ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

Research areas: biophysics, mathematical modeling in biology and medicine.

DOI: doi.org/10.35321/all84-14

MEETINGS IN LANDSCAPES OF THE SOUL AND THE HISTORY OF A SINGLE WORD

More than four decades have passed. I take into my hands three bundles of copies of pages typed on a typewriter. Copies of equipment, I no longer remember why called “era.” Very shabby, bound into covers made from a plastic folder, fastened with thick staples. And so it is written: Oskaras Milašius; Selected Writings, in four volumes. The fourth volume was never published. Translated from the French. At the end of the translations, explanations, but neither the authors of the translations nor those of the explanations are indicated. I no longer remember who gave me these (self-)publications. I did not participate in their preparation or publication, so no facts or events arise in my memory, only the spirit of that time and the encompassing mood we call nostalgia.

Through the initiative and care of Algirdas Patackas, three volumes of Oskaras Milašius’s writings were published in samizdat in 1978–1983. In the principal publication Pastogė, in 1979–1980 he printed, under the pseudonym Algis Galinis, a study Oskaras Milašius. Three Lives. Back in 1977, he described the local historians’ journey to Milašius’s birthplace, Čerėja, in the essay Talita, cumi...^¹ It seems that in the spring of 2014 I spoke with the director Juozas Javaitis. The director recalled that he had made a film about Oskaras Milašius. He then urged me to interview the seriously ill Algirdas Patackas while he was still with us. This publication presents a transcript of the conversation with Patackas, which took place at the very end of 2014.

^¹ These works have been reprinted in the book: Patackas Algirdas 2014: LITUA, Vilnius, 469, 492.

Articles

315

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

The name of that land—Lithuania—conquered my mind and feelings. I long to reveal it to you. Come! In spirit I will lead you to a strange land, misty, deep, rustling…^²

Why Patackas? Why about Milašius? In the aforementioned study on Oskaras Milašius, Patackas wrote: “It is not creativity, not literature itself that moves him above all, but the landscape of his own soul.”^³ The phrase “the landscape of his own soul” is a stylistic device referring to the world of the poet’s thoughts and feelings. In this sense, Milašius was a true landscapist:

I am a vast November garden, a tearful garden, In which the forsaken shiver from cold in the old suburb; Where the wretched color of mists repeats “Always!” Where the fountain’s monotonous murmur utters the word “Never!”^⁴

Landscape, in the broadest sense, is a suitable place to meet. Such a place is chosen so that, gazing together at the same scenery and experiencing the same impressions, we might undergo similar moods. The same landscape evokes kindred memories and experiences in people’s souls. Landscapes of the soul, by contrast, are themselves brought forth by moods, memories, and experiences. The soul creates its own landscapes.

Oskaras Milašius and Algirdas Patackas were missionaries of the Lithuanian ideal. Not of an ideal Lithuania, but of the Lithuanian ideal. Ideal is a word understood very broadly. I mean ideal not as an abstract concept, but as an active impulse that awakens one to action. On March 29, 1919, in the hall of the Paris Geographical Society, Milašius began his presentation with a confession: “For a long time I wondered where that deep feeling that overwhelms me comes from when I remember such a distant land, so long unknown to the West—Lithuania.”^⁵ What does he mean when he says “Lithuania”? He alludes to the recently restored state: “Thus I shall speak to you of the new Lithuania, of a nation whose independence the members of the Peace Congress assessed as one of the most urgent

² Lecture at an evening organized by the poet in the hall of the Paris Geographical Society: Milašius Oskaras 1919/2013: Conference of March 29, 1919. – Lituanistic and Political Journalism, Vilnius, 34, translated by A. Vaičiulaitis (see Andrius Konickis 1996: … the only one singled out from infinity of places, Vilnius, 26).

³ Patackas Algirdas 2014: LITUA, Vilnius, 474

⁴ Milašius Oskaras 2012: Mists. – Songs of Twilight, Vilnius, translated by Vaclovas Šiugždinis, 28

⁵ Milašius Oskaras 1919/2013: Conference of March 29, 1919. – Lituanistic and Political Journalism, Vilnius, 28, translated by A. Vaičiulaitis.

