human rights in the broadest sense, an extrastructural dissident, to use his parlance, Shtromas also was a patriot of Lithuania. A profound sense of the moral, as well as his tolerant and wise attitude to human virtues and vices, greatly assisted him in locating the nerve of intrastructural dissentʊhuman fear, selfishness, adaptability, and attachment to mundane stability and predictability, accompanied by the invincible will to live. Shtromas appreciated and analyzed every single manifestation of intrastructural dissent, instead of severely judging people for inconsistency, cowardice, lack of principle, and moral compromising. That same moral sense did not deceive him when he described the political and moral impetus of the Soviet regime. On a personal level, even high officials are dissidentsʊincluding members of the Politburo. (That is one of the reasons why in public they

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act as automatonsʊmouthpieces of an abstract ruling body and not like real people; Khrushchev, even when in power, showed something of his personality and, therefore, often sounded like a dissident.) By far the greatest expression of “dissent” is greedy selfishness, a rapacious attitude to the common good which results in cynicism being the dominant attitude towards life. Those in power, although having ceased to believe in Communism and in the infallible virtues of the Soviet regime, were still prepared to defend it by all means within their power, but only because they thus were able to protect their enormous personal privileges, which they could not have maintained in any other socio-political system.11 Shtromas dismissed all considerations about the alleged fanaticism and ideological single-mindedness of the Soviet people as vulgar and ill-founded political propaganda, and quite justifiably so. Instead of searching for the special qualities of homo sovieticus, or depicting the allegedly ever-present fanaticism and ideological zeal of Russians or the “Soviet people,” he focused on an analysis of the Communist Party and Communist ideology as the sword and the shield of the Soviet regime. It is the sole political party-based, oligarchic regime, or partocracy, that wages a never-ending war against its own society while pretending to be constantly surrounded and plotted against by external and internal enemies— roughly speaking, such an Orwellian hypothesis regarding the nature of Communism was employed in many of Shtromas’s contributions. Although Shtromas made himself quite clear regarding what he aptly described as “greedy selfishness” and the “rapacious attitude to the common good which results in cynicism,” the latter being “the dominant attitude towards life,” he remained a theorist of the alternative possibilities and visions of political existence. However, there were millions of people in the USSR who were committed to positive social goals that were incompatible with the totalitarian Soviet regime. In this positive sense the Soviet dissident was anyone who managed to remain loyal and committed not only to himself as to an isolated individual, but also to the society or simply to the fate of others. Those people motivated by civic considerations were joined by professionals who could not help but be critical of mismanagement and other symptoms of decay induced and maintained by the regime, allegedly for ideological reasons, but really to maintain a position of absolute power an ignorant oligarchy. For such professionals the whole rule of that oligarchy (partocracy) seems to have been irrational and needed to be replaced by a system based on sound management that they—the professionals themselves —would be able to provide. According to Shtromas, this is more than true of nationalism, which is, almost by definition, hostile to, and incompatible with, the Soviet regime. Being much at home in every aspect of Russian history and culture, let alone his overall expertise in Central and East European politics and societies,

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Shtromas strongly felt what other political analysts and sovietologists overlooked, namely that nationalism alone, no matter whether Russian or non-Russian, could destroy the Soviet regime. Tracing nationalism as political dissent, Shtromas worked out not only a theory of political change focused on the collapse of Communism as a major issue in world history, but also a new identity and freedom discourse which enabled him to theoretically substantiate his statement regarding the liberal nature of nationalism, unless it degenerated into a framework for xenophobic or racist reactions. At the same time, he explicitly stated that nationalism and national identity, like religion, operates optimally in a democratic settingʊin this, Shtromas entirely endorsed Kavolis’s conception of identity and freedom. Shtromas also added that nationalism and religion, unless they are distorted by authoritarianism, totalitarianism, or otherwise politically exploited, operate not only as an inescapable right of people to have a collective identity and be rooted in their histories and cultural traditions, but also as a potent alternative to global ideologies that come to deny this right as an obstacle to historical progress or modernization or the creation of a “new human being” free of history, religion, and tradition. Noteworthy is the fact that Shtromas, an agnostic himself, raised his voice in defense of religion and religious believers in the Soviet Union. The Soviet dissident is everyone whose genuine commitment to any social issue is stronger than his egoism and the imposed commitment to the Soviet state. Specifically, it means that all nationalists (including the Russian ones who are already able to distinguish between the Imperial and genuine national interests of Russia and see them as incompatible— Solzhenitsyn is one of them) and all religious believers are unqualified dissidents. (Ibid.) In order to understand this emphasis on nationalism as a phenomenon radically opposed to global ideologies of the twentieth century, we have to trace Shtromas’s conception of ideology and utopia, which was fully developed in his later contributions. Such an analysis is a clue to his ambitious undertaking to map the modern world of the political and moral imagination. 2. Betrayal and Insensitivity When Lithuania and Poland, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, became independent and achieved a historic breakthrough in their relations, Tomas Venclova’s political voice and humanist message were recalled in both countries. In the United States, Venclova joined Santara-Šviesa. A close friend of Czesáaw Miáosz and Joseph Brodsky (who dedicated his poetic masterpiece,

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“Lithuanian Divertissement,” to Venclova, cherishing the remembrances of their discussions and evenings in the Vilnius café “Neringa,” a favorite place of Russian and Lithuanian dissidents and non-conformist intellectuals), Venclova was much at home in this liberal intellectual and cultural movement of Lithuanian émigrés. It was quite logical that he established a close relationship with SantaraŠviesa. It would be difficult to imagine him somewhere else in AmericanLithuanian circles. Being at odds with the mainstream of Lithuanian immigrants in the United States regarding many issues of Lithuanian identity and freedom, the liberal and cosmopolitan Venclova was frequently referred to by the conservative part of the Lithuanian community in the United States as a Russophile, Polonophile, and, horribile dictu, a Judophile. Although no one in Lithuania and beyond has ever critically questioned or otherwise doubted his major contribution to the human rights movement and to the Soviet political dissent, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that Venclova has met more sympathy, respect, and understanding in Russia and Poland than in his native Lithuania. However cherished and respected by his friends and fellow dissidents in Lithuania, Venclova has always been alienated from the mainstream of Lithuanian culture and from the Lithuanian intelligentsia. With sound reason, his close friend Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the towering figures in Moscow circles of overt political dissent, once made a joke: “The Lithuanian peopleʊafter two thousand years of working so hard on itʊgave birth to its first Jew. The name of the Jew is Tomas Venclova.”12 Kavolis and Shtromas, though operating within distinct theoretical idioms and disciplinary contexts, attempted a symbolic reconciliation of nationalism and ethical universalism, both within themselves and Lithuanian culture. Their efforts to achieve this may be said to have culminated in Venclova’s philosophy of history and moral philosophy. Shtromas’s article on universalism and nationalism in the discursive universe of Tomas Venclova provides an interpretative framework within which we can map these intellectual tendencies and trajectories of consciousness. Shtromas, here, goes so far as to explicitly refer to Venclova as a nationalist, a reference point which can hardly be expected to be enthusiastically endorsed by Venclova himself, bearing in mind his overall skepticism regarding the ups and downs of nationalism in Central and East European politics. Yet Shtromas attempts an incisive discursive map of Venclova’s ethical universalism and liberal nationalism, a map which has yet to be surpassed in Lithuanian philosophical and sociological literature. Shtromas notes: Yet Tomas Venclova differs from other Lithuanian nationalists, inasmuch as Lithuanian-ness and its concerns have never been the substance of his political life. He was approaching nationalism carefully, slowly, closely viewing and combining every small step towards it with those universally

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Leonidas Donskis valid ethical dimensions that have always constituted the foundations of his worldview. I think, the idea that nationalism can be absolutely in tune with the norms of universal humanistic morality came to Tomas’s articles under the influence of the personalist philosophy of R. T. Flewelling, E. Mounier, J. Maritain, and, in particular, N. Berdyaev. This philosophy pronounces the nation a sort of collective personality and applies to it the same general ethical and teleological criteria that are applied to a human individual, including inescapable human rights that should be respected in every single case. It undoubtedly served as an orientation point that enabled Tomas Venclova to firmly identify himself with nationalism, not rejecting any single principle of his earlier formed worldview.13

By defining a dialogue-based personalist ethics as the starting point of Venclova’s moral philosophy, Shtromas offers a clue to Venclova’s concept of nation. Distinguishing between nationalism and patriotism, Shtromas defines Venclova as a nationalist in the paradigmatic sense, that is, as an intellectual perpetuating the ethics of compassion and the politics of collective identity and freedom. That individual freedom, reason, and conscience are prior to collective liberty and other collective sensibilities, according to Shtromas, is an indisputable fact. All liberal nationalists agree upon this: the human individual ontologically and ethically precedes the nation as a collective individual or collective personality. Only conservative and backward-looking nationalists tend to derive the human individual from the ever-present metaphysical substance of the mystical cohesion of the nation. The same goes for the blood-and-soil nationalists. Whereas nationalism perpetuates its ethics of sympathetic openness to, and understanding of, otherness, patriotism manifests itself in an uncritical acceptance of socio-political reality: its essence lies in the assumption “My country, right or wrong.” Many Lithuanian and Russian nationalists were fundamentally opposed to Communism and wished for its demise, without having any feeling for the fate of the Soviet Union as their country. A patriot is unable or unwilling to draw a dividing line between his/her country and its political regime. A nationalist, on the contrary, harshly criticizes the authoritarian or totalitarian regime inasmuch as he/she takes it as incompatible with the vision of his/her nation as a free political and moral actor of history discovering and disseminating itself in concert with other nations. To identify his/her country with an undemocratic political regime or authorities is the last thing a genuine nationalist would do. In this sense, Shtromas concludes, all Russian nationalists among political dissidents were unpatriotic. Shtromas’s valuable insights into the nature of, and differences between, such empirically elusive phenomena of consciousness as nationalism and patriotism allow us to critically reconsider the assumption of more than a few contemporary Lithuanian writers and politicians that Communism was

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nothing more, and nothing less, than a mask on the face of Russian imperialism. On the other hand, it makes no sense to strictly separate nationalism and ethical universalism. According to Shtromas, to be an internationalist without being a nationalist is a contradiction in terms. Genuine internationalismʊif not confounded with transnationalism, which denies nationalism and speaks out in favor of abstract globalization and various kinds of supra-national systems of world orderʊis a logical continuation and consequence of nationalism. Chauvinism, imperialist jingoism, blood-and-soil integral and radical nationalism must all be understood as deviations from the ethic of inclusive and liberal nationalism, which not only allows room for cosmopolitan stances in politics and culture, but logically and ethically should be derived from universalism. Moreover, they are complementary phenomena, for universalism without nationalism turns into a sort of totally disconnected, bloodless and soulless catholicity, while nationalism free of ethical universalism quickly degenerates into xenophobia, demonological chauvinism, jingoism, and other forms of social pathology. Shtromas’s attempts to reconcile nationalism and ethical universalism in Venclova’s worldview culminate in this passage: Reflecting on Lithuania and raising the crucial points of the existence of the Lithuanian people, Tomas Venclova, on the one hand, views Lithuania as a cosmopolitan ethicist and humanist, and, on the other hand, he approaches the universal ethical values of humanism from a Lithuanian perspective. His methodology and position uncover a new page in the history of Lithuanian thought. Earlier, having defined Tomas Venclova as a nationalist, I included him in a general tradition of Lithuanian thought. Now I will call him the Lithuanian universalist, thus trying to define a new current in this tradition, the current whose founder and representative he undoubtedly is. I am convinced that future historians will describe this book [Tomas Venclova’s book Lietuva pasaulyje [Lithuania in the World] published in Chicago, IL, 1981.—L.D.] as nothing other but the primary source of Lithuanian universalism. We, contemporary people, who cooperate, engage in a polemic with him, or simply follow his current activities, can be proud of having stood, together with him, close to this source. Lithuanian universalism, in my view, is not opposed to Lithuanian nationalism. Moreover, Lithuanian universalism should be regarded as a perfectly consistent and pure expression of Lithuanian nationalism. (pp. 113–114) In this context, we can recall Venclova as saying that, after Communism, nationalism is the second most unacceptable doctrine to him. He had long been reluctant to endorse nationalism as a blueprint for a viable moral order. As Shtromas correctly points out, Venclova, along with other overt dissenters,

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clearly realized that nationalism represents an explosive force and a great threat to the Soviet regime. The incompatibility and mutual exclusiveness of the two enabled many liberal-democratic dissenters to reconsider their skeptical and critical attitude to nationalism. Yet Venclova’s idea that universal human rights should be given priority over independence at any cost was at odds with a feeling shared by the vast majority of the Lithuanian intelligentsia, namely, that respect for human rights, political pluralism, openness, and tolerance would automatically result from the independence of Lithuania. In his essay, “On the Choice between Democracy and Nationalism,” Venclova remembers: I have often encountered a curious delusion. Some Lithuanian intellectuals have said to me, “Yes, we understand your tactic: you cannot openly defend Lithuania under Soviet conditions and that is why you defend human rights.” (It seems that was precisely the way of things in some other national Helsinki groups.) It always cost me a lot of effort to explain that for us human rights are not a question of tactics but one of principle. No matter how much we loved Lithuania, this principle was more important to us. If, in the independent Lithuania of the future, human rights were violated, it would be rather difficult to love it. There usually followed a response like, “But this is impossible. An independent Lithuania means a free and democratic Lithuania.” The only thing left to say was “I, too, am hoping for this. I am not, however, confident that one is the automatic result of the other.” 14 When Lithuania regained its independence in 1990, Venclova wrote that national euphoria is not the answer to the many challenges Lithuania is about to meet. The national mystique, which came to occupy the former place of Marxism-Leninism, is a psychologically and sociologically understandable phenomenon. Yet it would be more than naïve to assume that the nation is the paramount value or an end-in-itself. In the situation of a moral vacuum and anomie, many people are tempted to write the word “nation” with a capital letter. Venclova made it clear that there are values that are more important than the nation. “Shouldn’t we reserve capital letters for them? Let a Christian reserve the capital letter only for God, and a liberal for Conscience.”15 Venclova’s discourse about the priority of human rights over abstract independence did not prevent his remarkable emphasis on the relationship between individual and collective rights. Here we have an example of liberal nationalism, which Venclova approaches from a cosmopolitan perspective. His arrival at the ethic of liberal nationalism is not accidental and has something of the epoch of the springtime of the peoples. That is why it is difficult to resist an idea that Venclova, being much at home in every aspect of aristocratic and Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century, rejects its transformation into a doctrinaire, mass-oriented,

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and defensive phenomenon which departs from the intellectual and moral sensibilities of the epoch of the springtime of the peoples. Recalling Kavolis’s idea of nationalism’s cycle of virtues and vices, that is, its transformation from the Romantic ethics of compassion and the discovery of the Other into a kind of zoological defense of its own nation, accompanied by total insensitivity towards the rest of humanity, and by the cult of the dead, we can easily understand where Venclova’s distaste for integral, radical, and doctrinaire nationalism comes from. Hence, he distinguishes between moral and amoral nationalism, implicit in his vigorous assessments of the theory and practice of Lithuanian nationalism. The rights of man are the rights of the individual. But there are also collective rights, including the right of an ethnic group to preserve (if that is what it wants) its culture and language, as well as to create its own state. An independent national state is perhaps not the only guarantee, but it is undoubtedly the best guarantee that the language and culture will be preserved. There can be doubts here with regard to very small groups, or groups that live in diaspora, but the Lithuanians, as well as the other Baltic peoples, do not belong to this category. What is more, Lithuania has already been an independent state twice in the course of its history. The first independence was forcibly suppressed by czarist Russia, the second by the Stalinist Soviet Union. Sometimes people affirm that Lithuania is striving for independence only because it wants “to jump from a sinking ship,” meaning that Lithuania would stay within the Soviet Union if it were flourishing economically, and were democratic to boot. This is ridiculous. Besides the economic considerations, there are such things as national consciousness, national ambitions, the aspiration to play an independent role in history, and, finally, ancient and not-so-ancient injuries. They should all be taken into account, and they can be stronger than the purely pragmatic points.16 Having said that, Venclova sums up his considerations by suggesting: “These rights of the nation cannot be questioned. In this sense, nationalism is not a negative phenomenon. It is something inalienable and has often brought forth wonderful fruit in the course of history” (p. 88). Yet it does not mean that nationalism is just another term for human rights. However interrelated and complementary, these phenomena are simply not the same. One should not forget, however, that individual rights have logical precedence over collective rights, that is, human rights have logical precedence over national rights (which is the same as saying that the rights of the nation are the result of the rights of man, but not vice versa). To the extent that conflicts tend to spring up here, one should grant precedence to the rights of man. Forgetting to do this has led to grave consequences. People in our part of the world tend to affirm—directly and even more

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Venclova’s definition of the logical and metaphysical precedence of individual rights over collective rights serves here as a watershed between liberal and conservative nationalism, since the latter assumes that human rights, individual reason, and individual conscience are all logically and theoretically derived phenomena, and must, therefore, be ontologically and even ethically held secondary to the mytho-poetic substance of the organic people. Another crucial implication of his incisive description of the tension between democracy and nationalism is that nationalism can only be democratic and inclusive if it operates in a democratic setting and, subsequently, is complemented by a culture of discussion and opposition, and by social and cultural criticism. As Kavolis would have it, nationalism is modernizing and progressive insofar as political modernity meets cultural modernity. Nationalism, if it happens to be devoid of liberal-democratic sensibilities and of intellectual and ethical pluralism, turns into a mere cult of homogeneity, and, consequently, degenerates into a set of tribal subordination imperatives. On the other hand, nationalism remains a key word for the morphology of human diversity, ranging from historical memory and symbolic codes of history to collective sentiment and mundane—linguistic, social, and cultural—solidarity. In demonizing or otherwise misrepresenting nationalism as evil, neglecting or even ignoring nationalism as a social and moral philosophy and as a call for the critical questioning of one’s society and culture, we are at risk of denying and, finally, losing an important aspect of modern human experience. What really matters in evaluating nationalism, its political and cultural quality, and also its potential for sensitivity and humanity regarding otherness, is a dominant nation’s attitude to its minorities. Venclova was the first among Lithuanian intellectuals to single this out as one of the principal criteria to assess nationalism. A nation that fails to respect its minorities, and which identifies its dignity and pride solely with the territory it possesses, or claims is incapable of discovering and embracing otherness—this is Venclova’s ethical message regarding the high and low points of nationalism. The worst thing that can occur to a nation is an unshakeable belief in its selfrighteousness. As he points out, A dominant nation which suppresses and tramples upon minorities for the sake of its own “sacred rights” turns out to be a pathetic slave itself. If somebody emphasizes the “nation’s sacred rights” to territory, to the

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spread or preservation of its influence, this can lead and has led to wars more than once, including world wars. Unfortunately, the dignity of a nation is often seen only in the possession of territories and in the expansion of those territories (while it can also lie in self-limitation). People often say that a small nation is always on the defensive, while a large one is always on the offensive, and that is why the small ones are always right. This is true in many cases. But the line between defense and offence is, alas, shaky enough and it is a dubious thing to insist on one’s eternal and absolute rightness. Moreover, it is inappropriate to see the relations between states, nations and ethnic groups through the Darwinian model, according to which the strong ones “naturally” strive to devour the weak ones because they cannot do otherwise. This model was very widespread in the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth centuries. Even nowadays, it has preserved its influence over many minds, including some in Lithuania. But this model is simplified—primitive, to be more precise—and can be harmful. (p. 89) And then Venclova sums it up by stressing: “It would be useful for the Westerners to treat nationalism with slightly less caution, to admit that under certain circumstances it is legitimate and sound. But we, people in the former Soviet Union—and not only Russians—have to admit that nationalism can be illiterate, uncritical, and extremely harmful to democracy when it assumes this shape” (ibid.). Venclova’s harsh criticism of illiberal, insensitive, and morally provincial nationalism may well be perceived as a political and moral encounter of two conflicting and even mutually exclusive facets of nationalism, namely, the aristocratic and noble-spirited ethic of liberal nationalism, permeated by the ideals of tolerance and universal brotherhood/sisterhood, and rigid, militant, doctrinaire, mass-oriented, victimized, aggressively defensive, and exclusionary nationalism. In brief, Venclova’s social criticism obviously represents the encounter of two incompatible patterns of nationalistic ethics and of two contrasting modes of being of nationalism in general. The dialogue-based personalist ethics of Venclova comes into being along with his concept of moral responsibility. Having accepted Shtromas’s idea that legal responsibility concerns only those individuals who have been directly involved in crimes against humanity, he extends the validity of moral responsibility to the nation as a whole. In this, Venclova stands very close to Karl Jaspers, who, in his post-war essay on the question of guilt, described legal, moral, and metaphysical aspects of guilt. Venclova is also reminiscent of Emmanuel Lévinas, according to whom the miracle of morality disappears as soon as the question “Why should I be moral?” is asked. An evident intellectual and moral kinship relates Venclova to Martin Buber, too; namely, the idea that I can be free in this world insofar as the Thou recognizes my freedom, and that being-in-the-world is a dialogue.

