The last couple of decades have witnessed a growing interest in regional approaches to research on literary canons; the collections of articles, Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia (2015) and The Canon in Southeast Asian Literatures (2000) could be mentioned as examples. Even though the formation of national canons is specific for each country, similar conditions of historical and political development in different places reveal common tendencies in canon formation, due to the fact that this process always relies on links between the literary field and the spheres of national, class, and other group interests. The cultural distinctiveness of Central-Eastern Europe was shaped by similar historical trajectories and today it is widely recognized and intensively researched (the multi-volume series History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe is an especially important resource for studies of this region’s literary specificities). Since this collection seeks to examine the processes and interaction between modern nation-building and the national literary canon-building in the 19th century, it delimits a somewhat narrower regional scope than the usual approach of East-Central European studies. Because of their differing historical and cultural circumstances, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are not included here. The Baltic countries are positioned as a separate region that has similarities both with East-Central Europe and with the Northern countries as well.
Although all national movements rely on the national language and its literature as arguments for national identity and cultural maturity, in the 19th century, when the countries of Central Europe and the Baltic region were politically and culturally dominated by Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, national languages gained a specifically considerable symbolic power for bringing the national community together. The creation of literature in the national language and the establishment of an own literary canon for the empire’s non-dominant nations became a means of cultural emancipation (i.e., dissociating from the language and culture of the empire) and legitimization (i.e., to prove to themselves and to everyone else that they have a long-standing cultural tradition distinguishable from that of other nations). Only a few of the small nations (as termed by Miroslav Hroch) of the region had their own state in the past and could refer to their own historical narrative (for example, the Poles, Serbs or Hungarians). Others could only refer to their national language and its oral and written tradition as the strongest factor in ensuring the integrity and historical continuity of the community. This explains why the national languages in Central Europe and the Baltic region became the main marker1 of the distinctiveness of the national community, and the bards of the national movement, who raised the prestige of the national language and awakened the historical memory of the nation as well as predicted its revival, were considered the most important cultural heroes. The national community interpreted their biographies as stories of sacrifice or even martyrdom and, after their deaths, these national poets were turned into the objects of quasi-religious worship.2
All the articles in this collection are connected by a general theoretical approach to actualize the cultural nature of national movements and nationalism as an ideology by studying the formation of the national literary canon as one of the practices of nation-building. The investigations published in this book cover a wide historical period (from the national movements that founded modern nations in 19th century to the creation and consolidation of national states in the first half of the 20th century). According to the conclusions, literary canon did not forfeit its function of nation-building after Lithuanians, Poles or Romanians established their statehood. The cultivation of national culture through the mechanism of the literary canon was practiced throughout the aforementioned period until World War II.
Since the end of the 20th century, theoretical deliberations on the canon constantly raise the idea that the general processes of canon formation require detailed empirical research, without which discussions about the national canon (including the memorialization of specific writers) would remain speculative and superficial. This collection of articles attempts to bring together and present in English the barely studied process of interaction between the literary canon and the nation-building in Central Europe and the Baltic region, taking into account various possible research angles. The so-called minor literatures of the region receive little attention outside their cultural area, so even in neighboring countries literary researchers are not familiar with the specificities of the national literature of other countries. We hope that this collection of articles will help historians of literature and nationalism in Central Europe and the Baltic States to better understand the interaction between the formation of the literary canon and nationalism in the region, not only considering the era of nationalism (formation of national movements and national states) but also including the present situation.
This publication opens with Viktorija Šeina’s article in which she discusses the methodological assumptions for researching the formation of the national literary canon as a method for nation-building. The modern nations of Central Europe and the Baltics established themselves through various cultural practices, one of which was the national literary canon, which defined the community’s cultural and national identity. Thus the nation established its canon, and the canon established the nation. In her article, Šeina presents a theoretical framework and methodological tools for conducting descriptive research of canons, and proposes to apply these to studies of nationalism.
The first part of the collection is devoted to the issue of the national literary canon as a means of shaping identity. A survey of established national literary canons in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century permits an analysis of the phenomenon of nationalization of literature characteristic for this period, namely, the close relationship between the concepts of literature and nation, and the role of institutions that disseminated literature. These institutions include educational offices, their networks, publishing houses, and the periodical press, and should be considered in the context of the role they played in employing the literary canon for processes of nation formation. The dominant perspective in studies of nationalism is that the modern nations of Eastern and Central Europe formed according to a model of ethno-cultural nationalism. However, the research on the formation of literary canons in the context of nation-building shows that this process was by no means a unanimous founding of ethnic nations, but rather a site for tensions and interactions between different ideas of nationality (as well as of what constitutes literature). This aspect of the region’s literary culture is revealed in the contributions of Helena Markowska-Fulara, Brigita Speičytė and Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn which address the formation of the literary canon and the ways that it functioned in the land of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 19th century.