316

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV

Susitikimai sielos peizažuose bei vieno žodžio istorija

as its task, as the very core of the new Eastern question.^⁶ But any Lithuanian arriving in Paris from Lithuania or from across the Atlantic does not need to wonder where feelings arise when remembering his or her country. The French poet, writing in impeccable French although his native language is Polish, sincerely admits that he needs to reflect on where that feeling comes from. Where do these landscapes come from: “In spirit I will lead you to a strange land, misty, deep, rustling...”; “We are surrounded by the scent of water lilies, the steam of blazing forests...”; “A sour-sweet aroma like that of an old fallen tree, forgotten beneath moss, like decay after a passing shower at summer’s end”^⁷? There is no doubt that these images come from his native Čerėja, but what has Lithuania to do with it? Milašius did not speak Lithuanian in his homeland. When Baltic dialects were spoken there is a matter of discussion among linguists and archaeologists. The place is not the right one, or the time is not the right one. In the end, all this was written and uttered in French: “Je vous conduirai en esprit vers une contrée étrange, vaporeuse, voilée, murmurante...”^⁸

“One single question, O Hiram, gives meaning to our great sufferings: Where is space?^“⁹

Milašius had only begun to get to know Lithuania geographically, ethnically, or politically. He found and chose Lithuania in the landscape of his own soul. The Lithuanian ideal was the space with which he enveloped himself because he no longer had a place in the world. Milašius traveled extensively, became acquainted with the most diverse lands, and spoke and wrote French, German, and English fluently. At that time he was wealthy, having inherited the forests acquired by his ancestors near the Dnieper. He sold those forests to the Russians, acquiring Russian securities. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Milašius was left completely destitute. The Poles condemned him as a traitor because he had sold the forests to the Russians. He was probably not mistaken in asserting that “I, a French poet, deservedly or undeservedly respected by avant-garde groups, could have been crowned with roses in Warsaw together with many other Lithuanians of my world. Yet I hoped that I could be more useful by remaining beneath a modest Lithuanian cross”^¹⁰. It was a conscious choice, but not a coldly rational one; it was grounded in deep feeling.

Led by the same feeling, in the same landscape of the soul that we called “the Lithuanian ideal,” Algirdas Patackas also found Milašius. It is interesting that the impetus

^⁶ Ibid., 31.

^⁷ Ibid., 34.

^{⁸ de L. Milosz O. V. 1990:} Deux Messianismes Politiques, Paris, 32.

^⁹ Milašius Oskaras 2002: Ars Magna. Mysteries. Aidai, translated by Petras Kimbrys, 55.

^¹⁰ Milašius Oskaras 1927/2013: Two Political Messianisms. – Lituanistic and Political Journalism, Vilnius, 167, 168.

Kalba ir likimai / Language and destiny

317

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

He received the impetus to undertake the publication of Milašius’s writings on a journey to a specific place—to the poet’s native Čerėja, where he met his childhood muse, Anis, “the girl with an archangel’s eyelashes,” already more than a hundred years old…

Listen to the voice of the wind at night, That old, mournful voice of the wind, The curses of those already dead, your lullaby, you who are still alive… Listen to the wind.¹¹

This is an important lesson: ideal Lithuania is not the same as the Lithuanian ideal. We in Lithuania are not the same as Lithuania within us. Unfortunately, deep and unchanging feelings are no longer trusted today. Feeling is not reflected upon today but measured by the abundance of clicks. We no longer seek the Lithuanian ideal within ourselves, but design projects for an ideal Lithuania in which we want to settle comfortably. This is in no way reprehensible. We have a state, and it is proper to care for its security and welfare and those of its citizens. This requires knowledge and a cold, rational mind. But that is not enough. Lithuania must be found within oneself, found and chosen.