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At this point, Venclova not only joins the gallery of the most eminent existentialist and personalist thinkers of the twentieth century, but also enriches the dialogue-based ethics of personalism by expressing his Lithuanian and overall human sensibility, the sensibility of a human rights activist and political dissident, who, even in his society and culture, has always been and remains a maverick and dissenter. The following passage from Venclova’s famous essay, “Jews and Lithuanians,” is perhaps the most moving and authentic of all the attempts to symbolically restore the Jewish-Lithuanian dialogue and co-existence after the Holocaust. Of the Holocaust in Lithuania, and of the moral sense of belonging to one’s nation Venclova writes: What can I say, having heard all the testimony? Yes, totalitarianism distorts human nature and motives; yes, violence bears violence; but evil always remains evil, murder murder, and guilt guilt. Nothing on earth will change the fact that at the end of June 1941 some Lithuanians, in front of the very eyes of a crowd of Lithuanians, annihilated defenseless people, even the fact that in the twentieth century many—almost all—peoples have done something similar. And I, a Lithuanian, am obliged to speak of Lithuanian guilt. Sadism and looting, hatred and shameful indifference to people cannot be justified—worse, they cannot be explained; they live in such dark corners of personal and national consciousness that to search for their rational origins is a fruitless labor. Some will say: “Well, the Jews were killed not by Lithuanians, but by riffraff (or, even better, by ‘bourgeois nationalists’), utterly unrelated to the Lithuanian people.” I, myself, have said similar things from time to time. But this is not true. If one can consider the nation a greater self—and direct experience says that this point of view is the valid and fair one in the moral world—then all members of the nation, both righteous people and criminals, are included in this self. Every sin committed is a burden on the conscience of the entire nation and the conscience of each member of the nation. One must not dump one’s own guilt on other nations. They will figure out their own guilt. We must figure out our guilt and repent for ourselves. Properly speaking, this is the very essence of what it means to belong to one nation or another. (pp. 49–50) Venclova therefore describes the sense of a common universe of moral discourse as the ontological and ethical grounds for regarding oneself as a member of one nation or another. A human individual searches in his/her community and culture for a moral code. In doing so, he/she severely judges those traits of his/her community and culture that he/she finds the deformation of the moral character of the community of his/her memory and participation, let alone his/her individual moral character—Kavolis’s incisive characteristics of the nationalist moral culture serves here as a clue to Venclova’s ethic of liberal nationalism.

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One would think that it is of Venclova that Kavolis wrote about the committed individual, who, “inasmuch as his/her community’s experience becomes his/her personal substance, part of his/her identity. . . severely judges this community and its history rejecting those things that are perceived by him/her as the deformation of his/her moral character,” and who “judges him/herself asking whether his/her contribution to community coincides with what it needs the most.”17 To Shtromas’s note concerning a major influence that such personalist moral philosophers as Flewelling, Mounier, Maritain, and Berdyaev made on Venclova—and references can also be made to Jaspers, Lévinas, and Buber— I would add that Venclova’s emphasis on the nation as a moral actor of history dates back to the Russian philosopher Peter Chaadayev, one of the first eminent critics of Russian society and culture, and also one of the most dramatic and tragic figures in nineteenth-century Russia (his predecessor and soul-mate Alexander Radishchev may well be said to have been the most dramatic and tragic figure in eighteenth-century Russia). In his famous Philosophical Letters, the first literary and philosophical manifesto of the kind of intellectual called by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin “the superfluous man,” Chaadayev wrote that “peoples are moral beings in the same way as individuals are.”18 It is not accidental that Alexander Herzen described Peter Chaadayev himself as “the first superfluous man” of Russian society and culture. Having established quite early on his reputation as a citizen of the world, Venclova moved the centre of his Lithuanian political and cultural concerns towards core issues in ethics, political philosophy, and the metaphysics of human existence. He might well be regarded as the founder of modern Lithuanian ethical universalism. At the same time, he, along with Kavolis and Shtromas, laid the foundations for the ethic of Lithuanian liberal nationalism. There are many reasons to treat Venclova as a major figure in the philosophy of history and moral philosophy, too. His concept of nations as moral actors of history is much in tune with the humanistic pathos of Shtromas’s ethical theory of nationalism, and also is reminiscent of the best traditions of German and Russian philosophies of history and culture, and of the dialogue-based ethical personalism as well, the latter ranging from Nikolai Berdyaev to Martin Buber. It sheds new light on his attempts to expose prejudices, superstitions and taboos deeply embedded in modern Lithuanian politics and culture. One such taboo in Lithuanian history and historical memory is still the role and place of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) in the 1941 uprising to restore Lithuania’s independence and in the spread of antisemitic propaganda in Lithuania. In 1941, the provisional government of Lithuania started playing a complicated game with the Nazis, sincerely hoping to restore Lithuania’s independence. The game, as Venclova notes, was inexorably doomed to failure. It is difficult to imagine anything more dubious than choosing between Stalin and

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Hitler. Nobody can deny the fact that the provisional government was inspired by the LAF. And the point is that it was members of the LAF who launched antisemitic propaganda employing such gems of Nazi rhetoric as “the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy,” “a plot of the Jewish bankers and communists,” “the Jewish yoke and exploitation,” and the like. This is not to say that the entire 1941 uprising should be regarded as an overture to the Holocaust. But its fallacies and grave mistakes have to be admitted. Venclova was the first to do this. In his articles, he openly challenged the romanticized and patriotic version of Lithuanian Second World War history, which tends to glamorize both the LAF and the 1941 uprising, thus calling for a decisive and radical moral reassessment of the Second World War effects, wounds and traumas. Quoting from editorials in wartime Lithuanian papers, Venclova showed black on white that some Lithuanian politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary Lithuanians, on the eve of World War II, were influenced by Nazism. Moreover, Venclova implied that, by choosing and joining Nazism, they betrayed Lithuania and also turned down the values of the democratic world. For instance, Venclova quotes from an editorial in Naujoji Lietuva [The New Lithuania] (July 4, 1941): The greatest enemy of Lithuania and other nations was, and. . . remains, a Jew. . . . Today, as a result of the genius of Adolf Hitler. . . we are free from the Jewish yoke. . . . A New Lithuania, after joining the New Europe of Adolf Hitler, must be clean from Jews. . . . To exterminate the Jewry and Communism along with it is a primary task of the New Lithuania.19 Needless to say, the conservative and ultrapatriotic circles, particularly émigré ones, reacted noisily, thus adding insult to injury. The problem for Lithuanian Jews is that quite a large segment of Lithuanian societyʊincluding more than a few representatives of the intelligentsiaʊis still inclined to consider the Jews as collectively responsible for the mass killings and deportations of civilians, as well as for other atrocities committed during the Soviet occupation on the eve of the Second World War. This represents the disgraceful adoption of the Nazi rhetoric that equated Communism with the Jews. In an effort to modify the charges that Lithuanians participated in the mass killings of Jews in 1941 and after, some Lithuanians have spoken of “two genocides,” orʊas some Jewish writers have called itʊ“symmetry” in the suffering of both peoples. The notorious theory of the historic guilt of Lithuanian Jews for the nation’s disaster, which up to now has been deeply embedded in Lithuanian political discourse and popular consciousness, depicts Lithuanian Jewry as the decisive force of the Soviet regime. At the same time, this theory includes considerations of the allegedly subversive and treacherous activities, on the eve of the Second World War, of local Jewry, the latter perceived as lacking in loyalty, patriotism, and civic-mindedness.

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Thus, there is a derivative theory of two genocides, which provides an assessment of the Holocaust and of local collaborators of the Nazis in terms of the revenge for the Soviet genocide of the local population. It is little wonder then, that the theory of two genocides, which is just another term for the theory of the collective guilt of the Jews, has been qualified by Venclova as “troglodytic” and treacherous with regard to Lithuania, thus characterizing people who are still inclined to practice it as moral troglodytes. Regrettably, Lithuania has failed to bring war criminals to justice and provide an unambiguous legal assessment of those Lithuanians who were active in the Holocaust. Yet the great Lithuanian émigrés achieved intellectually what their country has yet to achieve politically, namely, the accommodation of Lithuanian consciousness and culture in an increasingly global and interrelated world of today and tomorrow. If culture precedes and anticipates politicsʊthe reverse is true only of totalitarian countriesʊthen the two Lithuanian critics of society and culture have demonstrated this better than anybody else in the twentieth-century world. At this point, Aleksandras Shtromas and Tomas Venclova richly deserve to reach a wider audience and to be placed beside such phenomena of the contemporary critical intellectual discourse as Group 47 in Germany, and beside the great critics of society and culture of the twentieth century in general, such as Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ernest Gellner, Czesáaw Miáosz, and Zygmunt Bauman.

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Chapter Five Juozas Girnius: Loyalty, Dissent, and Betrayal in the Conservative-Nationalistic Moral Imagination Without question, Juozas Girnius may be considered one of the most prominent figures of Lithuanian culture in the twentieth century. He belongs to a great triumvirate of Lithuanian luminaries of philosophy with decidedly Catholic ideological foci―Stasys Šalkauskis, Antanas Maceina, and Juozas Girnius―that comprises a cornerstone of modern Lithuanian intellectual history, and their ideas and works are essential to the cultural canon. Indeed, these thinkers introduced fundamental themes and issues of twentieth century philosophy of religion and existentialism into modern Lithuanian philosophy. However, there were many more themes and issues than there were academic philosophers, and this fact placed these thinkers in the unavoidable position of representing their culture and society, in spite of their Catholic interests. Maceina and Girnius, to use Ferdinand Tönnies’s terms, represented modern Lithuanian society not so much in terms of Gesellschaft, but rather through an understanding of community as Gemeinschaft, i.e., an ethnically organic Lithuanian community with interests that were quite universal in scope. Šalkauskis was, to put a finer point on it, the intellectual par excellence of modern Lithuanian society. At any rate, each of these three brilliant figures was an engagé intellectual and cultural critic, and each was connected to one or more large social and cultural movement(s). Finally, all three of them are considered Lithuania’s Catholic intellectuals of the largest scale, at the same time being the most important representatives of Lithuanian Catholic philosophy. Given their role and notoriety in Lithuania, it is curious that Šalkauskis, Maceina, and Girnius, as de facto representatives of Lithuanian culture in the world, were perceived as especially conservative intellectuals (though there were some exceptions to this rule―the early Maceina and Girnius had their more definitively radical periods).1 Quite to the contrary of general Western perceptions, these philosophers differ from one another dramatically. Naturally, even intellectuals with similar interests and shared sensibilities differ in their methodology, language, and manner of raising questions or theorizing, and even when remaining in general agreement, they will emphasize different particular aspects of an interpretation or theory. But these two differ significantly in their attitude toward political power. The young Maceina’s view on massive totalitarian movements cannot be called two-edged. Instead, it was simply favorable toward them. In his early development, he clearly thought very positively about such movements. His early social philosophy paid homage to anti-bourgeois, Prometheus-type accounts of the twentieth century, namely, Bolshevik and National Socialist (the latter he described as “new paganism”), which stands in stark contrast

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and contradiction to the principle of spirit, and to the metaphysical bourgeois, that Maceina radically rejected.2 The attitude of the young Juozas Girnius toward the ideology of totalitarian National Socialism was, at least more so than Maceina’s, ambivalent, although he most likely had more sympathy for this political ideology than not (the writings of Girnius on the subject of National Socialism provide some evidence of this leaning). Of the thinkers of the aforementioned triumvirate, only Stasys Šalkauskis was an unquestionable and consistent defender of democratic values. Moreover, Stasys Šalkauskis, together with Mykolas Römeris and Valentinas Gustainis, represented a handful of anti-totalitarian prewar intellectuals, who had great insight into, and stayed faithful to, Western democratic values, remaining immune to the various mass seductions achieved through ideological terrorization and exploitation by means of the technologies and rhetoric used in achieving these. Keeping in mind the context of interwar Europe—its political upheavals and the feeling of the impending arrival of the Second World War— Šalkauskis’s stubborn loyalty to democratic ideals deserves greater attention and a more extensive analysis. Not all that many European intellectuals maintained their faith in the future of democratic ideas and value systems during that era of a profound crisis of liberal democracy. Lithuania was no exception in this regard. Young, radically inclined, and talented Lithuanian thinkers were leaned toward supporting, and even the promotion of, dangerous political doctrines. Suffice it to recall a few wellknown intellectuals and artists, who became enthusiasts of National Socialism and fascism in other European countries, for example: Giovanni Gentile, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Umberto Boccioni in Italy; or the young Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, and Emile Cioran, who glorified the Iron Guard and propagated antimodern, antiliberal, ethnocratic, and antisemitic views as well as supported the cult of personality in prewar Romania. Or we might also recall the biography of Martin Heidegger in Germany. Or perhaps Knut Hamsun in Norway, who felt a deep antipathy to modern Western culture, and who glorified Adolf Hitler and National Socialist doctrines encouraging Norwegians to “become” Germans. Finally, there is the example of the founders of the French Action Française movement and clerical fascists of Charles Maurras’s type. Given this well-documented and prevalent trend, it is not worth demonizing the many young, talented European thinkers and writers of that time for lacking political insight and succumbing to dangerous political doctrines. During that interwar period of intense crisis in modern Western politics and culture, as well as the prevailing tone of disappointment and disillusionment with liberal democracy, what proves most astonishing, in a brief glance at this era, is not those intellectuals and writers who believed in, and found themselves caught in the web of, totalitarian propaganda, but those

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resilient thinkers who withstood it and maintained their faith in classical and modern humanist values of the Western world. 1. Nationalism and Patriotism One of the most dramatic and tragic aspects of Europe’s social and existential experience during the twentieth century is that many talented people became anything it was possible to become in the era of ideology and the masquerade ball of regimes. It was not merely some sort of innocent social experiment or test of social roles or playful improvisation that tried out different ideological masks and identities. This phenomenon was described by George Orwell in his especially perceptive essay, “Notes on Nationalism.”3 Preceding and anticipating the independent, non-academic U.S. writer, Eric Hoffer, who later wrote in his splendid study on the anatomy of fanaticism and true believers, Orwell well understood that all ideological mass movements of the twentieth century had only one goal―to create an illusion of mutual discord. In fact, they were known for their convertibility and even deep mutual dependence.4 Orwell, in his essay, quite unexpectedly defined nationalism, treating it very broadly―as a passionate identification with a group, for which (namely, for one’s own group) one must provide or win as much power and prestige as possible. Nationalism, for Orwell, first of all, meant a strange capability to tie ourselves to a certain language, ideological rhetoric, and far-reaching political visions. According to him, nationalism is always aggressive and full of a will to compensate a real or alleged downgrading of its group that is obscured by history. Orwell places patriotism in opposition, which, according to him, is merely an attachment to our country, lifestyle, and, at the same time, a readiness to protect our country in case of danger. Needless to say, not everything in reality is so evident and clearly delineated as it might have appeared to Orwell. Nationalism, until it is distorted by social-Darwinian or racist borrowings, is characterized by quite liberal ethics, the origins of which reach as far as the works of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Immanuel Kant, and Joseph-Ernest Renan. Meanwhile, there has not been a single solid theory of patriotism in the social sciences, and thus it remains an amorphous category. Patriotism means love and fidelity to one’s country, along with political loyalty, an attachment to a culture and its associations, but all these aspects are also enveloped into, and represented by, nationalism. On the other hand, an inclination toward critical questioning of its community and culture is, in general, foreign to patriotism. As a sentiment, it is awoken easily in discussions with foreigners or representatives from other cultures, therefore, it reveals itself as overly uncritical and defensive in relation to its country―as the English say: “my country, right or wrong.” Today it is quite popular to juxtapose nationalism and “constitutional patriotism” or other sociological coinages with a pleasant ring, which

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basically prove nothing, but simply artificially set both sides of the same nationalism against one another―causing civic, constitutional, legal, and modern forms of it to confront ethnic, archaic, conservative, and mythological origin nationalism. At any rate, Manichaean dichotomies rarely are fruitful in the sphere of social analysis, especially in the case of nationalism. The aforementioned forms of nationalism are merely the two faces of Janus. Nationalism is rarely singularly good or completely bad―its faces are rather phases of the same political and social cycles. The liberal phase of nationalism is usually substituted by a conservative one (sometimes coexisting as two models of political ethics until one prevails), but when nationalism cannot be made compatible with liberal-democratic values and institutions, its radical and antimodern versions inevitably appear. It seems that it is precisely at this juncture―when we have a superficial and reductionist interpretation of nationalism that takes it as fatal evil ab ovo―that an artificial opposition between nationalism and patriotism appears (as a matter of fact, Juozas Girnius also applied dubious dichotomy, strictly separating national loyalty from nationalism). It is not without reason that Zygmunt Bauman and other contemporary social theorists are inclined to emphasize that nationalism is nothing else than disliked patriotism, whereas patriotism is a well-liked nationalism. It is possible to paraphrase this winged description of both phenomena by saying that patriotism often is the nationalism of the powerful and the great, whereas nationalism is patriotism of the small and meek. Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” however, deserves serious attention for his other emphases. First of all, his real discovery was a provocative idea that nationalism rarely settles on a single object―it is inclined to keep changing its object, i.e., the group that identifies with it, and tends to be transferred to various systems of ideas and values. If we identify with a group and desire power for this group, it does not mean that this group has to remain identical all the time. A personal attitude can be easily shifted to other real or imaginary groups. The group, which is either imaginary or known in reality, cannot become an object of criticism―it is identified with passionately, and it is regarded as the embodiment of good. The fact is that it is the representatives or foreigners of remote provinces of empire who become the most ardent nationalists, who transfer that which they would have wanted to glorify in their group or nation onto an imaginary group had they only managed to maintain direct bonds of identity or a social linkage with it. This shows that nationalism is tightly connected with a passionate modern or antimodern moral imagination: it suffices to recall an Englishman aroused by the Aryan and Germanic spirit, one of the most quintessential modern racists, Houston Stuart Chamberlain, not to mention even more sinister Austrians, though not necessarily in intellectual terms or in regard to intellectual links, such Austrians as Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (SD chief after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated,

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responsible for controlling the Gestapo and the system of concentration camp), Arthur Seyss-Inquart, all believers in the German Third Reich’s historic mission. Recalling a far more sublime—in terms of cultural, rather than political, roles—category of Europeans who were also foreshadowers of evil, it is worth calling to mind Thomas Carlyle, the prophet of hero-worship and fascism, who was fascinated by the Germanic Geist, and Knut Hamsun, who urged Norwegians to become Germans. The imagined or idealized group, judging from the perspective of human experience, might have nothing to do with the one imagining it―in this way nationalism can be transferred, or, using Orwell’s fitting, one that gives rise to musical associations, transposed. It is precisely this uncomplicated shift of ideology and identity, as well as shifting of loyalty to a group which marks mass radical, political, and ideological movements. It was ideologically easy to migrate from Zionism to Communism or Socialism―in both cases preserving a deep millenarian faith in the coming of God’s Kingdom, not doubting the ideological salvation as well as the final justice on the Earth that will occur at the end of history. Isaiah Berlin described the unique case of Moses Hess, who was both a convinced Marxist and an ardent Zionist.5 It turns out that we can transmigrate from a national identity to an isomorphic ideological identity―a devotion to a nation might be transformed into a devotion to a party or an ideology. And vice versa. Furthermore, in Germany the National Socialist Workers’ Party was amply filled with the new members arriving from Germany’s Communist Party. This was, in a flash, comprehended by Nazi leaders who realized that their true and irreconcilable enemies were not the Communists but the Social Democrats. The opposite effect was also possible: after the Second World War, the Hungarian Communist Party warmly received new members from the former Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow-Cross, and even prepared special documents forgiving political sins for them. This ideological transmigration, proselytizing, and conversion, was not a garden variety expression of political opportunism or cynicism. Instead, a new type of loyalty and identity took shape: that of a human being who completely identifies him/herself with his/her group and entrusts not just a part, but the whole of his/her identity and personality to it, and for whom it is less important to belong to one fixed group than to be in it in general and to entrust his/her soul to it. Orwell singled out a few versions of transposed nationalism, the blind and the passionate identification with a real or imagined group, but especially interesting is his fingering of political Catholicism (represented by G. K. Chesterton, who, according to Orwell, was a real democrat and an enemy of any sort of imperialism, but, out of an affectionate love for Romance and Catholic countries, he strongly identified himself with France and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, refusing to criticize their dangerous politics, and was also