In the article “Classicists and the Classics: The Polish Literary Canon in Academia (1800–1830)” Markowska-Fulara analyzes two literary models – the “French” one and the “German” one – which competed in Vilnius and Warsaw university curricula and in the literary studies which were becoming more professional at the start of the 19th century. These models laid the foundation for the early conceptions of the Polish national literary canon as well as influenced the selection of texts, their evaluation, and reading attitudes. Together they correlated with various civic and ethnic concepts of nationality that were characteristic of Polish political thought for that time and encouraged visions of an alternative Polish cultural community. The author evaluates the different literary models as orientation points for the modernization of the Polish nation that appeared at the start of the 19th century, and which mark the boundary between the universalism of the Enlightenment and the valorization of ethno-cultural uniqueness. The first section of this publication concludes with Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev’s article, “Counter-narratives in Greater Romania: Polemical Social, Political and Cultural Engagement in the Avant-Garde Literary Magazine Contimporanul (January–July 1923),” which reveals that these hallmarks of modernization and the tension between them continued to function in the later era of modern nation states albeit in different forms: the author discusses the opposition between the cultural and national homogenizing tendencies, characteristic of Romania’s literary avant-garde during the interwar period.
In a similar way, Speičytė’s article, “The Concept of Lithuanian Literature in the 19th Century,” addresses how the idea of Lithuanian literature, and its different modelings that were formed by intellectuals of Warsaw, Vilnius, and Königsberg universities at the start of the 19th century relate to concepts of civic and ethnic nationhood. The spread of the “new” national literature in the 19th century allows one to see the essential mechanisms of canon formation and nation-building processes. The case of Lithuanian literature shows that the “new” literature, which had functioned in a premodern multi-linguistic cultural context, received nationalizing impulses not only from the Herderian idea of an ethnic nation and culture, but also from the memory of recently lost statehood. The author shows that the tendencies for canonizing bilingual Lithuanian literature were stronger in the first half of the 19th century and were associated with the notion of civic nationalism, and thus fit in with Okulicz-Kozaryn’s analysis of the spread of Polish literature of Lithuania in his article “Towards an Unofficial Canon: Striving to Strengthen the Lithuanian Cultural Community under Russian Domination in the Mid-19th Century.” Yet the efforts lacked institutional support to become fully established, especially once the Russian imperial powers shut down Vilnius University in 1832, and the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities in 1865 which had functioned for just one decade as a center for preserving the civic national culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The ethno-cultural model for the nationalization of Lithuanian literature took root only at the end of the 19th century as a reaction to the repressive politics of the Russian empire toward national and religious minorities.
Okulicz-Kozaryn discusses the important role of the reader, and the reading practices and institutions that organize them under conditions of repressive imperial politics by analyzing the Polish literary field of Lithuania in the middle of the 19th century. The author argues that, at that time, the Polish literature of Lithuania functioned to a certain extent as a separate cultural formation. This formation is linked with the historical memory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was upheld and disseminated by the Vilnius Provisional Archaeological Commission, established in 1855, and the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities. A certain “unofficial canon” of this literature took shape in the Lithuanian reading community, and its central figure was the author Adam Mickiewicz, who had been banned by the Russian imperial censorship. In the literary panorama of Central-Eastern Europe, this body of literature, discussed by the author, arises as a case of unrealized historical potential: a canon, which was not supported by the political-institutional power and thus never became “official.”
Okulicz-Kozaryn’s research on Lithuania’s cultural context, where literary activity was linked to the notion of civic nationalism, is supplemented by Jurga Sadauskienė’s article “The Concept of Lithuanian Folk Song in Lithuanian Folklore 1800–1940” which concentrates on the parallel process of consolidation and efforts to conceptualize an ethnic Lithuanian culture according to the philosophical and anthropological ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder. In the region’s formation of a national literary canon and in processes of nation-formation, oral folklore was considered to be a national “pre-literature,” a source of inspiration for literary works as well as a representation of national culture. The author reveals an attitude common among Lithuanian folklorists in the 19th century who considered the folk song as a resource that had retained “archaic” linguistic expressions and historical memory in the lowest rungs of society; hence, the main aim of publishing and disseminating folk songs was to propagate the public use of the Lithuanian language. However, from the start of the 20th century, folk songs along with authored poetry become more actively involved in the process of national formation and come to be considered no longer as a representation of just one social group, but rather of the entire national community’s culture. The author discusses how the performative power of the literary canon in nation formation processes was reinforced by amateur and professional musical choir cultures, which also included arranged folk songs in their repertoires.
