Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1873–1944)

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JURGIS BALTRUŠAITIS

A Lithuanian and Russian Symbolist 1873-1944

In commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Jurgis Baltrušaitis' death, this entire issue is devoted to introducing his works to the English-speaking world. As a writer he belongs to the literature of two nations, the Russian and the Lithuanian. Since he is known only to a few, especially in Western literary circles, we fell compelled to offer what is hoped are representative examples of his work in poetry, prose and literary criticism.

It is known that in his student days Baltrušaitis' first attempt in composing poetry was made in Lithuanian.1 For unknown reasons, however, he soon chose to use only the Russian language for his literary endeavors. Early in his career he began to translate into Russian the works of Maurice Maeterlinck, Henrik Ibsen, Giovanni d'Annunzio, Gerhart Hauptmann, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde and since 1899 his poetry began to appear in Russian. At the turn of the century he became acquainted with leading Russian symbolists, some of whom became his close friends. During his relationship in the publishing house of "Skorpion" and also while a member of the editorial board of the symbolist review "Vesy", he developed a very personal and literary relationship with Konstantin Balmont and Valery Briusov. In the second decade of the twentieth century Viačeslav Ivanov was one of Baltrušaitis' literary companions and it seems that the latter shared some of the former's belief on poetry and the duty of a poet.

The symbolist movement in Russian literature reveals the vitality of its participants and the diversity of their interests and attitudes toward symbolism in general. The Symbolist writers distinguished themselves by their inconsistency because of their radically shifting opinions during the period from 1894 to 1910 when symbolism dominated the Russian literary scene. Throughout that period Baltrušaitis was an active participant, but at the time he can hardly be said to have exhibited the same variable, mercurial traits. He never expressed any strong views during their literary and ideological discussions. This was due partly to his frequent and prolonged sojourns between 1900 - 1913 in Italy, Switzerland and other Western European countries and partly because Baltrušaitis attached no significant value to any literary school or group.

His literary works show no distinct change of attitude toward the use of literary devices; instead they represent a rather gradual development from the beginning to the end in the realm of his aesthetic beliefs and poetic techniques. Baltrušaitis was probably one of the most consistent of Russian symbolists.

The First World War completely changed Baltrušaitis' life in regard to his personal and literary activities. After the German invasion of Lithuania in 1915, many Lithuanians fled to Russia, and a considerable number of them settled in Moscow. We see Baltrušaitis helping his compatriots, for example, working on the Committee for Lithuanian War Refugees or helping students enter the university. This renewal of a relationship with his compatriots which had been discontinued in his teens, influenced the future activities of Baltrušaitis. From 1917 to 1920 he devoted his time and energy to two worlds: the Lithuanian and the Russian. With the former, his ties became stronger and more intimate, whereas with the latter, he continued social and cultural relationships. After his appointment in 1920 as a Lithuanian envoy to the Soviet Union, he ceased to be an active participant in Russian social and literary activities; however, he maintained personal contact with his Russian friends. Within a few years time Baltrušaitis' name as a poet disappeared from the Soviet press, and it was not mentioned even in studies devoted to Russian Symbolism.

Just when Baltrušaitis again began writing poetry in Lithuanian is difficult to ascertain. He often told his Lithuanian friends that he began to write in Lithuanian after 1905, but to date there is nothing to substantiate this claim. His first poem in Lithuanian was written and published in 1927. At present we know of only eight poems that were written in Lithuanian between 1927 and 1939. The vast majority of Baltrušaitis' Lithuanian poetry was written after his retirement from the diplomatic service in 1939 when he lived in Paris.

The occupation of Lithuania first by the Soviet Union (1940) and then by Germany (1941) made it difficult for Baltrušaitis' poetry to reach his native country. Nevertheless, his collection of poems, Ašarų vainikas (The Wreath of Tears) was smuggled from France into Lithuania and published in 1942. Due to post war Soviet literary policies, Baltrušaitis as a poet was completely ignored in the literary history of Lithuania for almost 20 years.

In the sixties Baltrušaitis was apparently "rehabilitated". At first his name was mentioned from time to time in the press. Then several articles on his life and work appeared. No doubt, the biggest event in Baltrušaitis' revival was the publication of his Lithuanian and Russian poetry in his native country (See the review in this issue of Lituanus). Baltrušaitis" poetry was very favorably reviewed in both Lithuanian and Russian Periodicals; the collections of his poetry sold out within a few weeks.

At present Baltrušaitis enjoys a definite renaissance in Lithuania. The centennial of Baltrušaitis' birth and the thirtieth anniversary of his death, for example, received a great deal of attention from the Soviet regime. On this occasion numerous articles about the poet were published. Several exhibits of Baltrušaitis' work, public commemorations and recitals of his poetry have been organized in Vilnius and Kaunas.

Baltrušaitis is primarily a poet. Nevertheless, he wrote several short stories, literary articles and reviews on Russian as well as on European writers. His poetry speaks in many moods and states of mind. In order to understand and to fully enjoy his poetry — or that of any other symbolist writer — it is necessary to have a certain knowledge of his views on life and art. These views are best expressed in Baltrušaitis' articles and reviews.

In organizing this issue, therefore, the selections have been made to provide not only the representative samplings of Baltrušaitis' creative activities, but his aesthetic views as well. The articles and reviews have been taken from Russian journals and literary reviews and all of them appear in English for the first time.