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unable to discern anything wrong in Italian fascism), along with Communism, pacifism, and solidarity of the skin color. In all cases, according to Orwell, people projected their country onto an ideologically, politically, and racially favored group, which immediately would be beyond criticism. Nationalism can be relocated to other, especially remote and exotic countries, and if one is ashamed of personal patriotic feelings and attachment to one’s country, it can be shifted to language and ideology. According to Orwell, alienated intellectuals on the left, who had lost love for their homeland, easily became ideological Russophiles and Communist sympathizers. This remark ties in interestingly with Karl Marx’s insight that the proletariat does not have and cannot have a homeland—its true homeland is socialism. The most interesting thing, however, is that one can freely move from one object of loyalty and devotion to another by modeling one’s personal views and loyalty for another group so that they can be transposed to this other group. Here would be naïve to shout “Alas for the times and the manners,” rushing to moralize all of this as an ideological Sodom and Gomorrah. It is not cynicism, but a new formula for identity. This formula originated in the insecurity and uncertainty of the modern world and, at the same time, out of a desire to stabilize the world, to achieve security, certainty, and clarity in order to get radical and unequivocal answers to complex questions of modernity, as well as solutions to painful political and moral dilemmas. For lack of a better term, Orwell called this formula nationalism because of its desperate search for security, certainty, and clarity. Suffice it to recall the people of Lithuania in the twentieth century, who also played almost every single role offered to them by ideological movements promising security, certainty, and clarity. An especially distinct example here would be the émigré writer, Bronys Raila, who in his time was a trečiafrontininkas (a member of the “Third Front,” a left-wing cultural movement), a nationalist, and who was sympathetic to National Socialism. In the end, as a writer and journalist in the USA, he became a liberal. Another who was caught up in the whirl of the twentieth century’s brutal mincer was the poet Salomėja Nėris―who migrated from Roman Catholicism to the aforementioned “Third Front” movement, but who finally went as far as Bolshevism and Stalin worship. On a different scale and, needless to say, without the worship of Bolshevism or the element of betrayal of his homeland, we can also trace this tendency in Girnius’s ideological evolution. 2. National Philosophy or a Set of National Stereotypes? I will not hide that there are things in Juozas Girnius’s philosophy that I find morally unacceptable. I value him as an author of theoretical and essayistic texts, and also as an influential thinker who in Lithuania and as an émigré

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became not only an intellectual hero, but a moral authority as well. But in our era of mass insanity and organized hatred, the texts of an influential thinker cannot be considered as politically neutral and innocent, especially when these texts are directly related to attitudes toward ideas and value systems, ideologies, and other countries and cultures. Recalling a postwar study by Girnius, Lietuviškojo charakterio problema [The Problem of the Lithuanian Character], which was written while in a displaced persons camp in Nörtingen, Germany, we can make the claim that it exposes some politically dangerous implications of Girnius’s thought. First, the very idea of discussing the Lithuanian national character without a more serious social or anthropological analysis inevitably led Girnius to national mysticism, prescribing to the collective Lithuanian soul everything that is most honorable and beautiful in humankind―social intimacy, unity, idealism, fragility, noble-mindedness, a lack of opportunistic flexibility and pragmatism, respect and love for one’s neighbor, humanism, wisdom, clarity of thought, generosity, emotional warmth, humility, simplicity, and tolerance. This socio-psychological portrait of a collective saint is crowned by an analysis of two symbols of Lithuanian essence and character: the Lithuanian folk depiction of Christ (Rūpintojėlis) and the knight on horseback shown in the national coat of arms (Vytis). In his comparison of the Lithuanian character with those of neighboring nations―first of all, Prussian and Russian―Girnius underlines that when comparing it with the Russian soul (with its collectivist and abstract love, and its hatred of humanity), the Lithuanian character is incomparably more inclined to ethical individualism and to real good, and comparing it with the German/Prussian, oriented to iron-clad order, the Lithuanian character is inconsiderably warmer, more intimate, and so forth. I do not wish to make fun of Girnius’s essay, which, as Tomas Venclova has noticed, without a doubt was born of post-World-War-Two sorrow and grief over his homeland’s annexation. It is easy to wax ironically about a document from another era, and for this reason it is not attractive to do so from an intellectual and moral point of view. But it is also evident that this circumstance cannot justify a philosophical essay’s construction based on the most crude and primitive national stereotypes of the nineteenth century. Yet stereotypes are stereotypes. As Leszek Kołakowski noted, people, for reasons of emotional security and certainty, are constantly creating and reinforcing them (after all, we cannot live by doubting or being skeptical all the time), but it does not mean that we should raise them to the level of philosophy.6 When we do this, then it is hard to avoid making a caricature of the object of one’s personal loyalty and love, and, at the same time, of all personal philosophy. Therefore, if the reader were not informed about the dramatic circumstances in which it was written, it would seem as if its author were approaching the level of a historical anecdote, not to say a naughty joke. I will not analyze the archeology of the Lithuanian stereotype as this has been insightfully done by Tomas Venclova.7 I only would like to call

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attention to the fact that Girnius’s messianic tendencies, victim’s syndrome, and sacralization of culture could have entered his writings through the Russian and Polish writers, whom he had mentioned himself (for instance, Dostoyevsky, whose brothers Karamazov, according to Girnius, ideally outline all aspects of the Russian soul). At same time, I have to call to attention that some stereotypes Girnius made use of, and for which he went as far as using theory to shore them up, have, at the very least, unpleasant political and moral implications. For example, after commenting on Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous lion and fox metaphors, Girnius states that Lithuanians are not sly as foxes nor fearsome as lions—in other words, the Lithuanian human material is too noble to confirm to Machiavelli’s cynical theoretical claims. Hence, Girnius’s insight into Lithuanians’ particular tolerance of foreigners, especially Jews: It is impossible for our human character to be the first, or the second, neither lion nor fox. We cannot be lions not only because we are not a large nation, but, first of all, because in cherishing our freedom, we cannot refuse to cherish the freedom of others. Our country’s politics of minorities undoubtedly testifies to the fact that our “unlioness” does not spring only from our nation’s smallness and the weakness of our state’s power. Even if we lacked enough power to attack our neighbors, still had enough to abuse our minorities. However, not for a single minority group (albeit the loyalty of some for us was very problematic) did we deny the right to live an individual life freely. Our political tolerance is especially well testified by our relationship with the Jewish minority. Although this minority group had an unequivocal stranglehold on the practical spheres of economic life (trade and industry) and could have been a strong basis for antisemitism, however, not even during the most passionate period of antisemitism in the neighboring Reich did antisemitism find any stronger reverberations in Lithuania. The Jewish minority lived freely. True, during the first period of occupation, many people of this minority did not pass the exam of loyalty to the Lithuanian nation, becoming the invader’s collaborators in devastating the Lithuanian nation. However, when, one year later, the second invader began its inhumane terror against Jews, the Lithuanian nation met it with a deep feeling of disgust, because, in our understanding, what is inhumane is inhumane, be it done to one of us, to a stranger, or, in the end, to an enemy.8 After such reasoning and such a demonstration of tolerance only one question remains: should we be taken aback that this position regarding Jews became almost universally accepted in Lithuania and among its émigré community, seeing that it was enunciated black on white by a celebrated Lithuanian philosopher and cultural hero? After all, Girnius’s logic of argumentation is transfused with a few stereotypes, which were used in

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constructing this public text, laying out a theory of Jewish disloyalty and treason of Lithuania. In short, it claims that in Lithuania there had never been antisemitism, there were only disloyal Jews who betrayed their country and en bloc went along with the Bolshevik occupation. The Jews failed the loyalty exam and betrayed their country, but even this did not give rise to a wave of antisemitism in Lithuania. Nevertheless, the massacre of Jews that took place during the war years brought on great anguish for Lithuanians and awakened in them a deep sympathy (though Jews were enemies, and, at the same time, economic exploiters). Unfortunately, the interpretation of twentieth century history suggested by Girnius is simply a compendium of Joseph Goebbels propaganda gems and Lithuanian antisemitic stereotypes. What causes astonishment is how it entered the field of Girnius’s discourse. Could it be that Girnius sincerely believed what he was writing? Or was it just his articulation (as it was, equally, for other Lithuanian intellectuals) of a secret feeling that a mass, rationally inexplicable, and strikingly rapid, as well as technically “effective,” annihilation of the Lithuanian Jews had raised fears in Lithuania and among émigrés that Lithuanians’ collaboration with the Nazis could have destroyed any kind of sympathy for Lithuania among Western allies, as well as compassion for the tragedy that had befallen it? The following passage shows the descent to national self-congratulation, one-sided propaganda, and a biased worldview, and, finally, an unconditional defense of one’s nation and country (even as it openly ignores facts and historical as well as political reality): That which we hold to be just, we defend in open battle, even though an opportunistic flexibility would let us hope to avoid of one or several victims. We do not know how to be “realistic.” We did not go red and did not hide in brown as the “realistic” countries did. We did not know how to bow our head to injustice. Our heads stand too erect for them to be swayed by every gust of wind. Our hearts are too sensitive to injustice for us to tolerate injustice with closed eyes and plugged ears. Our chests have always been stripped bare to the blows of invaders. Are we not, besides Poland, the only country occupied by the Nazis, from which not even the brown terror has not been able to squeeze out even a single SS legion?!9 Today such an historical interpretation would provoke a smile among Lithuanian or other European historians. At any rate, the interpretation of twentieth century turmoil that Girnius suggested has completely transfused the popular consciousness, and has become an almost universally accepted (often even officially) position of Lithuanian society, when evaluating the Second World War and social as well as political turmoil. An attempt to assess the Lithuanian moral and political attitude during the occupation and the Second World War differently is deftly condemned as an expression of

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disloyal, or an unpatriotic, attitude. But if, unfortunately, the facts bespeak something else, so what, too bad for the facts. Thus, it is not surprising that instead of a Western-style open and critical interpretation of the twentieth century, in our circles, until today, it has been satisfactory to rely upon half-truths or a factography that is only partly supported by a selective historical memory that presides over a defensive mythology. Unfortunately, Girnius no doubt lent a significant hand in constructing this do-or-die type of defensive paradigm, which sought to protect the country from an unfavorable (or unpatriotic and, therefore, hostile) historical interpretation. If Lithuanians, according to Girnius, never reddened or darkened, then it is clear that all the social and political turmoil that took place in twentieth century Lithuania was the aftermath of the activities of the counter-powers and of treachery by the fifth column active in Lithuania. It remains only to name those disloyal and treacherous forces―needless to say, they were Jews. After reading The Problem of the Lithuanian Character, what remains unclear is how the Lithuanians of the time, who, naturally, were born good and were the creators of good, happened to create for themselves an authoritarian regime, as well as thinkers who openly sympathized with totalitarian ideologies, and, finally, to call things by their true names, had created a quite influential pro-Nazi stream in their politics and culture. This of course, does not erase the miracle that was created in interwar Lithuania―which, for quite a long time, saw relatively liberal and tolerant minority politics created by Lithuanians, who step by step made their country more European and refined as far as intellectual and artistic culture, modernizing its bureaucracy, and generating the first Lithuanian forms of urban life generation and culture, as well as an education system that was quite advanced. Nonetheless, not mentioning the acute social problems and political tensions that Lithuania experienced due to its political system and international predicament would be strange at the least. This type of defensive attitude regarding one’s nation is hardly congruent with that of an independent thinker, and, quite simply, with a free individual’s situation, both in his nation and the world. 3. Idealism and the Spring of Life Why did Girnius, in September of 1941, pay so much attention to Adolf Hitler’s work Mein Kampf? Why did he write so much on National Socialism, calling it idealism and the spring of life?10 Moreover, Girnius endorsed Hitler’s idea that an individual must be subordinated to his/her society, and stated that namely from this type of devotion springs the deepest meaning of idealism. According to Girnius:

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Finally, racial survival and growth also requires deep idealism, a limitation of personal interests in the name of the nation’s survival and healthiness. The healthy ones have to limit their personal happiness by producing affluent families, duly raise them, while the ill ones should refrain from this. With this kind of attitude, the German nation is creating the New Europe. Joining the New Europe requires everyone to share deep idealism, the initial meaning of which has to be understood and provide enthusiasm even for everyday work, which now is the most needed.11 In the Girnius’s series of articles, “Idėjiniai nacionalsocializmo pagrindai” [The Ideological Foundations of National Socialism], published in the publication Į laisvę (To Freedom), Adolf Hitler’s work Mein Kampf is presented with great thoroughness. Girnius analyzed and commented this work methodically and painstakingly―referring to and quoting from it, using Hitler’s terminology, but at the same time inserting analytical as well as logical links, which would reveal all the essence of National Socialism. By tracing the thought of Mein Kampf’s author, and radically rejecting conservative as well as liberal notions of state, rejecting modern humanism, Girnius puts forward Hitler’s doctrine as the great alternative to a crumbling Western civilization. Finally, he reaches the central issue—the question of Jews. On this, Girnius writes: The instinct of self-preservation is especially well-developed among Jews. The best example of it is the fact that this nation, during all great upheavals, managed to remain intact and the same when it emerged from the greatest catastrophes of humanity. However, this vital selfpreservation instinct among Jews never reaches the heights of idealism. Among Jews, the will to sacrifice never goes beyond a separate individual’s naked instinct of self-preservation, in other words, never superceding egoism. Jewish sacrifice is equally dubious, just as their togetherness is dubious. It follows that Jewish solidarity is based on the same herd instinct, which brings starving wolves into a pack in order to attack the enemy, and which causes the attacked horses to group into one self-defending herd. Similarly, Jews tend to sacrifice and be united when a danger causes them to do so, or until they are seduced by a common spoil. When these two reasons are no longer present, the most detestable egoism emerges, which turns a “united” nation at one point into a bloody, scratching rat pack. . . . Because of this lack of idealistic self-sacrifice, Jews are incapable of creating even a state with a delineated territory. The creation of such a state requires a great deal of idealism, limitation of personal interests as well as an inclination to society, but first of all, the right notion of work. Because Jews do not have this idealistic spirit at all, they therefore cannot succeed in creating their state. By the same token, Jews lose the foundation on which their culture could grow. . . . It would

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be only half of the problem, if Jews were a nation in vain only culturally. Unfortunately, the eternal Jew is also the eternal enemy as well as an enraged destroyer of every true culture. He does not shy away from any means of ruining a perennially hated Aryan mankind. He tries, like a parasite, to encroach into the body of Aryan nations, and, being thus camouflaged, starts to pollute the blood of a nation that gave him a shelter, starts to destroy the foundation of its economic life, stigmatize its moral ideals, in other words, starts to pull it down to his own baseness. To be economical with words, National Socialism is a reminder to Aryan humankind of its highly creativity characteristics, and, at the same time, it is a warning of the Jewish danger.12 It is hard to tell whether Girnius, in all cases, is sharing his own position or merely retelling Hitler’s ideological narrative and being consistent, as a theorist should be, arranges the right emphases of racial doctrine, without providing his assessments. In any case, it is not just a sort of colorless retelling―Girnius does not question the position taken in the text, as it is clearly provided as the final word and the unquestionable truth. The aforementioned brutal and barbaric ideological vocabulary of the Nazis, with the help of which Hitler described Jews and their “crimes” against the Aryan race, inevitably calls for a reaction by twentieth century man―or for moral and political protest, or for a passionate identification. In Girnius’s text we do not find one or the other―it is possible that it quite simply utters the quiet and careful acquiescence of an intellectual. If it is not the text of a Nazi of deep convictions, then it is at the very least the text of a man who saw no alternatives to this ideology. To repeat Hitler’s phrases without any assessment―especially those that desecrate everything that is related to a basic respect for human dignity―also means an unquestionable moral treason of the Western world, as well as of universalist ethical ideals. Much can be said about a person just from his reaction to such the text just cited―if this kind of lexicon and manner of talking does not shock them, but merely gives rise to a will to defend one’s people at any cost, it means there is no value in continuing the discussion. That says it all. Barbarity is barbarity and it does not matter whether one actively defends it, or approves of it in silence. It is highly doubtful whether the Girnius’s writings on Hitler’s Mein Kampf were the compromise of a persecuted intellectual between his conscience and a forced tribute to a brutal regime. A writer who is persecuted, or who is placed under ideological pressure, usually has a different style of writing―he or she desperately looks for an Aesopian language of fable, plays with semantic aspects as well as with various interpretations that open up the possibility for ambiguities. Writers and thinkers who are persecuted by the institutions of militant religious or ideocratic regimes inevitably grasp at such creative opportunities.

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This phenomenon is well known to those who study Soviet literature. Czesław Miłosz has described the phenomenon of Ketman in his book, The Captive Mind, that is, a technique of simulating false acceptance and enthusiasm, a type of mental acrobatics when trying to preserve one’s life and concealing opposing or even dissident views in the face of a foreign religion or ideology. Leo Strauss has also analyzed in a subtle way to what extent the style of a politically and ideologically persecuted writer alters, as well as what marks it.13 At any rate, we can find none of this in the collection of articles by Juozas Girnius. He does not shy away from doctrine, he does not talk ambiguously, and there is no reticence, hiding at least some undertones of its real meaning, or attempt to encode it, not to mention that Girnius’s text on Mein Kampf does not even have the slightest hint of Aesopian language. Girnius completely openly rejects not only conservative and liberal social doctrine, but also the humanistic conception of the human being. True, this exclusion in itself would not perhaps be a shocking fact―one may do this from a radical position, but from such a position that would not be undermining the democratic positions of the left and right, representing the normal political spectrum. Girnius, however, does it by showing solidarity with the position put forward in Mein Kampf: We have already revealed that in the light of racial principles, the objective of a National-Socialist state is not to be a cultural pinnacle, but first and foremost to preserve the cared-for nation on this Earth. The measure of a National-Socialist culture is the way it fights for its existence. A culture has true value when it reveals it has the means, and provides strength for a combat for its existence as well as to assure its future. And vice versa: a culture that renders its people only more sensitive and less strong-willed, in other words, less fit for a tough combat for its existence, will be of no use and even highly reproachful. Hence, the primary objective of a separate individual in a racist state is not the socalled spiritual perfection of the human personality, but its vital force that is subordinated to the law racial preservation and continuation of the race. According to a National Socialist understanding, a human being’s value is measured by his ability to preserve and continue his race. All other human values or virtues are subordinated to this primary one and have as much real meaning as they are beneficial for it. Such an understanding of a separate individual’s life objective reveals for us the racially comparative value of human values: first of all, a human value is embodied in human healthiness, also in power; secondly, in the firmness of character or resoluteness and power to will; and, finally―in spiritual education. As we can see, an understanding of the National-Socialist human being is directly opposed to the so-called humanistic human appreciation. The latter, regarding personal spiritual perfection as the primary objective of human life, has pushed biological human values down to last place,

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whereas National Socialism, by providing racial preservation as a life objective for separate individuals, puts biological values in the very first place.14 It is interesting that Girnius, in his later and more mature period of creation, would also write on the substance of a nation, the necessity of its continuity, as well as the eternity and primacy of all other derivative things regarding state. But this is a known discourse belonging to conservative nationalism, which in itself does not lead to vitalistic, social-Darwinian or racist conclusions. At any rate, the idea of the continuation of the nation and a combat for its eternity is clearly articulated here―in itself it can be most noble and beautiful, but everything is decided by the context and instrumentation of the theory, its concepts, and value positions. In this case, Girnius seems to have been a twentieth-century victim of the aggressive encroaching of totalitarian doctrines on the consciousness of the human being (even of the thinking human being). Here is Girnius’s final word that offers an explanation of his analytical approach to Mein Kampf, as well as his, as the text commentator, goals and tasks, and, finally, he gives an explanation of his relation to the presented material. We can allow Girnius’s text, in this case, to speak for itself, so that one would not think that I am extracting something from the context and giving a biased presentation. Girnius closes his series of articles on Hitler’s Mein Kampf with these words: We now come to the end of this series of articles on the basics of the ideology of National Socialism. Following the thought of the author of the National-Socialist worldview, as much as has been possible, we used his own texts, since an authentic quotation always conveys the author’s flow of ideas with more precision rather than a simple retelling. Moreover, this was supposed not only to convey the meaning of the National-Socialist worldview, but also to enable the reader to feel this inner power more vividly, an inner power that its founder Adolf Hitler and his personality have given this worldview, and which gave the new meaning to this worldview as it winds the new paths of Western history. We hope that our readers will have gained a more systematic acquaintance with the worldview that Adolf Hitler, as leader of the German nation, is fighting for the future of the new Europe and today is victoriously striking at the enemy of all Western culture, as well as of centuries of humane tradition ―Jewish Bolshevism.15 I would like to add that I also believe that “an authentic quotation always conveys the author’s flow of ideas with more precision rather than a simple retelling,” which is why I was ungrudgingly quoted this textbook fascist discourse.