Krystyna Zabawa’s article, “‘Who are you? A little Pole’: The Vision of the Nation and Nationality in the Polish Literary Canon for Children on the Threshold of Independence (around 1918)” and Jagoda Wierzejska’s “State-Building and Nation-Building: Dimensions of the Myth of the Defense of Lviv in the Polish Literary Canon, 1918–1939” analyze the role of the literary canon in national identity politics of the state. The authors discuss the children’s literary canon (Zabawa), established in the restored Polish Republic (1918–1939), as well as the symbolic narrative and literary myth (Wierzejska) of the Polish literary canon at the time of the struggles for independence (namely the defense of Lviv in 1918). The authors reveal to what extent the political interests of a nation state empower the formation of a national identity based on difference, and how the literary canon contributes to this as it is reinforced through state-published books and the educational system. In this way, images central to identity are established (in contrast to the previously mentioned case of the “unofficial canon”), and endure for a long time. Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev’s article presents analogical tendencies of cultural homogenization in interwar Romania, which can be detected in the practices of literary canonization. This can be seen in historical examples where the national literary canon is “sterilized” by removing any multiethnic traces. However, in this case the author concentrates on the opposition that formed in response to this dominant tendency – an avant-garde group of Romanian Jewish writers who gathered together around the journal Contimporanul. This research encourages a consideration of the extent to which avant-garde movements in Central and Eastern Europe may have been influenced by aesthetic “imports” and general processes of societal modernization in Europe, yet at the same time may have also been affected by the canon formation and the tribulations of nation formation characteristic of the region, namely by the tensions arising from the identity politics of the nation state and multiethnic society. Judit Dobry’s survey of Hungarian literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic (“‘The Experience of Change’: Hungarian Literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic”) concludes this section by including the perspective of national minority literature into the purview of research on canons.
The second part of the collection is dedicated to case studies of concrete literary canonizations. As is well known, the criteria according to which canonical texts are chosen and interpreted vary depending on the historical period and cultural context: they are influenced by shifts in concepts of art, literary debates as well as general cultural and social transformations. Even though there exist institutions which deliberately undertake maintaining the canon (the most striking example being school or university literature curricula), but there are also canon-makers, who contribute to the constellation of the canon without much self-reflection (for example, publishers and book stores, libraries, theaters and cinemas making use of literary texts). The canonizing institutions are those that participate in processes of selection and transferal of canonical objects to younger generations, and that thereby they influence the formation of the literary canon (school, university, literary criticism, theater repertoire, the literary marketplace, libraries, monuments, museums, etc.). The second section analyzes various canonizing institutions and their practices for establishing the canonical position of particular texts, authors, and genres, or by refusing to grant them such status.
Studies of the institution of the national poet have formed a separate field within the research on canons. The category of national poet arose in the era of nationalism as the understanding of community hierarchy changed (although some of the writers who were included in this category had long been dead by then). Instead of a monarch as a symbolic figure crowning a strictly hierarchically structured society, there arose a need to create a pantheon of worthy national heroes who were equal in their rights and duties to all other citizens, yet surpassed them in their achievements and patriotic merits.3 A necessary condition for becoming a national poet is the author’s consciously accepting the duty to express collective experiences and to speak in the name of the nation. Thus the preconditions for the status of national poet were not only formed by the very nature of his creative work (the self-representation of the poetic subject as the nation’s poet), but also by canonizing structures (literary criticism, schools, theater, etc.) that declare and establish such a poet. Having one’s own national poet in the era of nationalism had become one of the conditions for the nation’s legitimation: the poet founded the local community’s self-image as well as that community’s image in a global context.
Strategies for the making of the national poet are analyzed in the articles by Gergely Fórizs (“Nation-Building or Nation-Bricolage? The Making of a National Poet in 19th-Century Hungary”), Vaidas Šeferis (“The Borderland between Conflicting Canons: Kristijonas Donelaitis”) and Aistė Kučinskienė (“The Making of the Lithuanian National Poet: Maironis”). The latter two researchers examine the (self)canonization practices of two early Lithuanian national poets, Kristijonas Donelaitis and Maironis. Marijan Dović has argued that in the context of East-Central Europe the Baltic countries stand out because the cults of local national poet were never intensely forged here.4 Such an impression may have stemmed from the comparatively late nationalization process of literature in the Baltic countries. These nations mostly developed their poets’ cults during the interwar period, when they could engage the resources of their newly founded states. Yet perhaps the most important reason why so little is known about this region’s canonization of national poets is the lack of research publications in English. In this collection, the articles of Šeferis, Kučinskienė, and in part Katre Kikas (“A National Epic from Below: Kalevipoeg in the Writings of Grassroots Literati”) markedly contribute to filling this gap. In his article, Šeferis analyzes an especially specific phenomenon: how Lithuanian and German receptions of the East-Prussian writer Donelaitis enter into conflict in the era of nationalism. Kučinskienė analyzes how Lithuanians consecrated the popular writer of patriotic poetry Maironis as their national poet during the years of national awakening. The poet himself played a role in this process by making the central figure of his works a creative persona who dedicates himself to the homeland.