The landscape of the soul is not a particularly original literary trope, transferring the term for a real landscape into the psychological realm. The landscape of the soul has a certain structure. A painted landscape is one thing. A landscape in nature has a viewpoint that coincides with the viewer. In painting, one strives to convey perspective. Success depends on the painter’s talent. Someone present in nature needs neither talent nor technique—he or she is there. In nature, landscape is always a landscape of the soul. Inner landscapes of the soul are created by life itself. Images of nature, in creativity flowing from within, themselves become creative means of expressing the creator’s feelings.

Oskaras Milašius chose Lithuania as a point of departure. Milašius chose a reborn nation creating its own state and stood up to defend its right to a place in Europe’s geopolitical space. Soon he entered the service of this country. We must frankly admit that without this choice Oskaras Milašius would have remained for us merely a Polish poet writing in French. Without his decision to defend Lithuania’s positions at European conferences, without his enthusiastic journalism and struggle for Vilnius, relying solely on his work as a poet, we might have found him somewhere in our memory a modest place in the space between Adam Mickiewicz and Czesław Miłosz. Algirdas Patackas had this choice and its profound motives in mind when he stated: “O. V. Milašius’s hieroglyph remains undeciphered.”¹² It would not have been surprising if someone had “deconstructed” this hieroglyph over four decades. To understand this choice more deeply, we must ask once again: what is a nation?

¹¹ Milašius Oskaras 2012: Song of Autumn. – Songs of Twilight, Vilnius, translated by Vaclovas Šiugždinis, 36.

¹² “Litua,” 469.

318

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV

Susitikimai sielos peizažuose bei vieno žodžio istorija

“The Lithuanian nation” are the first words of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, adopted by citizens in the referendum of October 25, 1992, respectfully set in capital letters:

THE LITHUANIAN NATION—having created the State of Lithuania many centuries ago, —having laid its legal foundations on the Statutes of Lithuania and the Constitutions of the Republic of Lithuania, —having steadfastly defended its freedom and independence for centuries, —having preserved its spirit, native language, writing, and customs, —embodying the innate right of the human being and the Nation to live and create freely in the land of their parents and ancestors—in the independent State of Lithuania, —fostering national concord in the land of Lithuania, —striving for an open, just, harmonious civil society and a state under the rule of law, having been reborn through the will of the citizens of the State of Lithuania, adopts and proclaims this CONSTITUTION

Constitutional-law scholars had already polished the concept of the nation to the brilliance of legal precision by the end of the nineteenth century. The nation is one of the three elements of the structure of the state. The other two are territory and government. If someone naively wondered how the nation, being an element of the state, could itself create that state, he or she would be answered with arguments smoothed by time and heated debate. Here is one version of the answer, presented in a contemporary Lithuanian constitutional-law textbook: “The Lithuanian nation, having created the State of Lithuania many years ago,” marks the core of the civic nation, the beginning of the life of the state. Yet at the beginning of the preamble, the “Lithuanian nation”—the pioneer of state-building—becomes a modern civic community at the end of the preamble, where it is proclaimed that the Constitution is adopted and proclaimed by the will of the citizens of the reborn State of Lithuania.”¹³

The concepts and terms used in the arguments are polished like sea pebbles. It is further explained that the nation which created the state at the beginning was “at the ethnic level,” and after creating the state moves to another level—becoming a “civic nation.” In this firmly rooted constitutional-law sense, the word nation is used in the main text of the Constitution. The nation’s “ethnic level,” solemnly honored in capital letters, does not appear again. That is history now. A modern state consists of a territory defined by laws and international treaties,

¹³ Jarašiūnas Egidijus 2002: Chapter VII, 1.1. The Problem of the Concept of the State. – Lithuanian Constitutional Law, Vilnius, 488.

Kalba ir likimai / Language and destiny

319

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

of democratically elected and lawfully functioning government and its citizens—the civic nation.