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Thus, as we have seen, for Girnius the ill-fated twentieth century, as it was for many other radically minded young intellectuals, provided an opportunity to try many roles, and to show empathy for many different things starting with classical Western values and forms of modern European intellectual culture: the modern culture of Roman Catholicism, the philosophy of existentialism, and later, even the ethics of liberalism, right up to the nationalist paradigm defending one’s country, and, during the Second World War, reaching as far as National Socialism. 4. Forms of Faithfulness to the Nation: Loyalty and Dissent Of one thing we can be certain―Juozas Girnius is an example of commitment and service to his community. Juozas Girnius deserves deep respect for his aristocratically spiritual self-abnegation, for his proclamation of an ethics of fidelity to one’s community, and for holding to such ethics personally. Just as he deserves to be honored for his enormous contribution to The Lithuanian Encyclopedia, published in Boston―a cultural feat of the Lithuanian émigré community, which cannot be detached from its editor and soul, Juozas Girnius. The same can be said of Aidai (Echoes), whose editor was the great man of émigré culture, Juozas Girnius. At the same time, Juozas Girnius’s personality, along with his works, contain something that is simply impossible to recognize as a continuous line of thinking or a consistent configuration of ideas and values. Interestingly, the danger of this type of incongruity, and continually growing tension between national values and ethical universalism, as well as subordination of philosophy to ideological and political projects, was recognized in Girnius’s thinking by Antanas Maceina. Whatever we can say about Maceina, he unequivocally evaluated his ideological errant back roads along with the seduction by radicalism of his early period. Girnius never did this. Writing on Girnius’s work, Tauta ir tautinė ištikimybė (The Nation and National Faithfulness), Maceina comments insightfully: . . . The thing that surfaces in the face of the question of nationality raised by Girnius is the relation of national culture to universal culture of mankind. It is that the presentation of our nation to the world is not about presenting information on our creations, but rather on an active participation in solving supranational problems, as Stasys Šalkauskis has underscored in his time by saying that “only through striving at supranational goals and through the service to universal tasks of humankind, can a nation achieve its greatest might. . . .” Just as the human personality reaches its full maturity, and gives sense to life only by working in a suprapersonal dimension for suprapersonal goals, a nation (or a part of it) justifies and gives sense to both its being and its culture only by actively and widely participating in supranational objectives and their pursuit. This is a thing we pass over in silence. Girnius has passed

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over it in silence in his book [The Nation and National Faithfulness.―L.D.]. Does not the same happen to a culture that Christ said about a person: the one who cares for his soul the most loses it; the one who plunges it into higher things saves it. . . . My wish for Girnius. . . would be to go back to the issue of the dissemination of nationality, only this time not from an ethical, but from a metaphysical point of view, namely, by linking faithfulness to a nation with human faithfulness and an understanding of national culture as a service to the supranational goals of humankind.16 These deep and wise observations by Maceina remind us of the fact that Girnius had played an important, though episodic, role in the ideas of Lithuanian liberalism. Interestingly, Maceina notices an especially important link between Girnius’s inclination to consider ethical problems and liberalism for which moral philosophy has primacy even over political philosophy. In Maceina’s words: His ideological openness explains Girnius’s inclination toward the liberal wing of our society and culture. He has said himself in one place that “unity of generation is not the unity of the answer, but of the question. . . ” In the answers that reveal his worldview, Girnius is by no means a liberal (in terms of the old meaning of an indifferent person, or even an atheist). However, liberalism is the dimension, out of which today’s questions surface. It is the dimension where a man’s freedom―his decision and his condition in society―becomes the center around which everything else circles. The ones who emphasize this freedom and defend it end up in the same dimension and for this reason are “fellows,” albeit the justification of freedom would be completely different (compare Girnius’s article “Liberalism and Christianity,” in Lithuanian Liberalism, edited by Vytautas Kavolis et al., 1959, pp. 45–47). Therein lies the foundation of why liberalism is so attractive for Girnius. In his day, his concrete relationships with Lithuanian liberals were so close that some among the Catholics were afraid that Girnius might become a true “liberal.” There was no basis for this. However, the fact that the liberal wing is constantly raising the question of freedom is precisely what makes up the unity of this common question tying Girnius to liberalism. Therefore, he constantly defends liberalism—at times even passionately—as it is shown by his dispute with the priest Yla. . . . And Girnius also cannot forgive me for, at one point, having called Liberalism the source of Communism. . . . The Catholic wing of society, which usually does not raise the question of freedom, or even tempers it, is unpleasant for Girnius.17 In honor of Maceina, it needs to be said that in his several succinct and quite precise formulations he not only described Girnius’s style of thinking, at the same time providing a profile of his personality, but probably was the

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only one of all Lithuania’s conservative and Catholic thinkers to describe with precision the outline of liberal philosophy (as an openly-discussed set of moral and political questions without a strictly fixed and obligatory system of views―leaving discussion partners the right to not only make mistakes, but also to change their positions). Unfortunately, in present Lithuanian philosophy, up to now, nobody has adequately reacted, from a theoretical point of view, to the works of Vytautas Kavolis, in which the liberal moral culture and its relationship to other moral cultures is considered. Either liberalism, as Maceina had justly noted, is still considered a field of indifference, agnosticism, and atheism; or, all the contemporary sins, along with caricatures of the leftist liberalism of Western Europe and of Northern America, are projected onto the works of Kavolis and other Lithuanian liberals―starting with the belief in its universally encompassing power of economic and political reform, and ending with political correctness. Yet Kavolis and other Lithuanian liberals, who had worked together with Girnius, constantly emphasized the importance of a sort of multidimensional framework for a peaceful dialogue of values and ideas, as they had also underscored political coexistence, instead of an alleged universal victory of liberalism or the triumph of an abstract universalism. Maceina seems to have been the only of all conservative and Catholic Lithuanian intellectuals to have understood that there exists not one, a single version of liberalism born during the Enlightenment and French Revolution, one that in a militant manner makes everything universal and, with a radical attitude, consciously secularizes humankind while holding all other values and sentiments to be pathetic superstitions, but that there exists another kind of liberalism (which I would describe as the liberalism of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, and Vytautas Kavolis), one that is unafraid of emphasizing liberalism’s limits, and proposing moderation and a coexistence of values. It is namely for this reason that Maceina’s amicable letter to Girnius on the occasion of the Girnius fiftieth birthday, deserves special attention as a fact of Lithuanian intellectual history, and also as a fact of intellectual history of its émigrés. Girnius’s fundamental concept, which provides the basis for his work, The Nation and National Faithfulness, and also forms a large part of his pivotal questions in ethics and philosophy of history, is faithfulness. In essence, this means loyalty, even though it covers some socially and morally intimate nuances of meaning, which we would not find in a judicially cold and clear political definition of loyalty. But how to separate loyalty to one’s country and nation from loyalty to more universal values―religious and moral ones first and foremost? How not to forget that, as Tomas Venclova has observed, for Christians it is proper to leave the capital letter only for God, but for liberals―to Conscience, rather than writing Nation with a capital letter?18 How to separate faithfulness to our

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nation from faithfulness to a particular individual (without regard for his or her nationality, or faith), and, simply, to humaneness? It is precisely these questions that Maceina reminds to Girnius of in his letter. Discussing Girnius’s The Nation and National Faithfulness, he emphasizes: However, this work is also characteristic of Girnius as a thinker, since it reveals very clear characteristics of his thought: suffering as a motive for philosophizing; passion as a motor for enunciation and inclination toward ethics; by the same token, however, the aforementioned danger of illuminating relative values in an absolute light. Two thirds of this book are of a moral nature―devoted to national faithfulness, fusing it together with human faithfulness. However, it is namely at this point that the question arises: What is a measure to what―human faithfulness to the national or national faithfulness to the human? It seems that it is possible to remain faithful nationality-wise, without being faithful to the human. However, what value does this nationality-faithfulness have without a human faithfulness? On what side should our resolution stand in case of a conflict between national and human values? In the state of exile such conflict is quite frequent. What does the origin of human primacy look like in the light of this national faithfulness? These are the questions that inevitably rise while reading Girnius’s work and reflecting upon his passionate warning: “Our nation, is among all other nations, the only one with which we are contingent by fate so inseparably that faithfulness to it is faithfulness to ourselves, and its abandonment is a betrayal of ourselves.” 19 Of course, it is not hard to understand the brooding anxiety in this work by Girnius. The loss of nationality and the uprooting of the human being is always a dramatic process, albeit it can be quiet one that is not always perceived and reflected on by those who are being uprooted. It erases a part of human identity and also the possibility of self-realization. On the other hand, as a Lithuanian, I am also connected to one global community, in its special way concentrating and experiencing the whole world and its drama―after all, a nation, as Girnius insightfully noted, is such a global community. Nevertheless, the loss of each little island or monad of identity when one’s nation faces danger and captivity becomes a dramatic and painful process. On the other hand, perhaps I would very much like to be British, Japanese, Chinese, or Jewish, but the road to these identities is an insurmountably difficult one―an illusion remains that language, faith or social ritual will open the gates, but in reality a part of our identity is inherited, and a part is acquired during early socialization and participation in or joining to social ritual. Thus, our attempts to imitate or improvise other identities may deserve a curious glance or some derisive remarks, but no more than that.

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Those who have lived in foreign countries know very well how comic all the talk is about so-called sociocultural symmetry between life in our society and culture, and a foreign environment, which is purportedly guaranteed by contemporary transnationalism, thanks to the English language, the market, liberal democracy, and equal opportunities. No matter the degree of success of a single individual’s assimilation and professional career in a foreign country, such talk is naïve and resembles simple self-deception. Within the sphere of our culture and the cultivation of our identity, there have never been and there are no absolutely open societies. As Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us, in modern society there exists, instead, a balance or an imbalance of heterophilia and heterophobia, though an absolute majority of society’s members dream quietly about a community of similitude, for the sake of safety, where they would be surrounded by those similar to them, and where the necessity for delving into the lives of those who look and think differently would disappear. This was well understood not only by Girnius, but by Maceina too, who in one of his later books, Asmuo ir istorija (The Individual and History), had developed themes very similar to Girnius’s: the birth of philosophy not out of wonder, but from suffering and moral dilemmas―personal and national, the preservation of personal identity in history. In doing so, he treated history itself as an ongoing loss of consciousness, identity and cultural layers, as well as the attempt to resist this.20 Not only Girnius, but Maceina himself can be compared to a philosopher who takes on Jeremiah’s mission in order to be able to remind his nation of the need for faithfulness to its uniqueness, history, and faith―this is for consciousness and the structure of self-perception that we call a nation. (Maceina had compared Girnius with this Jewish prophet, who in his letter to the Jews, then exiled and in captivity in Babylon, reminds them not to worship foreign gods, and to remain faithful to themselves.) But at this point a complex question opens up. Modern identity is inevitably not only inherited, but more frequently consciously and freely constructed. And in this there is no sin. Not because this would be a sort of frivolous and irresponsible attitude toward one’s collective identity, culture, or surroundings, but only because in our world there are no more road signs. As Bauman has observed, we all inevitably are becoming more or less responsible for our identity, which, in our era, has gone from being an inheritable and learnable phenomenon to becoming a matter of choice and individual responsibility, and even an achievement to be proud of. The modern project did not liberate us from identity―on the contrary, it is becoming even more important and relevant than it was before. But the modern project, unfortunately, empowers us, or perhaps condemns us, to take care of it ourselves, not infrequently in a dramatic manner.21 Here Girnius remains strict and sanctimonious:

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No matter how denationalization proceeds, it is always marked by the signs of guilt and shame. Just as each fault is shameful, so is denationalization. It is no coincidence that denationalization starts with the ending of relationships, by closing off ones who are close, in other words, it starts with a sort of hiding that is typical of shame. There is no such a thing as honorable denationalization. We can well see it in those who have been denationalized first. While the noblest idealists enter the battles of freedom, the pioneers of denationalization are the feeble ones. . . . Denationalization does not require spiritual greatness. On the contrary, the more spiritually feeble is a man, the more inclined he is to become denationalized. For one, there is nothing sacred for him that is not beneficial. Second, it seems to him that denationalization by identifying with “everyone,” with his “surroundings,” offers the seeming ability to hide his inner feebleness. Denationalization does not demand anything. But resistance to the factors underlying denationalization requires true spiritual and moral greatness. Anyone can become denationalized. But he, who is of strong spirit, can resist becoming denationalized.22 Girnius’s The Nation and National Faithfulness is a profound and multidimensional work that resists being reduced to several aspects. It has some deep insights into the structure of the linking dialogue between the individual and his/her community, sociability, the relationship between a society and a community, the inseparability of thought and action in social life, the insufficiency of a single individual and development of his/her powers of association―all of it not only resounds the thoughts of thinkers of dialogue-based personalism (such as those of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Lévinas), but is still relevant for the atomized, fragmented, and anonymous society of contemporary Lithuania.23 Nevertheless, there remain in it some questions worthy of serious debate. The Nation and National Faithfulness, the work that has become a handbook of exile, does not answer those questions. Is assimilation into another society, which involves acquiring an accent in due course, and possibly even losing native language, such a tragedy and a sin if a human being, despite it all, preserves deep links with the homeland, remains interested in its culture and is empathetically open in his/her soul and mind to the country’s contemporary reality, and even supports it politically and morally? In what way is a human being better when he or she mechanically learns his/her parents language, though is formed by another culture: and in his or her thoughts and lifestyle remains fundamentally foreign to the country and culture of his or her parents? Is not more important to preserve one’s native language and national identity, at the same time participating in the life and culture of the country in which we are living?

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Can it really be that an ascetic cultivation of national community values that completely ignore the country in which one lives is the best way to preserve one’s culture, or one’s intellectual, critical, and creative strength? Is active participation in international academic culture in any way sinful? Can it be sinful to enter the intellectual territory of the largest European languages that opens up a true dialogue as well as the possibility for an understanding of one’s self and culture? On the other hand, should we consider the greatest value to be the preservation of one’s native language even in the case when the person using the language provokes feelings of shame in us, as representatives of the same language and culture, due to his/her views and rhetoric? If this person has committed a crime against humanity and, in this way, demeaned his/her nation as a collective individual, as a historical actor, and, to use Johan Gottfried von Herder’s and Peter Chaadayev’s concept, a moral entity? Why should a human being who has preserved his or her Lithuanian language, but rejected the values of Western civilization and chosen modern barbarity, be in any way more valuable than the one who does not speak the native language of the parents and the grandparents, but is intensively seeking a link between Lithuanian and other modern forms of sensitivity and his/her inner self and the world? Should we feel betrayed and ashamed because Alphonso Lingis does not write in Lithuanian? Was Czesław Miłosz any less important to us because he did not speak and write in Lithuanian? Unfortunately, these are not rhetorical questions. If we hold intellectual and moral sensitivity as being less important than knowing the native language for the basis of what a Lithuanian is, then we will never be able to return Miłosz, Lingis, or the Litvaks to our culture. National faithfulness can find expression not only by an unconditional loyalty to our community and a defense of its historic and contemporary reputation, but also via dissent from the dominant tendencies in our society and culture, which contradict or even reject universally accepted moral norms, codes of behavior, manners of expression, and even entire trajectories of consciousness. Faithfulness to humanism or to any other moral culture that defends human dignity, respect for human life, and the principle of the incomparable value of an individual and his or her culture, in the end, also means moral faithfulness to our nation, community, and culture. Dissent from the deformations of one’s culture, which today are felt by others but which tomorrow we will inevitably experience ourselves or will be experienced by other generations, just as vociferous protest against one’s country’s amoral politics, is a higher form of faithfulness to one’s country. In that it connects the moral commitment to humankind with a trust in our society and culture, which is held as being able to maintain universally humane norms. Otherwise, the xenophobes, who rail against Jews, Poles, or Russians, and cynics, who apply double standards to their “own kind” as opposed to their

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ideological opponents or minorities, who are ready at any moment to betray their state or to strive for power and prestige at the expense of their society’s civic solidarity or their country’s wellbeing and international reputation (what we have been witnessing in today’s Lithuania), may appear to be somehow more “true homeland types,” than those Jews, Poles, or Russians, who are loyal to Lithuania and are, to the depths of their souls, attached to the landscape and mainstream culture of Lithuania. Just as the unconditional defense of one’s self and one’s people from criticism of foreigners can seem to us nobler than criticism of our society and culture, disagreeing with what is considered to be a threat to our own moral character and our person, regardless of what kind(s) of mask(s) of devotion to Lithuania camouflage those deformations. It is precisely from this perspective that Girnius today strikes us as especially conservative and out of date. Contemporary society’s human identity is multidimensional and pierces at least several layers of cultural and social experience. It is not for nothing that Vytautas Kavolis wrote so much about the postmodern identity (but by no means did he hold postmodernism to be identical with anonymous fashions, relativistic codes of moral culture, new cultural taboos, cult representatives and movements—instead, he treated postmodernism first of all as an attempt to bridge what was cleaved off by modernity, joining modernism and antimodernism in our consciousness and culture). Kavolis understood the postmodern identity as a link of multidimensional layers that inter-communicated, and perhaps even as an intensive polylogue among them―as a Czesław Miłosz-type devotion to one’s culture, but, at the same time, preserving empathy and open-mindedness to other societies and cultures.24 For Lithuania in the twenty-first century, Miłosz’s model of identity will truly be important, not Girnius’s.

Chapter Six Imagology, Populism, and Treason The basis for this not quite political science-based reasoning is an attempt to cast a glance at the social changes and the dynamics of political consciousness from a humanist position. To what extent in political science can one appeal to fiction, the theory of literature, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of culture, and aesthetics? Has the time not come for an interpretation of culture as something that has become an inevitable cornerstone for a discourse on political science or even an analytical instrumentation of political sciences? To what extent do the novels and essays of Milan Kundera open up for discussion the process of politics and some of the trends of modern, as well as the postmodern consciousness, and the tendencies in culture and politics at the threshold of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? The correlation between fiction and politics and the ability of writers to grasp, as well as predict, many disturbing tendencies in political life in greater depth and with a higher level of sensitivity, comparing to the work of political analysts, is illustrated by the fate and creativity of certain East-Central European writers―Arthur Koestler, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz, to name just a few. Even George Orwell, who was highly influenced not only by participation in the Spanish Civil War, but also by the literary oeuvre of Russia’s Yevgeny Zamyatin and his Hungarian counterpart Arthur Koestler, in large part belong to East-Central European literature, as well as to the experience of the political and moral universe. It would be hard to imagine contemporary social and political philosophy, especially the theories of revolution and totalitarianism, without the dystopian novels of Zamyatin, Orwell, Koestler, or Miłosz’s political essays. Evidently, it is impossible to comprehend the constellation of modern politics without fiction, i.e., modern political ideologies, institutions, practices, as well as the configuration of values and ideas that lie behind the entire political spectrum. This is not only because of the more sensitive grasp of social and political processes that has been so eloquently demonstrated by twentieth-century literature. It is also due to the fact that without an analysis of the modern political and moral imagination, it is hardly possible to grasp the basics of the political process, the distribution of power, political segmentation, and political consciousness. Perhaps almost all the pessimistic insights along with the tragic foreboding of evil in the first half of the twentieth century were equally linked with the philosophy of culture and political philosophy. The crisis of Western culture and its sunset, the style of culture, the death of philosophy and art, the themes of the coming epoch with its spectacles that entertain the masses, revealed by Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West, and by José Ortega y Gasset in his The Revolt of the Masses, as well as in other culturally pessimistic works, were not only cultural interpretations and critiques, but also the manifestation of an analysis of political life.

