Returning

On PR2 a good literary program (their literary programs are always good) about Polish poets connected with the city of Wilno (now Vilnius in Lithuania). Literary, not nationalistic, and about poets who, if they did live long enough to experience the loss and the exile, have all come to accept it. Let’s give up Wilno and Lwow, they all said to a man, or else the fighting will never end.

Yet, they were exiles and as such found it difficult not to be sentimental. One, Konwicki, claimed that he could not write unless he imagined the scenes in his novels taking place in familiar places of the Wilno landscape. A literary historian later analyzed his novels and suggested that every scene can be shown to take place in Wilno, even if in the novel the story it takes place in Warsaw or Katowice.

A writer must be connected to some larger community, continued Konwicki, in the same quoted interview, and I have decided to connect with Wilno… and I have mined it for profit – literary profit – all my life. Hence perhaps the impossibility of myself imagining myself a novelist: I am part of no community. I can’t imagine anyone to whom I would want to address a novel.

But all that aside. The point I wanted to make here is something else: that all these authors – Konwicki, Milosz – have reported one thing. Having gone back for a visit since independence they have failed to find the city of their youth, their memories, and their poems and novels. The city existed only in the past.

The implied meaning of this observation could be taken to mean that the city is no longer a Polish city. Poles are a minority, most old Polish institutions have died – Polish radio, Polish press, Polish bookstores, Polish theaters, Polish cabarets. And there has been an architectural change, the city has grown, the surrounding forest has been cut down, and so forth. This no doubt is the same reaction which is reported by the German exiles who return for a sentimental trip to the former East of Germany, now West of Poland, and leave saying that it has changed, that it is not at all like they remember it, that they don’t want it anymore if it is to be like this. The unspoken subtext is – they (the victors) have changed it beyond recognition.

But these men don’t know what they are talking about. The truth is, that whenever we return to our former cities, we find them changed. And it is not because the language has changed, or the architecture, or the theaters or schools; but because we have changed. What was once familiar and homey, now no longer fits us. We have seen the world, we have grown, the former pot, in which we had been once planted, well, we have outgrown it. It looks ridiculously small now.

In truth, there is no going back, ever, no matter what the history or the politics.