Why, then, does Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian explain the word nation differently: ‘a historically formed community of people sharing a common origin, land, language, history, and culture’? This is not a civic nation. It is a nation “at the ethnic level,” sometimes called an ethnic nation. Do linguists reject the concept of the modern nation? Of course not. Linguists know perfectly well what a civic nation is and do not ignore it, but they make decisions according to their own rules. This is the everyday, customary understanding of the word nation, whereas constitutional-law specialists have formulated a specialized term for their field. From the linguistic point of view, this is not even another meaning of the word, but a separate usage by specialists in a narrow field. Lawyers know this and acknowledge the everyday use of the word. Therefore, when speaking about the state’s legal system, they ask that the two usages be distinguished as special terms: ethnic nation and civic nation. Mykolas Riomeris begins his study The State with precisely this. At the outset, he shows that there is no adequate replacement for the word nation, rejecting the terms society, people, inhabitants, and human beings. He proposed adding Latin words after a dash: calling the ethnic nation “nation—natio” and the civic nation “nation—populus”¹⁴. This construction did not take root, and today, it seems, everyone is content to interpret the meaning of the word according to context. Such is also, as we have seen, the text of the Constitution. The word nation, as the authors of the aforementioned textbook confirmed to us, means civic nation throughout the text of the Constitution. Syntactically, the entire preamble is one sentence, and the word nation is its subject. Semantically, nation in the preamble is polysemous. It is not only a civic nation (“the citizens of the reborn State of Lithuania adopt and proclaim this Constitution by their will”), but also reveals the entire evolution of the ethnic nation, which over many centuries carried out various deeds and became a modern nation. The ethnic nation and national identity will not disappear anywhere in the modern state. The modern civic nation is merely the ethnic nation’s garment, one that is necessary in the contemporary world. The lawyers themselves acknowledge this, but do not consider the ethnic nation, leaving that to social researchers.

Historians are interested in the fate of the ethnic nation in history. For researchers of Lithuanian history, the ethnic nation is the most important object of study in the nineteenth century: “As in Europe at that time, so too among us this period was a period of the long formation and modernization of the Lithuanian nation. It was precisely by preserving the old traditions of statehood and creating new aspirations for a political existence independent of union with Poland that the Lithuanian nation increasingly understood that it is. And the Lithuanian people

^¹⁴ Römeris Mykolas 1995: The State and Its Constitutional Law. Part One. The State. Volume I. I. The Nation as an Element of the State, Vilnius: Pradai, 1–12.

320

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV

Susitikimai sielos peizažuose bei vieno žodžio istorija

gradually began to understand that it was part of the nation. In other words, the Lithuanian nation was becoming what it itself wanted to be.”¹⁵

For the authors of the Constitution, only the civic nation has legal meaning. The preamble of the Constitution is merely an insertion with symbolic significance into a legal text. For historians, the content of the sentence making up the preamble is an important object of study. They are interested in the transformation of the ethnic nation into a “civic nation,” a “modern nation,” a “nación,” a “political-territorial community of the fundamental taxonomic level.” They describe the stages of this transformation on the basis of written sources, but leave the mechanisms of this transformation for others to explain.

The author of the monumental study Europe. A History, Norman Davies, rejects the principal elements of the national nation, asserting that “national identity should be sought neither in blood, nor in land, nor even in language,” since “in all matters of national identity the most important thing is a person’s perception, consciousness.” He quotes a lecture by the Dutch historian G. J. Renier, delivered at King’s College London in 1945:

“National identity exists in people’s minds, [...] that is the only place where it can exist [...]. Beyond the limits of the human mind, no national identity can exist, because national identity is a way of looking at oneself, not a thing in itself. Common sense may notice it, and the only discipline capable of describing and analyzing it is psychology [...]. This perception, this sense of national identity, this national feeling is something more than any one of the nation’s features—it is the very essence of national identity.”¹⁶

Contrasting the concepts of ethnic and political nations and reflecting on the field of meanings they reveal is useful to historians or politicians. It helps to understand Alsatian choices amid the political tension between Germany and France, the legalization of citizenship in the laws of these countries, or interpretations of Ernest Renan’s famous phrase about the “daily plebiscite.” To understand Oskaras Milašius’s decision, we must follow Norman Davies’s advice and turn to psychology.