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Starting with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the formation of all modern Kulturkritik and political philosophy was directly intertwined with the philosophy of culture. Every attempt at cultural critique makes this theoretical link more acute: without an analysis of social structure, institutions, and of political thought, cultural interpretations often become sand castles and turn into a dead-end collection of essentialist schemes, whereas political theory, torn from cultural interpretation, is at risk of becoming too technical and shallow. At any rate, this time the discussion will be not about twentieth century totalitarianism, but about new phenomena that threaten by their forms: an industry of consciousness brutalization, manipulation, and even brainwashing. Let us analyze the obscure pathologies of the ambivalent human being, the modern amoral culture of determinism, imagology, populism, as well as the moral and political implications of all these phenomena. 1. The Ambiguous Person and the Ambivalence of Modern Life An analysis of the ambivalence of modernity, with all its self-disavowal and destruction, can allow us to trace not only the contours, but also the headwaters of a phenomenon, which Vytautas Kavolis, in his analysis of ambivalence and other social pathologies, called the ambivalent human being. It is a type of consciousness, the characteristic of which is the ambivalence of self-identification and the thirst for intensity it gives rise to. According to Kavolis, this type of psychological mechanism of ambivalence and intensity allows the glorification of spontaneous, unorganized state power, the romanticization of brutality, and fosters the aggression of groups that are politically weak, tormented by victim syndrome. Ambivalent human beings tend to romanticize what their societies hold to be perverse—they seek to experience with a degree of intensity what their cultures consider to be beyond the margins of rationality and transparency. (Namely out of this source astrology and occultism emerged in the contemporary “rational” societies of the West.) No wonder that in our modern imagination and culture the Marquis de Sade has become one of the symbols of the modern world, i.e., the world bound by normality and convention, along with its potent negation, intense antitheses, and striving for perverse experiences. Vytautas Kavolis aptly describes what is characteristic in the ambivalent human conception of the world by means of black and white dichotomies and dramatic antinomies, by disavowing all nuances, and daringly sacrificing doubts of any kind in the name of personal righteousness. Of the phenomenon of ambiguous person, Kavolis writes: Where the striving for intensity prevails, there predominates, quite often, the authoritarian style in both thinking and decision-making, even when the conscious content of the thought is libertarian. Let us take, for

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example, Marcuse or the Living Theater. The intensity seekers quite naturally tend to think in polarities contrasting “truth” with “error,” or “virtue” with “meanness,” rather than seeking out all the intermediate nuances. Those nuances represent nothing other than the psychic ambiguity in their character, which they consider unbearable and try to repress with arbitrary, though “real,” moments of intensity. This is why, they, even in demanding freedom of choice, expect others to choose their mode of freedom or even their manner of conceiving of freedom. The dogmatic demands of the world spring from the inner ambiguous personality. Hard talk can preserve one from inner decomposition. (Psychoanalysts identified this mechanism in the earlier, more or less romantic, Russian revolutionaries.) Dogmatism is the mechanical stabilization of the ambiguous man, rather than the organic one springing from the depths of his personality. (Yet this kind of protective armor, deep inside the ambiguous man, sooner or later comes to crack down and destroys either the ambiguous man himself, or others.)1 As a compensation for ambivalence, in the world of the ambivalent human being, there rises not only the most terrifying boredom, which the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge had called the fate of technological man, but also a feeling of fatal emptiness, which can be overcome only by consciously and openly cultivated extremes―or ideologically hard language that is marked by the sign of fanaticism and hatred, or drastic language that is shocking for people of puritan morality, who share the tastes of the Victorian epoch, i.e., swearwords, scenes of nudity and everything that Susan Sontag had called the pornographic imagination. Boredom and emptiness are not dispersed by disciplined thinking, demanding form, or strict discourse, but by body language, strong expressions, and intense physical sensations. The idea of the death of literature, art, and all high culture is linked with the phenomenon of the ambivalent human being. This issue is considered interestingly by the contemporary American writer Don DeLillo in his novel Mao II, published in 1992, which foresaw the global threat of terrorism that got away from the grip of international political and military control. The protagonist of the novel―a charismatic writer, who has inwardly resigned himself to the life of a secret loner and a cult-like figure of the literary world―suddenly experiences a deep creative crisis and decides that his exhaustion is both symptomatic and symbolic. Literature itself is dying with him. He is haunted by the conviction that literature’s narratives have altogether stopped exciting people in the age of global terrorism. According to him, people who everyday watch civilians being killed on TV, seeing images of crashing airplanes and exploding buildings, can no longer be moved by literature. Terrorism is becoming the great political and cultural narrative. Literature is no longer able to struggle against the reality that has conquered the imagination and surpassed it. The theory of the death of literature is based

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on a premise that the literary imagination is losing hopelessly to reality―terrorism, violence, and constant fear of travel or appearing in public places. Recalling an accurate remark by Zygmunt Bauman that traditional narratives, classical modes of virtue, and conventional artistic verisimilitude seem like something that has been hopelessly engulfed by the past, in the eyes of a humanity that is tormented by the ill-fated trinity of our epoch― uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity. The forms of manipulation of the mass consciousness struggle against each other. A girl, who has spent some time serving with the Moonies’ Unification Church, and who has been so exploited that she is no longer able to maintain the strength to identify reality, no longer knows what captures her consciousness more―the creativity of her favorite writer; television; terrorism; the stories of people who panic when flying on airplanes; or the images of a drug addict’s life. In Don DeLillo’s novel, an impressive parallel is spotted: the one between a crowd of American football fans and the founder of the Unification Church. Sun Myung Moon weds thousands of couples in a virtual way (incidentally, also in a giant stadium), as the ceremony is watched on a giant screen by people from all over the world. They all desire to dissolve into a will that is higher and larger than theirs, the will that controls and creates the picture, a TV wonder―Leader, Protector, Savior, and Picture Producer. These are people, whose desire is to be manipulated. The structure and the phenomenon of the personality that is guided by authority—unable to live and identify without a strong leader, guide, almighty, and single righteous party— were conceived and theoretically articulated by the representatives of the Frankfurt School, first of all by Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm. Fromm also analyzed with great insight the phenomena of running away from freedom and its passionate disavowal. But DeLillo in his novel reveals a somewhat different structure of the personality. At this point, I will genuflect to the worshipers of postmodernism, who try to explain by this concept absolutely everything what happened in the world of Western politics and culture after the Second World War. Adorno and Fromm revealed the structure of the modern person who has lost a sense of the world’s clarity (in other words, the same ambivalent human being), but who is desperately attempting to retrieve it―the structure of the political or religious sectarian, the believer in ideological truths, the revolutionary, the ascetic, the radical, and the fanatic. This is the person who was able, with a smiling face, to feel a sense of gratification at the march of the Nazis on the streets of Berlin after the world’s stability and clarity disappeared, which modern person experienced after the failure of the Weimar Republic. The personality guided by authority, discovered and analyzed insightfully by Adorno and Fromm, needed ideas, or a mixture of blessed ideas and practices, as it needs oxygen, which would

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become a guiding sign and would allow him or her to experience the world in a cognitively clear manner, along with clear values. DeLillo reveals a strongly segmented postmodern and post-ideological personality, who no longer longs for wholeness, and who does not need integrative ideas, but a patronizing and comforting image―an image with which one does not have to separate. This person is unable to confront reality, hiding instead in the underground. That underground might vary―the crowd of football fans that creates an illusion of socialization but disperses after the game; a hate group; terrorists who call themselves resistance fighters and long for death; the closed life of a professional who renounces the evaluation of the phenomena of existence, whose political views depend only on convincing pictures and images; a principled refusal to participate in political life. Yet all of these underground forms of existence are accompanied by the firm conviction that the world is governed only by powerful and closed groups and conspiracies. The symbolic structure of authority is changing fundamentally. In the modern world it was still possible to be a fanatic, choosing to die for a specific idea or individual. In the postmodern world, authority is sparse, it is impossible to gather it into one, ideology, theory, or person, which is why one prefers death when the hope at least remains that you will disappear along with at least a small part of a hated and inconceivable reality. Postmodernism de-romanticizes, renders routine, and turns everything into the commonplace, including fanaticism and hatred. Fanatics scared the modern world. The postmodern world is not scared by fanatics, but by the encounter with reality—any reality, the way it truly is, not the one that is represented in images, advertisements, and cartoons that camouflage it. Nobody wants to see poverty, death, women humiliated and stoned to death―it is much more comfortable to construct a doctrine saying that everything we conceive as poverty, coercion, and all the delirium about the Western world full of hatred, indeed, is nothing else but the unique characteristic belonging to another collective identity and conception of the world. Thus, the hatred of reality and the will to destroy it, or at least to hide it safely, really do not surprise the people of the postmodern world. The end of DeLillo’s novel is symbolic―the writer goes to Beirut in order to satisfy the request of a terrorist group and becomes a hostage, voluntarily, in order to free another hostage. But did he behave like this due to a moral impulse, as well as a sudden authentically experienced inner need to save the life of an innocent human being, or because of a need to experience something intense, and in this way to imbue himself with inspiration for a possible new work of art―a question that DeLillo’s novel leaves open.2 The existential and psychological openness of the ambivalent person to violence and to terror as a source of inspiration and as an impetus for the meaning of being in the world highlights what Kavolis defined as the pathologies of ambivalence. There is as much reality as there is intensity, stimulation, acute experience of reality, body language, an artificial

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stimulation of one’s own psyche, powerful emotions and shocks that become a daily routine. Shocks, fear, and other effects that become routine, as well as a part of popular culture, are also, without a doubt, the specific to the ambivalent individual’s psyche and touch with reality. (In this context, it is not hard to explain the enormous thirst for horror and fear, which is satisfied in our popular culture by film producers.) Running away from routine leads to a new routine of intensity and effects, but, at the same time, it signals the changes taking place in the consciousness of modern person. Therefore, the speed of modernization is reaching its culmination―not only is our structure for comprehending the world changing, but also the manner in which thoughts and language are laid out (an aggressive patter penetrating everything, reminiscent of a TV reportage, which simplifies language, and is also reminiscent of newspaper headlines or shocking reports), as well as the entire morphology of our culture and its relation to reality. We are no longer satisfied by the slowly-moving film camera—the slowpaced movies of Eastern European countries, or the older movies of Georgian film directors. Today these only appeal only to a cinema aesthete or to a recherché public. We convert printed text into an image wherever it is possible to do so. Images are picking up speed and, at the same time, raising new requirements for written and typed text―the latter has to be concise, broken down into easily and quickly readable paragraphs, concise, and split into sections that can be easily interchanged. What is left for sociologists is to explain, whether it is this self-inflicted speeding up of modernization that we do not find ourselves more and more often in the margins and the underground of a fast-paced, self-exploiting sociocultural system of our own creation. After all, the negation of modernity, and the attempt to push it into the margin of today’s processes, is the same as the ambivalent person’s reaction to an inconceivable reality—it is very hard to keep up with its high pace and record its reality. This should further encourage the potential for negation and destruction that lies inside the contemporary person’s imagination and daily practice. Not incidentally, Zygmunt Bauman warns us that it would be naïve to think that the extreme quickening of the processes of modernity signifies that modernity has ended, or died, and that in its place there is something fundamentally different. Many moral and political decisions made by people of our era depend not only on the intensity of social changes and the speed of processes (as well as an altered social perception), but also on their symbolic structure, which we use to articulate our social experience and to interpret ourselves as well as the world surrounding us. There is more than one such symbolic structure in our modern polycentric culture. They could be defined as systems of morals or moral cultures. Let us name one of them―its analysis will allow us to answer many questions arising from it.

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Vytautas Kavolis, in his book, Moralizing Cultures, insightfully analyzed a disturbing phenomenon that he termed modern amoral culture, or the culture of determinism. In this book, he describes and analyzes traditional, modern, and antimodern moral cultures, signifying different symbolic designs, logical and cognitive approaches, and, by the same token, different concepts of the human being, society, faith, power, loyalty, and transcendence. Beside the moral cultures of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and others, Kavolis singles out such modern moral systems as the ascetic-revolutionary, liberal, romantic, ecclesiasticalimperialistic, and conservative-nationalistic. Then Kavolis adds modern amoral culture, which he also defines as a culture of determinism. According to Kavolis, A modern amoral culture, in the sense that it tends to eliminate the notion of individual moral responsibility without taking collective responsibility seriously, is the culture of determinism. In this culture it is assumed that individuals are shaped and moved by biological or social forces in all essentials beyond the control, or even the possibility of major choices, of individuals affected by them. The four major intellectual foci of this culture are the theory that “biology (or racial inheritance) is destiny”; the belief that the human being is and should be nothing but a utilitycalculating, pleasure-maximizing machine; the conviction that the individual is. . . only a victim of the “oppressive,” “impoverished,” “devitalizing,” or “traditionally constricted” social conditions of his or her existence (without the ability to become an agent of his fate and assume responsibility for her actions); and the notion that he can be helped out of such conditions solely by the “guidance of experts” who have a “rational social policy” at their disposal, in the determination of which those who are to be helped participate merely as instruments of the experts.3 Kavolis’s concept of modern amoral culture explains why victimized groups or societies reveal themselves as a culture of fate and determinism― differently from cultures of freedom and choice. The conception of determinism may become an analytical bridge to an understanding of the numerous deterministic theories and superstitions―especially in the domain of social studies. It is not in vain that Kavolis quotes the winged words of Sigmund Freud, “biology is destiny,” and then opens up other discourses, beneath which lies the idea of inexorable laws of racial heritage, history, geography, society, environment, and social organization. Modern amoral culture, negating individual responsibility and moral choice, or the culture of determinism, is also an (anti-)moral system revealing itself in the forms of imagination of modern morality. The culture of determinism gives birth to all possible theories of conspiracy―by accusing victims and rejecting the idea of individual

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responsibility, the conspiracy theory always leans on the idea of an uncontrolled and personalized evil. Evil, in conspiracy theories, might materialize in hermetic power groups, secret hierarchical organizations, classified secret laboratories, influential and mysterious organizations, or secret intelligence agencies. As we know, the conspiracy theorists easily reduce all social and political life into almighty controlling structures and helpless groups. Here we have no dynamics―the most powerful groups do not change over the decades and even centuries, just as oppressed groups are faultless and naturally faithful to the Good. This model of cultural determinism and amoral logic appeals not only to a large (but maybe to the largest) part of modern antisemitism, but also to many other forms of antimodern sentiment and hatred toward modernism. On the other hand, the culture of determinism has obviously incorporated medieval demonological, quasi-animistic, and exorcist principles that allowed an easy justification of one’s sins due to the embodiment of the Devil, or demons in the case of women (that is, witches), and other manifestations of evil―after all, passion for a woman and adultery resulting from it, or even the rape of a woman, was easily justified by the explanation that sinister and seductive powers supposedly lie in the body of woman. Along with this, the culture of determinism incorporates into its symbolic (anti-)logic an accusation predating even the medieval period: the maleficium, or a secret act of collective evil and magic. It is ironic that this accusation, directly incriminating incest and the use of blood for religious ritual, was, in the Roman Empire, ascribed to the First Christians, but since medieval times Christianity has reserved this accusation only for Jews. (After all, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Lithuania there are people who truly believe that Jews use the blood of Christian babies for baking matzos—this is a perfect example of maleficium.) Characteristic to the culture of determinism is also a phenomenon that Oscar Lewis called the culture of poverty.4 The culture of poverty is not identical to real poverty: according to Lewis, who for many years studied the trajectories of people’s identities living in the shanties of Puerto Rico and Mexico, their value orientations, and evaluations of the world, there are cases when groups living in poverty have social networks, and show conspicuous cooperation and social forms (as did Eastern Europe’s Jews in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, or craftsmen from India). The culture of poverty manifests itself, first of all, in an absolute distrust of institutions and the state, in an unwillingness to participate in the state’s life, a conviction that everything in the world is predetermined―social roles, the amounts of power, wealth, and poverty. Let us say that the culture of poverty was not characteristic of Fidel Castro’s post-revolution Cuba, since the society (even the poorest layers of it) acquired a sense of value and of the meaning of life, what Lewis had not noticed until the revolution. Characteristic to the culture of poverty are a

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strong sense of fatalism, a low level of social trust, matricentric family, a man’s distancing of himself from the most important family problems. In other words, all this anthropological package of the culture of poverty clearly points to the fact that the culture of poverty is a variation of determinism. Incidentally, Oscar Lewis encountered characteristics of the culture of poverty―isolation, disbelief in the possibility of social ties, fatalism, and distrust of everything―even in the thinking and worldview of wealthy people. (Is it possible to forget, at this point, Kavolis’s 1996 rhetorical question asking whether there are characteristics of the culture of poverty in Lithuania?) Finally, the culture of determinism opens up conspicuously in a technocratic consciousness and in technocratic politics, in the sense of experts who act only when they have special qualifications. Technocracy rises out of the rationalization of government, that is, rational planning and universal control, autonomization and a distancing from public space. But, at the same time, it is directly linked to a phenomenon, which was first described by Jeremy Bentham, later by Michel Foucault, as a panopticon metaphor. The idea of universal control and observing everything visible. In any case, on Bauman’s precise observation, the perfect jail-panopticon project Bentham created and Michel Foucault’s subtle interpretation of it are based on the premise that the ones who watch and control everything are always somewhere over there, in a known, or, at least, in a place that can be anticipated, whereas the postpanopticon situation differs in its essence: those who watch and control everything may at any time retreat and change their location. In other words, they themselves are not only invisible, but also camouflaged by their location, which is safe and unpredictable. Those who watch do not only control people, but control space and time as well. The postpanopticon signifies the end of interrelation and social intimacy. There is a final separation of those who watch and those who are being watched, the controlling and the controlled, capital and work, leaders and their followers, and, in the case of war―armies. Nowadays, the highest technology of power means not the physical entering into a foreign territory and its conquest, but a safe and timely retreat, the avoidance of creating order in foreign territories and of maintaining it. 2. Imagology Many social critics and critics of culture have spoken about the new, threatening, and almost unlimited possibilities of the manipulation of mass consciousness in the twentieth century. Conservative writers and thinkers―here Oswald Spengler is especially worth mentioning―have warned about the new direct dependence of politicians upon the media and journalists, and, at the same time, about the symbiosis of wealth and media as one of cornerstone levers of political power, as well as of the unsophisticated processing of public opinion.

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Spengler, who considered the era of mass democracy, mass education, mass society, and mass manifestations to be the end of Western culture, also considered the marriage of media and financial power to be the biggest threat to democracy, and predicted a rapid degeneration of Western liberal democracy. Of course, he was not the first to have sensed this—after the 1848 Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that an absolutely secularized liberal democracy in Europe, over the long run, would degenerate into tyranny by the masses. Quite before Spengler’s gloomy prophesy, as well Ortega y Gasset’s prophesy of a new barbarity and rebellion of masses, a book was written of rare insight into the crowd and its collective psyche―it was The Crowd, written at the end of the nineteenth century by French psychologist Gustav Le Bon. Le Bon was the first, in 1895, to speak about the crowd that does not think, but lives, according to its instincts, and merely feels, about the crowd as being void of structure and as an amorphic phenomenon, that it is to say, a kind of collective animal, in which civilized human being, having no understanding and no sense of it, becomes a barbarian. This book, in a stunning way, foresaw the coming era of genial persuaders and leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Le Bon’s work provided a good articulation of the crowd’s two-sidedness (just as all modern phenomena seem ambivalent). The crowd, according to him, is often nothing more than a collective criminal, though it also can be heroic. The idea that the crowd desires not the truth, but an illusion of the truth, as well as joyful, pleasant self-deceit, belongs not to Freud, but to Le Bon. It was not only Freud and other psychoanalysts who borrowed much from Le Bon, but also the representatives of the concept of elitism in sociology―Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who reduced all organized social life into forms of interaction between an elite and the masses. Along with being the first to speak about an organized crowd (elsewhere Le Bon uses the term “psychological crowd”), Le Bon also noted the crucial role of pictures and images in the way they affect the crowd’s choices and its worldview in general.5 The crowd does not think, but feels and sees. The crowd lives by pictures, personifications of power, and images of authority. The crowd dreams about being deceived and seduced by the one who has power (our postmodern and politically correct ear, without any doubt, is assaulted by Le Bon’s thought regarding the female origin and morphology of the crowd). Le Bon’s idea that the crowd desires not the truth, but an illusion of it, along with soothingly sweet lies, not only predicted the era of nationalism, the crowd’s “geniuses,” as well as the demagogues of ideological politics, but also symbolized the end of pre-Freudian society, politics, and culture. All that was left for Freud to do was to give a psychoanalytic form and an interpretive structure to what had already been conceived of by a talented French psychologist and political commentator.