Fórizs analyzes the Hungarian situation of national poet creation and questions the applicability of the term “nation-building” to the region of Central-Eastern Europe. In his article he argues that the mechanistic and voluntarist aspects that are characteristic of this term are only applicable to research of the political nation formation of newly established ex-colonial states (such as the USA). In contrast to the latter, the modern nations of Central Europe, according to Fórizs, did not have a state equivalent in the 19th century (some had one only in the distant past) and understood themselves not as forging their national unit here and now, but rather as a primordial community seeking “revival.” For this reason, Fórizs considers the ideologues of this region’s nationalism not as builders of a nation with a clear plan of action (like America’s Founding Fathers), but rather as handymen (bricoleurs) who take to molding a nation, without a clear plan, out of the previously existing political formations, patchworks of recollections, or remains of mythical narratives in that territory. As an example of such a nation-bricolage Fórizs presents the publishing and translation practices of Gábor Döbrentei and István Széchenyi. Wherever Dániel Berzsenyi’s text did not coincide with the modern Hungarian ideology of nationalism, it was edited according to the will of the translator or else re-interpreted according to the understanding of the publisher. Fórizs considers such practices of nation-bricolage by the Hungarian literati to be a manifestation of cultural nationalism specific to the region of East-Central Europe, and compares this with the compilation of the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg. Kikas examines the contradictory nature of the reception of this Estonian national epic at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The merit of this article is that the author expands the public discussion of the Estonian cultural elite about Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s epic through research of manuscript texts that revealed the often publicly unrepresented attitudes of poorly educated members of society toward this work. Ramunė Bleizgienė in her article “Cultivation of New Readers in the Early Criticism of Žemaitė’s Works (1895–1915)” also writes about the poorly educated community of readers at the end of the 19th century in Lithuania. However, her article focuses not on the readers themselves, but rather on the Lithuanian cultural elite’s self-assigned mission to train the writers to write “correctly” for the folk, so that literature would be of greater use to “our little brothers.”
Through the case of the metaphysical 18th-century Polish poet Józef Baka, Paweł Bukowiec (in his article “Constraints of Canon Constructing: Research into the Paradoxes of Reception of Józef Baka’s Poetry in Polish Literature and Literary Studies”) reveals the problematic evaluation of the pre-nationalist heritage in the era of nationalism. According to Bukowiec, it was the ideological, more so than the aesthetic, “deficiencies” which led Polish literary historiographers to position the work of this poet beyond the borders of the national canon (there was no way that Baka’s texts could be construed as correlating with the aims of the Polish national movement). In her article “The Polish Theater Canon and Comedy – a Complicated Relation,” Anna R. Burzyńska analyzes the influence of 19th-century Polish national independence ideas on the theatrical canon. This research reveals a paradox of Polish culture: even though the origins of the national theater of Poland are closely linked with the flourishing of comedy, starting in the middle of the 19th century, when more “serious” genres become central to the national canon and were prioritized by the Romantics, comedy came to be considered a genre unfit for staging at the National Theater.
The collection of articles concludes with Renata Beličová’s publication “Postmodernist Representation of the Central European Multiethnic Milieu: Marek Piaček.” This article, on one hand, outsteps the chronological boundaries of the volume: it analyzes the power of postmodern musical pastiche to deconstruct the national historical narrative by foregrounding events and participants that had not been given a place in it. On the other hand, this point is illustrated through a discussion of Marek Piaček’s Apolloopera, which is a heteroglossic libretto composed of excerpts from canonical texts of various peoples that lived in Bratislava during the interwar period, so the main focus lies on the reinterpretation of the history of early 20th century.
The present collection of articles expands the current interest in research on Eastern and Central European national literatures, and contributes to it through a specific perspective on the national literary canon. The cases analyzed by the authors of this collection concerning the interplay of the literary canon and nation-building show that the research of cultural nationalism practices in this region has a great potential and can offer weighty contributions to the analysis of the historical and political development of nationalism. Currently, as the ideologies of nationalism are again becoming stronger in the region of Central Europe, various aspects of this research remain pertinent because they can help to better understand processes occurring in this area. We are especially grateful to the Research Council of Lithuania and the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore for partially funding the publication of this collection and providing an opportunity to disseminate this work.
Translated by Vaiva Aglinskas
Bibliography
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