Interestingly, the clue lies in the Lithuanian language. In LKŽ we find two meanings of the word. 1 tauta means: ‘a historically formed community of people that emerged through the consolidation of various tribes and shares common land, language, history, economy, and cultural life.’ This is the concept of the ethnic nation we have already discussed. But LKŽ also provides another meaning, 2 tauta, explained as ‘longing for one’s country and home.’ If we belong to a nation, it is understandable that, having lost it or moved away from it, we feel longing. That this longing is expressed by the same word is unsurprising, since LKŽ also contains two verbs. When one longs for the nation, one taučiama, when one moves away from it

¹⁵ Aleksandravičius Egidijus, Kulakauskas Antanas 1996: Under the Rule of the Tsars. Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century, Vilnius, 14.

¹⁶ Davies Norman 2002: Europe. A History, Vilnius.

Kalba ir likimai / Language and destiny

321

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

one becomes estranged—nutautstama. The verb tausti, usually used in the negative form—nutušti—has two different meanings. Alongside the meaning ‘to move away, become unaccustomed, grow cold (toward one’s own people, toward home); to lose national characteristics,’ in former times it was used with the meaning ‘to long for home, one’s native land, one’s homeland, to feel nostalgia.’ Both meanings belong to one and the same context, while the movement or attraction they evoke is in opposite directions. Tausta means moving away from home, while taučia means moving toward home. Thus LKŽ leads us to a psychological view of the nation. The nation is nostalgia.

The word nostalgija is an artificial medical term from the end of the seventeenth century. Over three centuries it underwent an interesting evolution and was adopted into the everyday vocabulary of almost all European languages. As a superficial glance at the Google translator shows, the word is not used by peoples culturally farther from Europe and by the Icelanders, Scots Gaelic speakers, Irish, and Welsh, who are especially protective of the purity of their languages. The Turks, closely connected with Europe, use this word. The Turkmen and Uzbeks adopted the word from them or from the Russians, but not the Kazakhs. Of course, all peoples have words that express, in one way or another, longing for home. European languages that borrowed nostalgia have or had such words as well. The Google translator merely shows that the word nostalgija predominates in usage in these languages. The same happened in Lithuanian. The word nostalgija is composed of two Greek elements, nostos and algos. Nostos is a word already used by Homer, meaning a journey home. We will return to it later. Algos is encountered today in many medical terms, for example, when using pain-relieving medicines—analgesics.

In the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera “William Tell,” a melody played by the English horn and flute can be heard: Ranz des Vaches. It is the Swiss shepherds’ horn in the Alps calling their herd of cows. Swiss neutrality has old traditions, but it often had to be paid for by sending recruits into foreign armies. Swiss Guards used to be loyal protectors of the highest-ranking persons, and today they still guard the Pope in Rome. Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts in his eighteenth-century Encyclopedia of Music that Swiss mercenaries were strictly forbidden to sing Swiss songs. For a song, or simply hearing a melody similar to the one G. Rossini used in his opera, would arouse in Swiss mercenaries an uncontrollable longing for their homeland, and they would not merely lose their fighting spirit but actually fall ill. The illness was called the Swiss disease (French mal du Suisse). Finding themselves on the plains of France or Italy, they longed so intensely for their native Alpine landscape that they became genuinely ill. Deaths were also known, medically recorded as strokes. Such patients often had to be sent home. They recovered as soon as they heard the news. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Alsatian physician Johannes Hofer coined a medical term to describe this Swiss disease: nostalgia. In 1688, upon completing the University of Basel, he submitted a medical dissertation on longing for one’s native home (German Heimwehe). In his work he also used the words nosomania and philopatridalgia, but settled on nostalgia. Homesickness, understood as an illness, quickly became popular among physicians treating soldiers and

322

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV

Susitikimai sielos peizažuose bei vieno žodžio istorija

sailors. The symptoms attributed to nostalgia multiplied until the diagnosis itself became vague and doubtful. A modest place in oblivion among other words once used in medical history and now obsolete was prepared for this term. That did not happen. We find this word defined not only in the Dictionary of International Words, but also in DLKŽ and LKŽ. Today nostalgija is a loanword used in many languages. How did this medical term enter everyday usage, and what does it really mean?