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Milan Kundera in his novel, Immortality, described a new social type―a professional layer that, from fiction, shapes people’s perception of the world by pictures and images. In the era of image and television, reality is no longer observed and analyzed as in classical eras or as in early modernity. It is constantly being created and recreated by specialists, who become responsible for providing reality at the right time and at the right place. These new social engineers, specialists of visual magic, and the technologists of the image Kundera named imagologues.6 The latter, in our time, are definitively eliminating ideologists—the old creators of ideas. According to Kundera, no one in our times is interested in capitalism or socialism, just as it has been a long time since anyone has been moved by the fate of Marxism in the era of globalization. What is necessary is not ideas or concepts, not to mention the truth and passionate search for it, but images injected directly into the brain―faces, smiles, and symbols of power. On whom is a politician dependent in our times? On the journalist. How about the journalist him/herself? On the imagologue. Kundera provides a chain of cause and effect, as well as a chain of motivational power. Imagologues construct ideals and anti-ideals; thanks to them, everybody knows what is good and what is bad. In essence, they are needed only because people are no longer excited by politics―more precisely, they are no longer interested in the politics of ideas and dramatic moral choices. Politics has drifted away from them, just as reality itself has drifted away. According to Kundera, today we are no longer in control of our lives and our reality, as was the case for simple village people, who used to know that the cycle of human life and death, and the universe of human values, is unfolding next to them. There is no difference whether the characters chosen by imagologues indeed have even one of those qualities ascribed to their creation. As with Victor Frankenstein, described in Mary Shelley’s famous gothic novel, imagologues create not a live being, but a micro-universe composed of correct functions—it could just as easily be a reanimated corpse, the body of which once again performs the proper and obligatory biological functions. The only difference is this: Frankenstein is a satanic and powerful being, who becomes a challenge to God’s created world order by the geniuses of science, whereas the modest and nice imagologues are merely invisible professionals, who are not interested in the drama and passions of this world. They are interested only in persuasiveness of the daily repeated cycle of a simulated world, and its heroes and anti-heroes. The persuasiveness of this cycle is the criterion for the quality of their work, and that is what they get paid for. Needless to say, imagologues did not simply appear yesterday. The greatest twentieth century dictators and geniuses of crowd persuasion, without a doubt, had their own imagologues. The difference, let us say, between Hitler’s imagologue and a contemporary image-maker is this: the latter brazenly enters public spheres and comments their clients, their client’s

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weaknesses and their relationship with the client. Needless to say, the Führer’s imagologue would have paid a high price for such impudence. Kundera’s thoughts relate well to many other theories, including the theory of the death of ideology and the theory of the end of history. By adjusting these theories, it could be said that ideologies perhaps remain, but they function only in a very narrow social field. In the sphere of ideology, perhaps, only intellectuals remain. Of course, by far not all of them—after all, quite a large number of them become imagologues. But a part of them, the old-fashioned ones, who still have faith in the power of ideas, remain faithful to something that, at least from a distance, reminds us of classical liberalism, conservatism, or socialism. A large swathe of society enters into the field of imagologue’s competence and activity. Differently from the handful of intellectuals still living in Gutenberg’s galaxy, i.e., the era of the book, who still believe in such outdated things as moral choice and the professing of values, many people no longer have any sense of controlled reality. Moreover, they do not feel any autonomous reality beyond themselves, except for the one that they receive from imagologues on a daily basis. In other words, the world ends beyond the zones of television and commercial. It simply does not exist. Thus, let us generalize—according to this logic, reality disappears. Only imagologues save us from a sense of the end of the world, and from suicide. Everyday they create this world anew, like some kind of Aristotelian demiurges. The Western world ceases existing in the sphere of ideology. From the era of ideology it enters the era of imagology. In the era of ideology, there still exist regimes and countries opposed to the West—the remains of Communism, the countries of Islam (more precisely, not so much countries as radical Islamic groups), and one or two remaining authentic Western doctrinaires. Imagologues well understand their power. After all, in the contemporary world, what has become absolutely obvious is that by not entering popular culture, by not finding yourself on TV and in the pages of commercial magazines or tabloids―it means you do not exist. Pictures and images do not lie. Ideas and concepts may mislead you, but images never. Imagologues know that it does not take much effort to inject into the brains of a certain segment of society the fact that white is black, and vice versa. Moreover, only imagologues determine who is doomed to be submerged into the past, or never enter the paradise of public visibility, and who is destined to become the hero of our times. A phenomenon, close to the very social-psychological essence of imagology, is what the American writer Alan Harrington has called mobile truth. The truth is what serves my interests. If my basic interests are held constant, but for their satisfaction it is necessary for me to espouse strange and perhaps barely conceivable phrases and images in order to persuade others, then today these may become the biggest part of my truth, which I will accept and argue for with all levels of my personality. Tomorrow the biggest

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part of my life’s truth may become absolutely different, what the naïve, oldfashioned dupes call views and political ideologies. In his novel, Life in the Crystal Palace, Harrington describes a strange model of behavior existing in large corporations: an agent, who advertised his company’s product, was absolutely convinced that this product was really the best, by far surpassing an analogous competitor’s product. But as soon as he lost his job and got a new one with the competition, the same person immediately convinced himself that the new employer’s product was better than the one he was advocating so vehemently not long before. Erich Fromm, who has commented on Harrington’s novel and the term “mobile truth,” has put forward his deep conviction that this tendency is not just a grimace of the corporate world, but one of the most destructive of our times, revealing the world’s orwellization and the unlimited possibilities for manipulating people who are unable to define and maintain a clear and stable value system.7 Imagologues, having pushed aside ideologists and turned into a routine weekly or monthly cycle that which some time ago was proud history, along with the ideas and drama of beliefs that created it, would not be so influential, if not for the fundamental changes witnessed in public sphere. Imagologues would not have gained even the smallest part of their power and the demand for their services, if not for the disappearance of the boundary between the private and public spheres, which also threatens the end of both. The public sphere is about to be filled with facts and scandalous details of the private lives of famous and powerful people. What is now public is what some time ago was private, but now a “success story” means that facts are “uncovered,” or “divulged.” Publicity is arrived at through popular culture, which is the medium of initiation—one does not enter it without the endorsement and participation of the imagologues. Popular culture may, for a short time, flirt with persons of high culture, the poor, or those belonging to a subculture, but one only arrives for a longer duration when it has been established that one’s private life can no longer belong only to its owner, so that someone else can imitate it, or at least incorporate small parts of it into his or her personal dreams. Today one becomes a hero of popular culture, and also of the public sphere, when there is a conviction that one can represent society’s dream, and when there is a reciprocal desire to identify with you. Along with it, the logic and criteria for popularity and visibility are disappearing and hiding apace. In truth, they are accidental, because there is a process of regular simulation of social reality―it is pretended that the logic and criteria of success are known, but in truth they simply do not exist. Everything is being determined by imagologues―they tell a person whether he/she has become a celebrity, whether his/her books or television programs have become a phenomenon of popular culture or the public sphere. According to a precise and witty but rather serious observation by Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1961 published book, The Image, the celebrity is a person who

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is known for his well-knownness, while a bestseller is a successfully sold-out book―because it simply had successful sales figures. But who then is an authority, and what does s/he mean in such a society and social situation? An authority is a person who increases the number of viewers or readers. In other words, public opinion polls, surveys, voting by telephone or obsessively calculated ratings—all these create an authority, but, at the same time, s/he remains an anonymous, a diffuse authority, for whom, in the hands of imagologues, it does not take long to become personified as some sort of contemporary hero. How, otherwise, can s/he be created in a society that has lost its goals, vision, direction of movement, and evaluation criteria? The power of imagologues and their social role is reinforced by the rapidly disappearing boundary between privacy and publicity. As is known, a public place in ancient Greece, i.e., the agora, becomes, in the twentieth century, a euphemism for a toilet. Today public discussions are nothing else but a compendium of personal evaluations and experiences, which are easily recognized, watched, and commented on by similarly private people. Only the imagologues, their technical staff and assisting personnel (including producers and impresarios, who without imagologues would immediately see the loss of their existence and would lose all social function), can, for a moment, turn private people into public figures—a montage made in a flash and then disassembled, which convinces the extras of this life that even they are visible, i.e., that, in the end, they too exist. Needless to say, their existence is brief and only thanks to imagologues. From this, there is a partial verification of Zamyatin’s, Huxley’s, and Orwell’s prophesies―the rapid extinction of the private, not in a totalitarian system, but in a society of masses and a culture of masses, in which the convertibility of everything that is interpersonal is established (that of people, their functions, as well as of artifacts). What we watch on various reality shows or public TV discussions, accompanied by “heart rending” sentimental stories and sadomasochistic openness (when speakers and participants do not even suspect that they are mere victims of manipulation), is more or less what Jürgen Habermas has called the disappearance of private sphere—according to him, daylight has simply invaded the private sphere, conquered it, and colonized it. On the other hand, Habermas and other social theorists, a long time ago, spoke out regarding the reverse process—the beginning of the end of the public sphere. It is worth especially mentioning Richard Sennet, who, a while ago, spoke out about the end of the age of the public person.8 Thus, it is notably ironic that imagologues associate themselves with the PR sphere, that is to say, with public relations. The phenomenon that is deforming and destroying public space and natural public opinion defines itself as the concept of public relations—here one can already get a whiff of an Orwellian new-type coinage, which allows an institution that kills and tortures people to be called the Ministry of Love.

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In truth, PR is born of advertising, but has mutated phenomenon that rules a technocratic society with a camouflaged elitism, and represents an amoral culture of determinism. Without exaggeration, one may contend that imagologues are the gravediggers of public opinion and of the public sphere in general. When does a journalist or an ironic humanist become an imagologue? Not necessarily at the moment when s/he starts writing reviews ordered by wealthy and influential customers. The nineteenth century already had many professional fabricators of sensational events, which discredited those in opposition, and, when ordered, destroyed the political opponents of influential clients. From their cooperation with secret police forces, and will to rule public opinion, arose two famous antisemitic forgeries: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Rabbi’s Speech. An individual becomes an imagologue when s/he no longer participates in discussions, and starts hating those who search for the truth by means of discourse. Also when a person stops respecting his or her society, which to a true imagologue is nothing but an empty sound. An imagologue despises the truth, considering it as a mere mask of power, or a successful practice—in this sense, there is an obvious relationship between Karl Marx’s descendants and the offspring of the world he created, the world which Marx hated with his whole being, but in which he, at the same time, secretly took delight. For imagologues, there exist only relationships of power―everything else is just a fiction. Power is not just money, but also a sense of being allpowerful, the possibility of rendering oneself important, and the feeling of being great player on the world stage, and sometimes even the director of the world’s film. In their flirtation with a relativistic culture, and creation of a personal legend (formerly disappointed idealists or experimenters who have tested all values), they disguise their amorality and conformism almost with near perfection. An imagologue does not discuss and does not attain to great influence. He or she fabricates some short–lived fables and plots for mass consumption. He or she forms the needed superstition and the direction it needs to take. At the same time, an imagologue creates a momentary, situational authority only to dispersing it by reducing it with the tricks of animated films. Here we can also talk about the end of great politics, or politics with a capital “P,” in our contemporary world—or at least the beginning of its end. As Bauman has noticed, classical politics has always been related to the conversion of private problems into public issues (at the same time, internalizing public issues and turning them into private or even existential problems). Today this political mechanism has been clearly taken apart. Thus, what we, in our postmodern politics, treat as public issues, most often are the private issues of public figures. The extreme power of manipulation, in terms of public opinion and imagology, and its political and moral implications are well revealed by one

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film that has contributed to the critique of today’s controlling political structures. This is Barry Levinson’s film Wag the Dog. The film tells us the story of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss and Washington’s spin doctor Conrad Brean (“a spin doctor” in the U.S. and Great Britain connotes specialists of manipulation through political advertising, whereas our Lithuanian PR specialists modestly label themselves information managers and myth creators), who are supposed to save the White House due to the President’s scandalous romance. The duet of Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro reveals with skill a world of people who are talented, but also amoral and value disoriented. At any rate, the revelations of instrumental mind and instrumental morality are not the only merits of this great film. This film, created in 1997, foreshadowed a military campaign in Yugoslavia (the film mentions Albania) during the height of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s sex scandal. Of course, it would be silly to claim, wearing a serious face, that the war in Yugoslavia was required because of U.S. domestic politics, and as a means of smothering the scandal. “Pacifist” Western Europe wanted this war perhaps even more than “militaristic” America. The U.S. was the wand that was used to solve the problem. But this film leaves an impression due to its emphasis on something else—it just so happens that a war can be fabricated. Just as, as it turns out, one might direct public opinion in such a way that a war would be wanted or even much desired. Create an artificial crisis, sacrifice a few dozen innocent lives to a political Moloch, increase people’s sense of insecurity―and, everyone, in a flash, almost overnight, will want both a firm controlling hand, tough rhetoric, and, perhaps, even war. In short, something similar to being beyond good and evil. It is not clear to what extent this scheme could be applied to actual foreign politics. In part―it is applicable, since right-wing hawks and militarists have made a living from conflicts and war, not burdening themselves with the puzzles of diplomatic and international relationships. However, if a part of the repertoire we see in the spin doctor’s and Hollywood producer’s inspired production is indeed used in the politics of democratic countries during times of war, or as a part for causing one, then we can readily state that the beginning of the end of public opinion is at hand. In the contemporary world, manipulation by political advertisement is not only capable of creating people’s needs and their criteria of happiness, but also capable of fabricating the heroes of our time and controlling the imagination of the masses through successful biographies. These abilities make one pause for thought about a “velvet” totalitarianism―a controlled form of manipulating consciousness and imagination that is cloaked as liberal democracy, which allows the enslavement and control of even the critics. Perfect manipulation encompasses the spheres of needs, evaluation criteria, vocabulary, and, finally, of the imagination, provided the codes exist for the world of the consumer and postmodern culture or for the regulation of

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social conflicts, as well as algorithms for channeling tensions, which the imagologues have figured out and made use of in political advertisement. They destroy the alternative imagination and the possibility of diffusing it within a society, and then one can observe the fact that the new forms of totalitarianism will not torment humanity or destroy it, but will transform it in a perfect fashion. What is the connection between the organized crowd (as Le Bon would put it), in which one loses a sense of humanness, and mass society, in which you, your needs and your reactions manage to be cleverly fabricated, even your protest or the forms of your disagreement? First of all, in all cases, any moral relation is destroyed and, instead, a technical, “rationalizing” relation is introduced—the relation that manipulates moral categories, but essentially rejects them. Zygmunt Bauman calls this adiaphorization (derived from a Greek word adiaforon―to be apathetic to something that, according to the Roman Catholic Church, did not threaten one’s faith and was merely a thing of a ritual or collective behavior). The latter means the destruction of the absolute moral relationship among individuals and groups by making an individual impersonal and through “rationalization,” which is the elimination of morality or at least a temporary retreat from evaluations, any kind of world of social and interpersonal intimacy.9 Collective adiaphora and the elimination of the categories of good and evil from today’s politics is the paradise and essential pillar of imagologues. 3. Populism The headwaters of populism reach back to the nineteenth century. It was born as specific Russian political doctrine, at the source of which stood a figure of European stature―the prominent Russian political thinker and social critic, Alexander Herzen, whose ideas gave rise to the movement of the “Narodniki” (a movement of the people). In the era of the reactionary Tsar Nikolai I, with its censorship and cruel persecution of dissenters, Herzen became the first true political emigrant. He had sworn in his youth to seek revenge for the killings and 1825 exile of the Decembrists, and had lived for a long time in Paris, associating with prominent European political thinkers of that time. He knew Europe’s famous socialists and anarchists well, and also corresponded with the father of modern Italian nationalism, Giuseppe Mazzini. During the years of Alexander II’s liberal rule Herzen went back to Russia, and, because of his disappointment with all Western political doctrines, told Russian intellectuals to disavow their wealth and privileges, go out to the people and rediscover it, along with its sorrows, experienced injustice, but, at the same time, conserving their wisdom and preserved values.

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Thus, populism was born as a semi-mystical and radical political doctrine that rejected political reforms and institutions, offering, instead, a direct relation between enlightened and privileged society and the populace.10 As a form of criticism of the state, its institutions, and political elite, populism was an interesting phenomenon that sparked the interest of many in Russia and the West. But if it is interpreted word for word, and translated into modern political language, populism becomes a particularly threatening and destructive phenomenon. Those who think that populism was reborn in the twentieth century, first of all among the mass ideological movements of the National Socialists and Bolsheviks, and their totalitarian regimes, are not quite correct. To some extent, it is true, but only partly. Both of these regimes were bureaucratic in their essence and based on exclusive ideologies, which rejected the possibility for a peaceful coexistence with other ideologies and other political powers―all other ideologies and powers needed to be destroyed. At the same time, one should not confuse populism with political elections and games played with the masses during campaigns. In the era of mass democracy, such games have become both banal and routine, which no longer surprises anybody. Populism is not just an assortment of election campaign tricks. If that were the case, then we could label all of the contemporary world’s politicians populists. Sociologists, who conduct studies in the area of populism, tend to emphasize the populists’ exceptional political intuition, their skill at probing the soil of social processes, as well as a peculiar sense of political awareness. They always appear at the right time and at the right place, namely―in the zone forgotten by the political elite or controlling structures, which ignore collective sentiments, hopes, and disappointments. Populism most often thrives during transition periods, when a new social and moral order is crystallizing, when old value systems and ideological orientations no longer work, while the new ones have not yet started to function. At the same time, populism provides a warning of the distancing of official institutions from the society, as well as a crisis in the society due to politicians becoming overly bureaucratic or arrogant, which causes distrust in institutions and politicians. Indeed, populism starts with a promise of clarity and security to a society that has lost both clarity and the feeling of security―especially during crises and transition periods. Populists rush to provide ways that would, purportedly, allow them to rescue the country from a crisis—the return of historic lands, the introduction of anti-immigration laws, limiting the number of foreigners in the country, and similar ultranationalist and xenophobic pearls. Most importantly, it is the promise of order. Order is promised to a society that is suffering from unemployment, opacity, instability, insecurity, social segregation, crime, corruption, and the collapse of values. Those with common sense can see very clearly that the very promise to bring order betrays an absence of vision and ideas; however, those who are insecure, lost

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in themselves and confused, and thirsting for social revenge, always hope in secret that a redistribution of wealth and power will take place—something that in our day would destroy social solidarity and cause a deep civil conflict. There is nothing surprising in this―social wrath, the thirst for revenge, a hatred of foreigners or those who are better off and have better education, is the most stable currency of political populists. In other words, populism always implies a political lumpenization and an appeal to the darkest and lowest instincts of the crowd. It is a sort of anti-politics, which is recognized by Lumpenproletariat and criminal world unbelievably quickly. As Michel Wieviorka points out: Populism may be on the left as well as on the right, a fact which tends to be underestimated today. It is always based on a mythical formula which has the characteristic of placating what cannot be placated by promising to combine the future and the past or by ensuring social transformation while ensuring the reproduction of traditions. Populism promises the synthesis of identity and of change, it declares to the people that they will remain the same while they change, and that its accession to progress will be accomplished in the name of an unchanged culture. Populism is not concerned about its own contradictions, and its leaders are often charismatic precisely in order to resolve, through discourse, the contradictions which define it. Populism. . . is therefore a synthesis, an amalgam, a fusion in which the actor is both defined by an identity, a tradition, a culture, a history on the one hand, and on the other hand, by a future, projects or desires for modernisation or inclusion in modernity. It can tend toward the one or the other, but it is of necessity both, by definition. It is not a pure thorough-going discourse as nationalism, but a milder formula and one in which the most radical tendencies are to some extent contained. Populism, for example, could be permeable to racism and even more to anti-semitism.11 Populists are most often true masters of social masquerade and political circus, who know how to use the elements of clownery and show. In their hands, a carnival-type anti-structure turns into a structure, while the medieval Feast of Fools is made routine and an everyday life experience. Thus, populists naturally are inclined toward imagology and its services, because they, being of the people, after all, have to be recognized by the pub regular men and the public that is furious with the world at large. For this, one needs specialists who can create transitory ideals and their opposites, and who can directly assault the mass brain with video clips and semi-animated tricks. It is not worth suffering any illusions that social sensitivity and sympathy for the poor are priorities for the populists. Their ideology, as well as their only concern, is authority. Yet they can reach a wide audience by promising safety and security in an unsafe and insecure world, by juxtaposing tradition and modernity within a

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recognizable idiom. It may be related to antisemitism and racism, though this is not always the case. Indeed, in a populist perspective the Jews may incarnate a tradition which must be opposed in the name of one’s own tradition, religion or nation, and at the same time symbolize a form of modernity which is becoming unattainable, or from which one feels expelled and which they control by holding money or power in the mass media. But racism and anti-semitism, for as long as they are an integral part of a populist phenomenon do not go very far, and if they explode, it is when the phenomenon in question is decomposing far more than when it is at its zenith. . . . In this perspective populism is therefore not fascism, nationalism, the extreme right, nor the occasion for extreme expressions of racism and anti-fascism. It tends to be an intermediary period marked by considerable change, and in which the actors and the discourse are limited to a myth of reconciliation of the irreconcilable. This myth sometimes tends to be left-wing, dominated by references to the social and political emancipation of the people and to justice, while at other times it is right-wing, with references to the nation, religion, the community of culture, and to history. But. . . it is always by definition both, until it disintegrates. (Emphasis mine.—L.D.)12 Populists may not attack their opponents openly, but if they succeed in imposing on their opponents absolute amorality and the rejection of all values, the opponents, due to their confusion and powerlessness, not knowing how to regain the favor of the masses, themselves start imitating the populists, who constantly keep altering their form in the manner of the ancient Greek river-god, Protheus. It is nothing other than the end of Aristotelian politics as an art of organizing matters of common concern. The same day that liberals, conservatives, or social democrats suddenly, with chaste angelic faces, claim that not abstract ideas and values, but their fellow countrymen are their core concern, and that it is necessary to cooperate with all political forces, one can observe either a short or a long-term victory of populism. Populism can win or establish itself only by demolishing the existing political system. Partly, in our day, it has become a technique for taking and maintaining power. This technique is seemingly capable of adjusting to the existing political spectrum, but what it really does is dismount it from the inside. Populism can be compared to a computer virus, which one can call in any way one wishes, giving it a name that gives rise to the most varying associations, but its essence remains the same―either the virus wins by destroying the system, or the system finishes off the virus by erasing it or curing the contaminated file. Populism cannot coexist with traditional political parties and classical political ideologies. It differs from totalitarian ideologies and movements in

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that it does not destroy its enemies from outside, but dismounts them from the inside by imposing on them its techniques and practices. The starting position of populism is that one should not provide rhetoric with any sort of face value, but should look at what people really want. Populism is the enhanced mechanics of seizing power and maintaining it, freed from all values, ideas, or moral obligations. Populist parties might flirt for some time with many other previously heard names and simulate Right and Left values, but in the end words and their meanings are kept separate. Thus, the question of whether the public domain will remain in postmodern politics and society, whether public intellectuals will remain along with public political debates, not only the imagologues’ manipulative political advertisements that fabricate and manipulate fleeting opinion, according to the needs of populism, is not by any stretch just a theoretical, or, moreover, a rhetorical question. It is political in its deepest sense. Beyond it lies the future of political and civil existence, moral choice, intellectual culture, the validity of norms and values, and the political individual’s conscious and democratic self-realization. 4. The Scandal that Divided the Nation The immense political scandal that erupted in Lithuania at the end of October 2003 dealt a shocking blow to the cohesion and civic solidarity of Lithuanian society. The country was divided over its president: Should he stay or should he go? Was he open to the charge of treason? Great uncertainty hangs over Lithuania’s future. As the scandal has shown, there are still too many temptations to talk about two Lithuanias. On the one hand, there is the Westward-looking and dynamic Lithuania, a new member the European Union and NATO; a “Baltic tiger,” as Poland’s Leszek Balcerowicz recently described it. On the other, there is depressed Lithuania, abandoned by the elites, longsuffering, divided, and longing for something like the equality-in-misery it knew in the Soviet Union. To cut a convoluted tale short, the scandal emerged from a report by the Lithuanian State Security Department. It linked one of President Rolandas Paksas’s close advisers to a Russian businessman with suspected ties to organized crime. Others in the president’s inner circle were also alleged to have met with the Russian, Anzor Aksentyev-Kikalishvili, who was thought to have been interested in buying Lithuanian assets. The report also found evidence that Paksas promised a job to a second Russian businessman (also his major campaign contributor), who was surrounded by allegations of illegal arms trading. On November 3, the Seimas, Lithuania’s parliament, met in closed session to decide what to do next. Formally, the Seimas has the authority and power to impeach the president in the event of treason or violation of his oath of office. A special commission was set up to look into the affair.

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On December 2, the commission released its findings, and its chairman Aloyzas Sakalas presented a summary. Paksas had placed himself in a “vulnerable position,” and, taking into account the president’s role in domestic and foreign policy, the affair “represents a threat to Lithuania’s national security.” The next day Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas and Seimas Speaker Artūras Paulauskas both urged the president to resign. These events hardly came as a surprise to dozens of politicians and political observers. Many had long had grave doubts concerning the transparency of the activities of Paksas’s supporters and donors―both in Lithuania and in Russia. These misgivings were heightened after the presidential election in January, which Paksas won by a landslide victory over the incumbent, Valdas Adamkus. The émigré environmentalist Adamkus returned to Lithuania and became its president in January 1998―and had, ever since, enjoyed the reputation of the most highly esteemed and regarded politician in Lithuania, ever. Paksas’s victory over Adamkus in January 2003 was marked by some ugly details, as well. The symbols used by Paksas’s Liberal Democratic Party (LD) caused great unease―especially their eagle logo, stunningly (and hardly accidentally) similar to the Luftwaffe eagle, and their torch-lit rallies where speakers called for the introduction of “iron order” in Lithuania. The nasty rhetoric and Paksas’s populist dash were accompanied by an aggressive and cynical PR strategy, which appealed to the lowest instincts of the masses. They described Adamkus as representing the interests of the West and the rotten political and intellectual elite in Lithuania. In brief, Paksas’s presidential campaign shamelessly exploited the immoral logic of populism. During the election campaign, Paksas consulted the Russian public relations firms Niccolo M and Almax (the latter having been instrumental in Vladimir Putin’s victorious run for the Russian presidency). Paksas’s most generous campaign contributor was a helicopter sales-and-rental company called Avia Baltika, which Lithuanian law-enforcement agencies had investigated in connection with illegal arms sales to Sudan. Immediately after the election, company chief Yuri Borisov applied to President Paksas for Lithuanian citizenship and received it, which allowed him also to keep his original Russian citizenship. During the campaign, Paksas hopped across Lithuania in an Avia Baltika helicopter, delivering fiery speeches about the better life to come to audiences in one depressed rural stopover after another. A few more words about Rolandas Paksas: However unpredictable and sinister, he is, by no means, a freshman in politics. Having served twice as mayor of Vilnius (while still a member of the Conservative Union), Paksas twice reached the office of prime minister. Frequently associated with the vigorous and forward-looking part of the Conservative Union, he enjoyed much popularity in the country, and was thought of as the future light of Lithuanian politics.

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But it was not to be. During intense negotiations with the American oil company Williams in 1999, over the privatization of the Mažeikių Nafta oil refinery, Paksas, in a highly charged political atmosphere, suddenly resigned from office. His theatrical argument was that he did so over his strong disagreement with the unreasonable and politically motivated decision to choose an expensive American company―over the far more affordable and favorable Russian Lukoil. This ex-prime minister, a willful and stubborn air pilot (Paksas worked as a professional flying instructor in Soviet Lithuania, and was the all-Soviet cup winner in acrobatic flying) changed political coats, becoming chairman of the Liberal Union Party. By choosing the political hero and naysayer to head them, the Liberals gained plenty of political points―and won many seats in the 2000 parliamentary elections, returning Paksas to the premiership. In the end they bitterly regretted it. Paksas proved to be a dictatorial party leader, rather than political team player. The party’s split would not be long in coming. What resulted from the divorce of Paksas and the Liberals was the emergence of Paksas’s new political entity, the LD: an infamous analog of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s identically named party in Russia. (Incidentally, Zhirinovsky warmly greeted both the Lithuanian Liberal Democratic Party and Paksas on his presidential victory.) Small wonder, then, that Paksas was christened “the pilot of political parties.” We can draw several conclusions from what has happened in Lithuania, or rather, how it has happened. First, we should not mock Belarus, nor explain away the tragedy that has befallen it merely by referring to the low level of political culture of its society, or the prevalence of a Soviet-type mentality among the nation. Alas, as we see, our political culture is very similar to that of our eastern neighbors, and we thus have no grounds for a naïve belief in either our superiority or our larger degree of “Westernness.” The embryo of Lithuanian civil society has suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the Soviet people. Although we have an intellectual culture of Western orientation, it is still isolated and poorly institutionalized on a national level. Its role in our fragmented and further-disintegrating society is less than minimal. Further, the moral authority of the educated part of society has been reduced to zero. The second point, perhaps, is a consequence of the first. The larger part of Lithuanian society has totally lost its immunity to political manipulation. The low level of political culture (and absence of any political awareness of the powers and functions of the country’s president) paved the way for a victory by means of simply telling the voters what pleases their ear or by rewarding them. Well, our susceptibility to manipulations is good news to our large eastern neighbor. The task of destabilizing Lithuania and redirecting its political orientation―even that of its whole civilization―is not only possible, but, apparently, far easier than anyone would ever have believed. Third, we have no real political left, let alone leftist values. The fidelity of the Lithuanian political left to social-democratic values is nothing but a

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lamentable fiction. In any democracy of Western Europe, social democrats would have marched their electorate through the streets, and would have been the first to stand up to a presidential candidate who employed quasi-Nazi symbols. In Lithuania, a part of the left showed its open support for such a candidate, while the most powerful and best-organized left-wing party, the Social Democrats, played a double game; declaring its favor for Valdas Adamkus while secretly blessing Paksas’s road to victory. I could feel only sadness when I heard our left-wing politicians earnestly disputing what they saw as the more-or-less identical mistakes and sins of Adamkus and Paksas. Application of this kind of symmetrical reasoning was not only silly, it was morally repugnant. With this kind of morality among the political left, we are surely not immune from the establishment of autocracy. 5. Ordinary Paksism Finally, recalling Mikhail Romm’s masterly documentary about the “ordinary fascism” of the Browns (and their striking, almost morphological resemblance to the Reds), the so-called “phenomenon” of Rolandas Paksas as a whole, could be described as ordinary “paksism.” There was nothing remarkable in it, only a masterfully modeled political game, which needed a small fortune and professional image-makers and propaganda masters―as well as a cohort of local revenge-seekers and cynics. Paksism was not just a political amalgam of incompatible and mutually exclusive things. In general, it was the absence of political convictions; a rejection of any coherent world outlook; an unleashing of political methods of combat that disregarded the rules of morality; and, most importantly, an effective use of something that the aforementioned American writer Alan Harrington once called a mobile truth. The truth is what serves my interests. If my interests remain the same―but to pursue them I need to present alien (and maybe not fully understood) phrases and images as a real thing to convince others―then today, my interests may become the greatest truth of my life, which I will accept and profess in every possible way. Tomorrow, the greatest truth of my life may become other things―called “political ideology” and “views” by old-fashioned simpletons. Ordinary paksism was there right in front of us. I did not believe that Paksas would push Lithuania into dictatorship; for he had neither the powers nor the willpower. What was more, whatever political deformations Lithuania may have suffered, the nation would never have allowed him to do this. It was sad, though, to have seen that such methods were the means to win the favor of Lithuania’s electorate and become the country’s president. Yet Lithuania continues to stand at a crossroads. The pivotal question is, can Lithuania pass this examination of Western democracy, and get rid of the regrettable populism it now suffers―or is it on the way to a new status as a European Union member de jure, yet a protectorate of Russia de facto?

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Was that autumn the autumn of our discontent or the autumn of our hope for the future? Was it something that was meant to become a tragedy, yet turned out a farce? Was it a horrible treason that might have changed the modern history of Lithuania? Or was it just much ado about nothing? Only time will tell.

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Notes Introduction 1. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 10–11. 2. Ibid., p. 110. 3. Ibid., pp. 27–28. 4. Vytautas Kavolis, Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), p. 166. 5. Ričardas Gavelis, “Kultūrinė situacija: Vakarai ir Lietuva: 1” [The Cultural Situation: the West and Lithuania: 1], Metmenys [Patterns] 64 (1993), pp. 80–81. 6. Donatas Sauka, “Ideologija, kultūra ir absurdo karuselė” [Ideology, Culture, and the Carousel of Absurdity], Metai [The Years] 10 (1995), p. 123. 7. Arvydas Šliogeris, Konservatoriaus išpažintys: 1988–1994 metų tekstai [The Conservative’s Confessions: Texts of the Years of 1988–1994] (Vilnius: Pradai [The Beginnings], 1995), pp. 22–23. Chapter One 1. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 3–28. 2. Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 116. 3. See Vincas Trumpa, “Kultūros filosofijos suklestėjimas Lietuvoje” [The Flourishing of the Philosophy of Culture in Lithuania], Metmenys [Patterns], 51 (1986), pp. 165–166. 4. For more on this issue, see Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 114–135; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, op. cit., pp. 1–24. 5. The point here is that St. Augustine is treated by the Greek Orthodox Church as merely Blessed. 6. Nikolai Berdyaev, Smysl istorii [The Meaning of History] (Moscow: Mysl’, 1990), p. 4. 7. Antanas Maceina, Asmuo ir istorija [The Individual and History] (Chicago, IL: Ateitis, 1981), p. 4. 8. For more on this issue, see Vytautas Kavolis, “Centrai ir apytakos kultūros dirbtuvėse” [Centers and Exchanges in the Workshops of Culture], Metmenys, 68 (1995), pp. 36–37; Katherine Verdery, “The Production and Defense of ‘the Romanian Nation,’ 1900 to World War II,” in Richard G. Fox, ed., Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures (Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, No. 2, 1990), pp. 81–111; Vladimir Tismaneanu and Dan Pavel, “Romania’s Mystical Revolutionaries: The Generation of Angst and Adventure Revisited,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1994), pp. 402–438. 9. See Verdery, “The Production and Defense,” op. cit., pp. 103–104. 10. For more on this issue, see Arūnas Sverdiolas, Kultūros filosofija Lietuvoje [The Philosophy of Culture in Lithuania] (Vilnius: Mintis, 1983), pp. 148–189. 11. In inter-war Lithuania, not a single serious sociology monograph or even textbook was published, with the relative exception of vaguely sociological theses in the writings of Mykolas Römeris, a professor of law at Vytautas Magnus University,

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and an amateurish introduction to a sociology text written by Petras Leonas, a professor of law at the same university. 12. For more on the time-honored Romanian “flight from modernity” and the Central/East European tradition of self-centeredness and lack of concern with political and moral dilemmas, traumas, and even dreams— what Milan Kundera once called “the tragedy of Central Europe,”—see Tismaneanu and Pavel, “Romania’s Mystical Revolutionaries,” op. cit., p. 409. For more on this issue, see Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXI, No. 7 (April 26, 1984), pp. 33–38. 13. An excerpt from Sverdiolas’s Steigtis ir sauga has been translated into English and published as Arūnas Sverdiolas, “Culture as Preservation,” in Timo Airaksinen and Olli Loukola, eds., New Ethics—New Society, or the Dawn of Justice (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland/Acta Philosophica Fennica, Vol. 65, 2000), pp. 233–245. For more essays by Sverdiolas, Šliogeris, and other Lithuanian philosophers published in English, see Aleksandr Dobrynin and Bronius Kuzmickas, eds., Personal Freedom and National Resurgence (Lithuanian Philosophical Studies, I) (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994); Jūratė Baranova, ed., Lithuanian Philosophy: Persons and Ideas (Lithuanian Philosophical Studies, II) (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2000). 14. For more on the role of Lithuanian intellectuals in the national liberation movement, see Leonidas Donskis, “Between Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1999), pp. 474–500. 15. For more on Lévinas and Lingis, see Algis Mickunas, “Two Philosophers of Lithuanian Origins: Emmanuel Lévinas and Alphonso Lingis,” Lituanus: The Lithuanian Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1978), pp. 44–61. 16. For more on Vytautas Kavolis and Aleksandras Shtromas, respectively, see Leonidas Donskis, The End of Ideology and Utopia? Moral Imagination and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); and Leonidas Donskis, Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Chapter Two 1. Among Kavolis’s other books which became his major contribution both to Lithuanian intellectual culture and to international scholarship, the following should be mentioned: (1) Lietuviškasis liberalizmas [Lithuanian Liberalism], Editor (Chicago, IL: Santara-Šviesa, 1959); (2) Žmogaus genezė: psichologinė Vinco Kudirkos studija [The Genesis of Man: A Psychological Study of Vincas Kudirka] (Chicago, IL: Chicagos Lietuvių literatūros draugija, 1963); (3) Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), translated into Swedish and Spanish, Chapter 5 translated into German; (4) Nužemintųjų generacija: egzilio pasaulėjautos eskizai [The Generation of the Uprooted: Sketches of the Psychology of Exile] (Chicago, IL: Santara-Šviesa, 1968); (5) Comparative Perspectives on Social Problems, Editor (Boston, MA: Little, Brown,1969); (6) History on Art’s Side: Social Dynamics in Artistic Efflorescences (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972); (7) Designs of Selfhood, Editor (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); (8) Civilizations East and West: A Memorial Volume for Benjamin Nelson, Co-

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Editor, with E. V. Walter, Edmund Leites, and Marie Coleman Nelson (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985); (9) Sąmoningumo trajektorijos: lietuvių kultūros modernėjimo aspektai [Trajectories of Consciousness: Aspects of the Modernization of Lithuanian Culture] (Chicago, IL: Algimanto Mackaus knygų leidimo fondas, 1986); (10) Epochų signatūros [Epochal Signatures] (Chicago, IL: Algimanto Mackaus knygų leidimo fondas, 1991); (11) Moralizing Cultures (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993); (12) Moterys ir vyrai lietuvių kultūroje [Women and Men in Lithuanian Culture] (Vilnius: Lietuvos kultūros institutas, 1993); (13) Žmogus istorijoje [The Human Being in History] (Vilnius: Vaga, 1994); (14) Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); (15) Kultūrinė psichologija [Cultural Psychology] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1995); (16) Kultūros dirbtuvė [The Workshop of Culture] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996); (17) Civilizacijų analizė [Civilization Analysis] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1998). Kavolis is the author or editor of 17 books, of approx. 150 scholarly articles, and 20 book reviews. 2. For more on this issue, see Vytautas Kavolis, “Structure and Energy: Toward a Civilization-Analytic Perspective,” Comparative Civilizations Review 1 (1979): 21– 41. 3. For more on the history of consciousness and civilization analysis, see Vytautas Kavolis, “History of Consciousness and Civilization Analysis,” Comparative Civilizations Review 17 (1987): 1–19; Vytautas Kavolis, Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). 4. Although Shtromas, as a political scientist who clearly foresaw and analytically articulated the fall of the Soviet Union, was unique in the political science world, such a standpoint, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was no fantasy among his fellow dissidents in the Soviet Union either. At this point, Shtromas may have been influenced by Andrei Amalrik. For more on this issue, see Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (Harper & Row, 1970). 5. Shtromas is the author or editor of 14 scholarly books, 9 small books and booklets, approx. 20 book chapters, approx. 50 articles in international refereed journals, and around 30 articles in general interest and cultural periodicals in English, Japanese, Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish. 6. Referring to Czesław Miłosz, Kavolis defines exactly what he takes as postmodern nationalism. For more on this issue, see Vytautas Kavolis, “Nationalism, Modernization, and the Polylogue of Civilizations,” Comparative Civilizations Review 25 (1991), p. 136. 7. For more on this issue, see Aleksandras Shtromas, The Jewish and Gentile Experience of the Holocaust: A Personal Perspective (Worcester, MA: Assumption College, 1989). 8. For more on the differences between intrastructural, or concealed, dissent and extrastructural, or overt, dissent, see Alexander Shtromas, Who Are the Soviet Dissidents? (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1977). 9. Tomas Venclova is the author of 13 books of poetry in Lithuanian, Polish, English, German, Swedish, Hungarian, and Slovenian; 6 books of essays in Lithuanian, Polish, English, and Russian; 4 books of literary scholarship in Polish, English, and Russian; and around 100 scholarly publications. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages.