When J. Hofer decided to give the Swiss disease a special medical term, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had ended not long before, and Europe was trying to begin living according to the principles of the Peace of Westphalia. This gave impetus to the modernization of armies. In medicine, an illness must have a cause. If the cause is not clear, it is sought, and hypotheses are proposed and tested. The young inventor of the term did not miss the opportunity to formulate his assumption, which, paraphrased in the terminology of the time, sounded approximately as follows: “Essentially a cerebral disease of demonic origin, the continual vibrations of animal spirits in those middle-brain fibers in which the impressions of ideas of the Fatherland are trapped.”¹⁷ Others sought simpler explanations. For example, the physician J. J. Scheuchzer claimed that perhaps, when Swiss mercenaries descended from their native highlands to the plains of the surrounding countries where they had to fight, changes in atmospheric pressure caused blood to rush to their heads, producing the symptoms of nostalgia¹⁸. Still others did not shy away from entirely original explanations—the constant ringing of cowbells damages the eardrums and brain...¹⁹

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the definition of nostalgija changed substantially. Having failed to find a reliable organic cause, the diagnosis moved into the field of psychiatry. Until the mid-twentieth century, it was described in terms of psychodynamic traditions as a subconscious desire to return to the mother’s womb. It was regarded as immigrant psychosis. As the 1980s approached, assessments became more moderate; finally, a tendency emerged to classify nostalgia as a form of depression and equate it with “homesickness” (English homesickness), experienced by four groups of people: immigrants, first-year students, soldiers, and sailors²⁰. In recent decades

¹⁷ MEDICAL DISSERTATION ON NOSTALGIA BY JOHANNES HOFER, 1688 Translated by CAROLYN RISER ANSPACH. – Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2(6), AUGUST, 1934, Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 376–391.

¹⁸ Routledge Clay, Wildschut Tim, Sedikides Constantine, Juhl Jacob 2013: Nostalgia as a Resource for Psychological Health and Well-Being. – Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7/11, 808–818.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Sedikides Constantine, Wildschut Tim, Arndt Jamie, Routledge Clay 2006: Self and Affect: The Case of Nostalgia. – J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Affect in social thinking and behavior: Frontiers in social psychology, New York, NY: Psychology Press, 9.

Kalba ir likimai / Language and destiny

323

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

everything turned upside down. Nostalgia changed from a pathological condition into an effective means of solving existential problems. There is a great deal of contemporary research on nostalgia. In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists distinguished three nostalgia concept components. The cognitive component emphasizes memory of autobiographical content. The affective component of nostalgia was understood as negative emotions verging on pathology. The conative component expressed the desire to return home. This division into components remained, but their content was changed and refined. First of all, nostalgia is not limited to autobiographical memory. The contemporary concept of memory is a generalized mental simulation. Put more simply, nostalgia is caused not only by personally experienced memories, but also by narratives created by the imagination, which may be associated not only with the past, but also with images and dreams of the present or future. This activity of our mind is now studied extensively by science as mental time travel (English: MTT – mental time travel). How could one not recall here the Soviet-era joke about the man who sighs: “I want to go to Paris again.” When asked whether he had ever been to Paris, he replies: “No, but I want to go again...” A special term has even been coined for such nostalgia – anemoia. Recently, researchers have discovered that the emotions associated with nostalgia are not solely negative. It seems that several centuries ago doctors reversed cause and effect in their diagnosis. It is not nostalgia that causes negative emotions; rather, the negative emotional content of memories or narratives created by the imagination causes nostalgia as a protective mechanism. Researchers have discovered that nostalgia can be caused not only by the imagination but also by other factors: loneliness, social isolation, a sense of meaninglessness, boredom, or simply cold. The content that evokes nostalgia is negative, but nostalgia itself is a positive experience. In short—it is sad that youth cannot be restored, but it is pleasant to remember youth.

He slept peacefully that night, having forgotten his troubles and misfortunes. Until the bright star rose, revealing to Earth That the daughter of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, would appear, the ship that cleaves the sea reached the island, having conquered the waves.²¹

Finally, the third component—the desire to return home—does not always mean a direct physical movement through space from one’s present location to one’s native home. This is the first part of the word itself—nostos. This feeling has been known for ages. The best-known biblical episode is the Babylonian captivity, recalled for us by the famous slaves’ chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Nabucco.” However, researchers have concluded that the essence of nostalgia is not limited to direct

²¹ Homer, Odyssey, CANTO XIII (92–95), translated from Greek by Antanas Dambrauskas, Vilnius: Vaga, 1979.

324

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV

Susitikimai sielos peizažuose bei vieno žodžio istorija

desired movement through space. The paradox mentioned in Plato’s dialogue “Gorgias” was recalled: the desire for some goal does not disappear when that goal is achieved. It was discovered that nostalgia is a positive state that encourages action. Nostalgic desire is motivating.

Psychologists, like lawyers or historians, have time-tested terminology. Today they can also draw on experiments and the techniques of neuropsychological and neurophysiological research. We are interested not in individual details or nuances, but in the development of the word’s semantics. Nostalgia was an artificially created word form devised to name a narrow medical concept. Over three centuries, it lost its narrow medical meaning and acquired a whole range of associations that shaped the contemporary meaning of the word in the general language, understood and used similarly in many European languages. The newly created medical term struck a broad range of human emotions that had no clear name. Contemporary psychology undertook to inventory the field of meanings of nostalgia.

The variety of feelings now revealed by psychologists and called nostalgia undoubtedly had its own forms of expression in languages and cultures. It is characteristic that the Romantic movement in the countries of Eastern Europe aroused a desire to emphasize the peculiarities of their own words for nostalgia and their meanings. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym, a professor at Harvard University originally from Russia, recalls intellectuals and poets from various countries who wrote about Czech litost, Russian toska, Polish tęsknota, Romanian dor^²². Our tauta also belongs here. Each of these words is distinctive in its own language. Each tends to experience romantic feelings in its own way, but romance itself is a feeling shared by all people. S. Boym also recalls the reflections of her Harvard colleague, the classical scholar Gregory Nagy, originally from Hungary, on nostos—the first part of nostalgia. G. Nagy bases his account on the origin of the word nostos in the Indo-European root nos, meaning ‘a return to light and life’. Odysseus returns home not only from Troy, but also from Hades^²³. Therefore he sleeps “having forgotten his troubles and misfortunes” when his ship reaches the native island of Ithaca. This episode also emphasizes a third, mythological, dimension of nostos, since Odysseus returns at sunrise, when “rosy-fingered Dawn, the daughter of morning” appears. All three dimensions—physical wandering and the journey home, psychological awakening from sleep and dreams, from unconscious wanderings into the light of consciousness, and the mythological path of the Sun from morning to evening and from evening to morning—have migrated into the field of meanings of nostalgia.

^²² Boym Svetlana 2001: The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books.

^²³ The same place.

Kalba ir likimai / Language and destiny

325

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

Be welcomed, you who, as footsteps echo, Come to meet us from the dark, cold corridor of the past. Be welcomed, solitude, my mother.²⁴

Oskaras Milašius met the twentieth century with an attempt to take his own life. Thrown into the environment of Paris as a child, he managed to acquire an education and become a poet. The legendary underground passages of Paris exert a powerful attraction. This was the period of the “Poems of Downfall,” which led him into a dead end. Like Odysseus, the young poet descended into the darkness of Hades. Few return, for they taste the waters of forgetfulness in the river Lethe. Fate decreed that he would remain alive. Alive, but lonely. In solitude, in 1901, he reached rock bottom; in solitude, at the end of 1914, he experienced a vision in which he was raised onto a mountain, where he saw the “Sun of Memory.” For the poet, this was the period of the “Seven Solitudes.”