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10. Tomas Venclova, Forms of Hope: Essays (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), p. 3. 11. Ibid. 12. For more on this issue, see Aleksandras Štromas, “Universalizmas ir nacionalizmas: prieštaraujančios ar suderinamos koncepcijos? (Tomo Venclovos atvejis)” [Universalism and Nationalism: Conflicting or Compatible Conceptions? (The Case of Tomas Venclova)], Politologija 2 (1991): 109–118. 13. Tomas Venclova, Vilties formos: eseistika ir publicistika [Forms of Hope: Essays and Reviews] (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1991), p. 10. This book has also been translated into Russian as Tomas Venclova, Svoboda i pravda [Freedom and Truth] (Moscow: Progress, 1999). 14. Ibid. p. 23. 15. Quoted from Tomas Venclova, Kad išliktų bent vienas. . . [To Have at Least One Alive. . .] (Vilnius: Algimantas, 1995), p. 3. Chapter Three 1. For more on modern concepts of civilization, see Vytautas Kavolis, Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995); Roger W. Wescott, Comparing Civilizations: An Unconsensual View (Atherton, CA: Atherton Press, 2000); Leonidas Donskis, The End of Ideology and Utopia? Moral Imagination and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); and Leonidas Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003). 2. Kavolis, Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture, pp. 19–20. 3. For more on Kavolis’s bibliography, see Leonidas Donskis, Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 71; 167. 4. For more on this issue, see Vytautas Kavolis, “Civilizational Models of Evil,” in Marie Coleman Nelson and Michael Eigen, eds., Evil: Self and Culture (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984), pp. 17–35; Vytautas Kavolis, “Logics of Evil as Secular Moralities,” Soundings, 68 (Summer 1985), pp. 189–211; Vytautas Kavolis, “Moral Cultures and Moral Logics,” Sociological Analysis 38 (Winter 1977), pp. 331–344; and Vytautas Kavolis, Moralizing Cultures (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993). 5. For more on this issue, see Vytautas Kavolis, History on Art’s Side: Social Dynamics in Artistic Efflorescences (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1972). For more on art style as a projection of religious qualities, and also on how the images of the universe, along with religion and politics, affect the styles of art, see Vytautas Kavolis, Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968). 6. Vytautas Kavolis, “Ir erezija, ir humanizmas” [Both Heresy and Humanism], in Virginijus Gasiliūnas, ed., Metmenų laisvieji svarstymai: 1959–1989 [Free Debates of Metmenys, 1959–1989] (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1993), p. 44. 7. Ibid., pp. 51–52. 8. Kavolis, Civilization Analysis as a Sociology of Culture, p. 161. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 166.

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11. Vytautas Kavolis, “Nationalism, Modernization, and the Polylogue of Civilizations,” Comparative Civilizations Review, 25 (1991), p. 134. 12. Ibid., pp. 134–135. Chapter Four 1. Alexander Shtromas, “To Fight Communism: Why and How?” International Journal on World Peace, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1984), p. 27. 2. Alexander Shtromas, Who Are the Soviet Dissidents? (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1977), p. 2. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 4. For more on this issue, see Leonidas Donskis, Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 5. For more on this issue, see Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp.54–81. 6. Ibid., p. 78. 7. For more on this issue, see George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” in George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1970), pp. 155–179. 8. See Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 154; p. 157; p. 191. 9. Shtromas, Who Are the Soviet Dissidents?, op. cit., p. 13. 10. H. Stuart Hughes, Sophisticated Rebels: The Political Culture of European Dissent, 1968–1987 (London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 94–95. 11. Shtromas, Who Are the Soviet Dissidents?, op. cit., p. 15. 12. Quoted from Tomas Venclova, Kad išliktų bent vienas. . . [To Have at Least One Alive. . .] (Vilnius: Algimantas, 1995), p. 3. 13. Aleksandras Štromas, “Universalizmas ir nacionalizmas: prieštaraujančios ar suderinamos koncepcijos? (Tomo Venclovos atvejis)” [Universalism and Nationalism: Conflicting or Compatible Conceptions? (The Case of Tomas Venclova)], Politologija, Vol. 2 (1991), p. 113. N.B.: in Aleksandras Shtromas’s Lithuanian contributions, his last name is spelled Štromas. 14. Tomas Venclova, Forms of Hope: Essays (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), p. 86. 15. Tomas Venclova, Vilties formos: eseistika ir publicistika [Forms of Hope: Essays and Reviews] (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1991), pp. 250– 251. 16. Venclova, Forms of Hope, op. cit., p. 88. 17. Vytautas Kavolis, “Moralinės kultūros: žemėlapiai, trajektorijos, įtampos” [Moral Cultures: Maps, Trajectories, Tensions], in Virginijus Gasiliūnas, ed., Metmenų laisvieji svarstymai: 1959–1989 [Free Debates of Metmenys: 1959–1989] (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1993), p. 183. 18. Peter Chaadayev, “Philosophical Letters: Letter I,” in James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, Mary-Barbara Zeldin, eds., with the collaboration of George L. Kline, Russian Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p. 112.

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19. Tomas Venclova, “A Fifth Year of Independence: Lithuania, 1922 and 1994,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1995), p. 365. Chapter Five 1. For more on this issue, see: J. P. Nettl, “Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent,” in Philip Rieff, ed., On Intellectuals (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 57–134. 2. See: Leonidas Donskis, “Antanas Maceina: Doktrininis intelektualas XX amžiaus lietuvių kultūroje” [Antanas Maceina: A Doctrinaire Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Lithuanian Culture], Akiračiai [Horizons], Vol. 2 (286) (February, 1997), Vol. 3 (287) (March, 1997), Vol. 4 (288) (April, 1997). This article provides all the references and documentation proving the role of Maceina preparing ideological positions of LAF. 3. For more on this, see: George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” in George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 155–179. This phenomenon is also analyzed by Leonidas Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2003). 4. More on this see: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Time, 1963). 5. See: Isaiah Berlin, “The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” On Intellectuals. Ed. Philip Rieff. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1970, pp. 137–181. 6. For more on this issue, see: Leszek Kołakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life. Trans. Agnieszka Kołakowska (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1999), p. 139. 7. Tomas Venclova, “Lietuviškojo stereotipo problema” [The Problem of Lithuanian Stereotype], Literatūra ir menas [Literature and Arts] (July 17, 1993). 8. Juozas Girnius, “Lietuviškojo charakterio problema” [The Problem of Lithuanian Character], Metai [The Years] 12 (December 1991), pp. 140–141. The entire text is published in: Juozas Girnius “Lietuviškojo charakterio problema,” Metai 11 (November 1991) and 12 (December 1991). 9. Ibid., p. 140. 10. Juozas Girnius, “Idealizmas―gyvybės versmė” [Idealism―the Spring of Life], Į laisvę [To Freedom] 47 (16 September 1941). 11. Ibid. 12. Juozas Girnius, “Idėjiniai nacionalsocializmo pagrindai” [The Ideological Foundations of National Socialism], Į laisvę 63 (September 4, 1941). 13. See: Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 22–37. 14. Juozas Girnius, “Idėjiniai nacionalsocializmo pagrindai,” Į laisvę 77 (September 20, 1941). 15. Ibid. 16. Antanas Maceina, “Laiškas Aidų redaktoriui Juozui Girniui (50-ties metų amžiaus sukakties proga)” [A Letter to the Editor of Aidai, Juozas Girnius (On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary)], Aidai 10 (1965), p. 448. 17. Ibid., p. 440.

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18. See: Tomas Venclova, Vilties formos: eseistika ir publicistika [Forms of Hope: Essays and Reviews] (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1991), pp. 250– 251. 19. Maceina, “Laiškas Aidų redaktoriui Juozui Girniui,” Aidai, op. cit., p. 448. 20. For more on this, see: Antanas Maceina, Asmuo ir istorija [The Individual and History] (Chicago, Ill.: Ateitis, 1981). 21. See Zygmunt Bauman, “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” in Sandro Fridlizius and Abby Peterson, eds., Stranger or Guest? Racism and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1996), p. 62. 22. Juozas Girnius, Tauta ir tautinė ištikimybė [The Nation and National Faithfulness] (Chicago: Į Laisvę fondas lietuviškai kultūrai ugdyti. Leidinys Vol. 2, 1961), pp. 154–155. 23. Ibid., p. 17–25. 24. For more on this, see: Vytautas Kavolis, “Nationalism, Modernization, and the Polylogue of Civilizations,” Comparative Civilizations Review 25 (1991), p. 136. Chapter Six 1. Vytautas Kavolis, “Neaiškumo patologijos” [The Pathologies of Ambiguity], in Virginijus Gasiliūnas, ed., Metmenų laisvieji svarstymai: 1959–1989 [Free Debates of Metmenys: 1959–1989] (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1993), p. 126. 2. See Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). 3. Vytautas Kavolis, Moralizing Cultures (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), p. 48. 4. For more on this issue, see Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., The City Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 217–224. 5. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), p. 34–44. 6. See Milan Kundera, Immortality (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991). 7. See Erich Fromm, Afterword to George Orwell’s 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 263–264. 8. For more on this issue, see Richard Sennet, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 9. For more on this issue, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 208–221. 10. See Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1979). 11. Michel Wieviorka, “Populism and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe,” in Sandro Fridlizius and Abby Peterson, eds., Stranger or Guest? Racism and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1996), p. 25.

12. Ibid., pp. 25–26.

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Index A Adamkus, Valdas, 40, 45–46, 140, 142 Adorno, Theodor, 122 Aksentyev-Kikalishvili, Anzor, 139 Alantas, Vytautas, 17 Alexander II, Tsar, 135 Anderson, Benedict, 48, 69 Aquinas, Thomas, St., 23 Arendt, Hannah, 45, 95 Ariès, Philippe, 38, 57 Aristotle, 130, 138 Aron, Raymond, 45, 61, 74, 95 Ash, Timothy Garton, 79 Augustine, St. (Greek Orthodox— Blessed), 19 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 59 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 139 Barrès, Maurice, 21 Bauman, Zygmunt, 1–2, 95, 100, 115, 122, 124, 127, 133, 135 Bentham, Jeremy, 127 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 18–19, 23, 53, 86, 93 Bergson, Henri, 22 Berlin, Isaiah, 101, 113 Besançon, Alain, 45, 61 Blaga, Lucian, 21 Boccioni, Umberto, 98 Bonner, Elena, 42 Boorstin, Daniel J., 131 Bordonaitė, Mira, 41 Borisov, Yuri, 140 Brazauskas, Algirdas, 76, 140 Brodsky, Joseph, 47, 52–53, 84 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 34 Buber, Martin, 28, 53, 91, 93, 116 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 42, 53, 82, 85 C Carlyle, Thomas, 101 Castro, Fidel, 126

Cézanne, Paul, 27 Chaadayev, Peter, 93, 117 Chamberlain, Houston Stuart, 100 Chesterton, G. K., 101 Cioran, Emil, 20, 98 Clinton, Bill, 134 Conquest, Robert, 43 Copleston, Frederick, 26 Curie-Skłodowska, Maria (Marie), 52 D D’Anunzio, Gabriele, 98 Dana, Charles A., 34 Daniel, the Prophet, 19 Daniel, Yuli, 42, 82 Danilevsky, Nikolai, 17 Daudet, Léon, 21 De Niro, Robert, 134 DeLillo, Don (Mao II), 121–122 Donskis, Izaokas, 22 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 18 Dumont, Louis, 13–15, 38, 57–59, 62 Durkheim, Émile, 23 E Eckermann, Johann, 15 Eichmann, Adolf, 100 Eisenstadt, S. N., 38, 57, 59, 62 Eliade, Mircea, 20, 98 Elias, Norbert, 12–13, 57–58 F Faulkner, Robert, 43 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 60 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 15 Fiore, Joachim, de, 19 Flewelling, Ralph Tyler, 86, 93 Foucault, Michel, 38, 57, 127 Freud, Sigmund, 59, 125, 128 Frobenius, Leo, 17, 23 Fromm, Erich, 122, 131

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G Gadamer, Hans Georg, 23 Galanskov, Yuri, 49 Galich, Alexander, 42 Gasset, José Ortega y, 119, 128 Gavelis, Ričardas, 6–7 Gellner, Ernest, 33, 45, 57, 61–62, 69, 74, 95 Gentile, Giovanni, 98 Genzelis, Bronius, 29 Gilson, Étienne, 23 Gimbutas, Marija, 52 Ginzburg, Alexander, 42, 49, 51 Girnius, Juozas, 21, 23, 97–98, 100, 102– 116, 118 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, Comte de 78 Goebbels, Joseph, 105 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15 Gray, John, 113 Greimas, Algirdas Julius, 30 Gurwitsch, Aron, 30 Gustainis, Valentinas, 98 H Habermas, Jürgen, 132 Hamsun, Knut, 98, 101 Harrington, Alan, 130–131, 142 Hartmann, Nicolai, 21 Havel, Václav, 47, 69 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 27–28, 98 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 13–15, 24, 99, 117 Herzen, Alexander, 50, 53, 93, 135 Heydrich, Reinhard, 100 Hess, Moses, 101 Hilckman, Anton, 23 Hitler, Adolf, 94, 98, 100, 106–108, 128– 129 Hobsbawm, Eric, 33, 69 Hoffer, Eric, 99 Hoffman, Dustin, 134

Hook, Sidney, 43 Hsu, Francis L. K., 58 Hughes, H. Stuart, 81 Husserl, Edmund, 28 Huxley, Aldous, 2, 132 I Ingarden, Roman, 26 Ionesco, Eugène, 20, 98 Ionescu, Nae, 20 J Jaspers, Karl, 23, 45, 91 Jenkins, Roy, 43 Juozaitis, Arvydas, 29 K Kagan, Lady Margaret, 42 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 100 Kant, Immanuel, 45, 99 Kaplan, Morton, 43–44 Karsavin, Lev, 18, 22, Kavolis, Vytautas, 4, 20, 29–30, 33–40, 45–46, 50, 53, 60, 61–71, 75, 84–85, 89–90, 92–93, 112–113, 118, 120, 123, 125, 127 Klages, Ludwig, 23 Koestler, Arthur, 2, 45, 95, 119 Kołakowski, Leszek, 26, 43, 45, 61, 103 Kroeber, A. L., 63 Kundera, Milan (Immortality), 3, 45, 47, 69, 119, 129–130, 146 Kuzmickas, Bronius, 29 L Le Bon, Gustav, 128, 135 Lebra, Takie Sugiyama, 58 Lenin, Vladimir, 77 Leontyev, Konstantin, 18 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 30, 91, 93, 116 Levinson, Barry (Wag the Dog), 134

Index Lewinski, Monica, 134 Lewis, Oscar, 4, 126–127 Lingis, Alphonso, 30, 117 Lossky, Nikolai, 22 Lotman, Yuri, 48 Lozuraitis, Albinas, 26 Lukács, György, 25 M Maceina, Antanas, 15, 17–21, 23–24, 27, 97–98, 111–115 Macenavičius, Marija and Antanas, 41 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 104 Maistre, Joseph de, 19 Maritain, Jacques, 23, 86, 93 Marcuse, Herbert, 121 Marquand, David, 43 Marx, Karl, 60, 102, 133 Maurras, Charles, 21, 98 Mauss, Marcel, 58 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 17, 53, 69, 135 Melville, Herman, 63 Meškauskas, Eugenijus, 25–26 Michelet, Jules, 17 Michnik, Adam, 47 Mickiewicz, Adam, 16, 24, 50, 53 Mickunas, Algis, 30 Mill, John Stuart, 23 Miłosz, Czesław, 3, 45, 47, 51–53, 61, 69, 75, 77, 84, 95, 109, 117–118, 120 Miłosz, Oscar, 16 Minogue, Kenneth, 43 Mosca, Gaetano, 128 Mounier, Emmanuel, 23, 86, 93 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 121 Munnynck, M. de, 18 Mussolini, Benito, 101, 128 Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas, 17 N Nelson, Benjamin, 38, 57–58 Nėris, Salomėja, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 120

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Nikolai I, Tsar, 135 Noica, Constantin, 20–21 O Orlov, Yuri, 51 Ortega y Gasset, José, 119, 128 Orwell, George, 2–3, 45, 77, 79, 95, 99– 102, 119, 132 Osipov, Vladimir, 80 Ovid, 50 Ozolas, Romualdas, 29 P Paksas, Rolandas, 139–142 Parekh, Bhikhu, 43 Pareto, Vilfredo, 128 Parsons, Talcott, 34 Paulauskas, Artūras, 140 Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia, 16, 81 Petkus, Viktoras, 51 Pinsky, Leonid, 42 Pomerantz, Grigory, 42 Popper, Karl R., 45 Pushkin, Alexander, 93 Putin, Vladimir, 140 R Radishchev, Alexander, 93 Radžvilas, Vytautas, 29 Raila, Bronys, 102 Renan, Ernest-Joseph, 99 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 27 Römeris, Mykolas, 98 Romm, Mikhail, 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14 Rozanov, Vassily, 18 Rückert, Heinrich, 17 Russell, Bertrand, 6

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S

T

Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de, 120 Sakalas, Aloyzas, 140 Sakharov, Andrei, 42, 77, 82 Šalkauskis, Stasys, 15, 17–18, 21, 23, 27, 97–98, 111 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6 Sauka, Donatas, 6–7 Sennet, Richard, 132 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 101 Sezemanas, Vosylius (Sesemann, Vassily), 21–22, 25 Shafarevich, Igor, 80 Sharansky, Natan (Anatoly), 51 Shelley, Mary, 63, 129 Shtromas (Štromas), Aleksandras, 30, 33, 40–48, 53–55, 73–80, 82–87, 91, 93, 95 Singer, David, 43 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 42, 82 Šliogeris, Arvydas, 8, 27, 29 Smith, Anthony D., 33, 69 Šmulkštys, Julius, 40 Sniečkus, Antanas, 41 Socrates, 50 Sodeika, Tomas, 26, 28 Solovyov, Vladimir, 17–18, 23 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 76–77, 80, 84 Sontag, Susan, 121 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 34, 38, 57–58, 63 Spengler, Oswald, 17, 19, 21, 23, 57–58, 63, 119, 127–128 Spranger, Eduard, 23 Stahl, Henri, 21 Stočkus, Bronius, 21 Strauss, Leo, 109 Štromas, Jurgis, 41 Štromienė-Kozin, Eugenia, 41 Sun Myung Moon (Unification Church), 122 Sverdiolas, Arūnas, 26–28

Taagepera, Rein, 43–44 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 26 Tiryakian, Edward A., 34 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 128 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 97 Toynbee, Arnold J., 57, 63 Trumpa, Vincas, 15–16, 50 Turner, Victor, 59 V Venclova, Antanas, 47, 49 Venclova, Tomas, 30, 33, 42, 45, 47–55, 69, 73, 76, 82, 84–95, 103, 113 Vico, Giambattista, 19 Voltaire, 13–14 Vulcănescu, Mircea, 20 W Weil, Simone, 27 White, Hayden, 38, 57 Wieviorka, Michel, 137 Williams, Raymond, 20 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, 119 Weber, Max, 1, 23, 57–58, 62, 74 Y Yla, Stasys, 112 Z Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 2, 45, 119 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 141