Almost at the same time, a year earlier (in October 1913), Carl Gustav Jung had powerful visions. “[...] while traveling by train to Schaffhausen, Jung saw a vision while awake—a Europe ravaged by a devastating flood; two weeks later, while traveling along the same route, the vision recurred.”²⁵

“In 1925 Jung said: ‘I felt that I was suffering from hypercompensatory psychosis, and this feeling did not leave me until the first of August 1914.’ Many years later he told Mircea Eliade:

“As a psychiatrist, I became concerned and wondered whether I might not begin to ‘become schizophrenic,’ as we said at the time. [...] I was in the process of preparing a lecture on schizophrenia, which I was to deliver at a congress in Aberdeen, and I kept repeating to myself: ‘I will speak about myself! It is quite possible that I will go mad after reading this report aloud.’ The congress was to take place in July 1914—precisely when, in three dreams, I saw myself traveling across the South Seas. On July 31, immediately after my lecture, I learned from the newspapers that the war had begun. At last I understood. And when I disembarked from the ship in the Netherlands the next day, there was no happier person than I. Now I was certain that I was in no danger of schizophrenia. I understood that my dreams and visions arose from the substratum of the collective unconscious. I had to analyze and substantiate this discovery. That is precisely what I have tried to do for forty years.’”

Jung then decided that his fantasy depicted not what would happen to him, but what would befall Europe. In other words, it was a premonition of a collective event, which he later called a “great” dream.²⁶

Why did Jung calm down about the condition of his psyche? Fantasies in dreams during sleep are a normal phenomenon, but visions occurring during the day,

24 Milašius Oskaras 2012: Autumn Song. – Songs of Twilight, Vilnius, translated by Vaclovas Šiugždinis, 99.

25 Jung C. G. 2017: The Red Book, Liber Novus, Vilnius: Margi raštai, 34, 139.

26 In the same place, 44.

326

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIV

Susitikimai sielos peizažuose bei vieno žodžio istorija

called hallucinations occur much more rarely. Hallucination is a medical term describing spontaneous images, not necessarily visual but also involving other senses. It is not an illness, but it may be a symptom of illness. The content of the images is highly varied, and for physicians the nature of the hallucinations matters more than the content itself. What frightened Jung was precisely the intensity of the visions. When it became clear that the content of the visions expressed a premonition of the war that actually began, he was pleased and calmed down. The nature of the visions did not thereby change. He was calmed by the content, because its source was not his own unconscious. But this raised a scientific problem, which Jung undertook to solve by inducing visions in himself and analyzing them. This analysis became available to everyone in the form of The Red Book only in 2009. This empirical material is the basis of all Jung’s theories. The problem itself remains unresolved today: can the unconscious of an individual person have direct access to the collective information of all humanity or of individual nations, which Jung called the “collective unconscious.”

Oskaras Milašius was not a doctor, so his reaction to the visions was different. Nevertheless, in essence he acted similarly to Jung. He undertook to encode the content of the visions. He did this by his own methods. Ars Magna and Mysteries are works of poetry. They have little in common with theories of relativity in physics. Einstein’s theory of relativity without its mathematical apparatus is nothing. Einstein’s famous thought experiments about journeys through spacetime, without an understanding of the mathematical formulas underlying them, are at best science fiction. Milašius encoded his visions for the rest of his life. Deep faith and the practice of the Catholic Church saved him from madness. But he needed another anchor. The three planes of Odysseus’ journey are echoed in personal experiences. Myth is the language of the unconscious. The emergence from depression into positive experiences is the second nostos plane, which contemporary psychology studies as the spectrum of nostalgic contents. But Milašius needed to return home in the real physical world. He chose Lithuania.

Algirdas Patackas speaks about this in his account. About the search for a place, for a metaphysical homeland: “To have one’s place, on which one can rely, from which one has come.”²⁷ A. Patackas lived in Lithuania, but experienced his personal journey to the realm of Hades in the KGB basements, when he accepted the fate of his occupied homeland. His return home, his nostos, took place together with his country—with Sąjūdis and Independence.

Submitted on May 17, 2021.

ALGIRDAS SAUDARGAS

Lauryno Stuokos-Gucevičiaus St. 13–3, LT-01122 Vilnius, Lithuania [email protected]

²⁷ See Algirdas Patackas’s interview, p. 294.

Kalba ir likimai / Language and destiny

327