The essay "On the Essence of Art and the Creative Duty of the Artist," originally delivered as a lecture to a Russian audience in Moscow (1915), remained as a manuscript; it later appeared translated and published in Lithuanian. Baltrušaitis' views on pictorial art are expressed in the article "The Distinguishing Inner Marks of Reorich's Painting". These views are very similar to those found in Baltrušaitis' voluminous still unpublished correspondence with his literary friends. Baltrušaitis' essay "To the Memory of Emile Verhaeren", written a few days after the death of this Belgian poet, present Baltrušaitis' views on modern poetry as well as the role of the poet in the twentieth century.

It is regrettable that the short story "Legend of the Torches" does not provide the best sampling of Baltrušaitis' prose. His other stories are too long for inclusion in this issue.

Delija J. Valiukėnas' article "Jurgis Baltrušaitis and William Blake: A Brief Comparison" places Baltrušaitis in a better perspective. Valiukėnas' article as well as this issue of Lituanus would hopefully provide an impetus for readers to become better acquainted with Baltrušaitis' work.

B. V.

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JURGIS BALTRUSAITIS AS RESCUER
OF RUSSIAN POETS AND ARTISTS
FROM BOLSHEVIK PERSECUTION

by
KAZYS (CASIMIR) NORKELIUNAS
Marist College

Jurgis Baltrusaitis was a Russian-Lithuanian poet, one of the original founders of Russian Symbolism. His overall contributions to the Silver Age of Russian Culture were not insignificant. Yet to this date, he is insufficiently known or appreciated in English-speaking countries. From 1899 to 1911, Baltrusaitis was closely associated with the Symbolist Movement, its publishing house "Skorpion" and the literary journal Vesy. As a poet of Russian Symbolism, he occupies a unique place. Stylistically, Baltrusaitis is a refined bard of mystical-metaphysical verse, somewhat akin to William Blake. His philosophical, idealistic poetry has assured him a significant place in the annals of twentieth-century Russian literature.
Poetry as a witness to history occupies an important role in the professional career and artistic life of Jurgis Baltrusaitis, as it does in Boris Pasternak's and Anna Akhmatova's, for example. As a famous Russian symbolist, widely known in the pre-revolutionary culture ferment, i.e., in the Silver Age, Baltrusaitis is remembered not only as a poet, but also as a diplomat of the highest caliber. It is in his capacity as Lithuania's Ambassador to Moscow from 1920 to 1939, that he achieves importance in Russian, Lithuanian and European histories, both diplomatic and literary. To quote Joseph E. Davies, U.S. Ambassador to Soviet Russia (1935-1943) who met Baltrusaitis in Moscow, Davies has this to say about him: "...I found the Minister Baltrusaitis was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and had translated his works into Russian". (Davies, p. 142) The occasion prompting this remark is recorded in Davies' famous diaries (Mission to Moscow) in the entry for June 29, 1937: "in the evening we had a dinner for 36 in honor of the Lithuanian Minister, a poet, quite famous and a great friend of the U.S.A."
Students and experts of Russian Symbolism are well aware of Baltrusaitis's contributions to the movement and his role in the founding of the "Skorpion" publishing house and the magazine Vesy. We will not attempt to elaborate on these contributions in this work. The occasion calls for a solid review of his impact on Russian literary history during the post-revolutionary period, at the period of the creation of the Bolshevik State. Briefly and to the point, Baltrusaitis saved many of his Russian fellow poets and intellectual friends form Lenin's deliberate campaign to exterminate the intelligentsia, as promulgated in the Secret Decree of June, 1922, ordering ,,anti-Bolshevik artists" to be driven out of Russia.
The following is a roster of nineteen (and an incomplete number as such) famous Russian poets who were active at the time of the Revolution, regardless of their ideological orientations or political attitudes towards the Bolsheviks: 1. Alexander Blok, 2. Nicholai Gumilev, 3. Velimir Khlebnikov, 4. Konstantine Bal'mont, 5. Zinaida Gippius, 6. Vladislav Khodasevich, 7. Vyacheslav Ivanov, 8. Georgi Ivanov, 9. Valery Briusov, 10. Andrey Bely, 11. Sergey Esenin, 12. Vladimir Majakovsky, 13. Marina Tsvetaeva, 14. Fyodor Sologub, 15. Mikhail Kuzmin, 16. Anna Akhmatova, 17. Boris Pasternak, 18. Nikolai Kliuev, 19. Isaac Babel. This is just a meager segment of victims' of Lenin's and Stalin's terror perpetrated on Russia's most talented artists.
Baltrusaitis protected, saved or rescued many prominent Russians from destruction. He did this in his official capacity as Lithuania's Chief Ambassador to Moscow, (from 1920 to 1939). In the reminiscences and memoirs of artists that made it safely to the West, we find frequent reference to Baltrusaitis' heroism. Boris Zaitsev, a well-known novelist and short story writer, in his memoirs Dalekoe, (The Distant Past) related how Baltrusaitis saved the life of Konstantine Baltmont, the famous "decadent" symbolist poet and a close personal friend. Bal'mont's life was endangered when he publicly denounced the idea of using art for political propaganda, as per the theory of "Social Realism". When the Cheka (the secret police) questioned him about his political loyalties, Bal'mont retorted that he belonged to only one political party and that was the "Party of the Poet". With that answer, Bal'mont's fate would have been sealed, if not for Baltrusaitis. (Zaitsev, pp. 45-46) To quote Zaitsev, "...in 1921 Bal'mont went abroad. His true friend, Baltrusaitis, who was then the Envoy to Moscow, obtained for him a permit to leave the country, thereby saving Bal'mont's life". (Berberova, pp. 26869) A year or so later, Baltrusaitis drew up similar papers for Boris Zaitsev and his family, permitting them to flee Russia.
A similar situation develops in the case of Andrey Bely in that he needed Baltrusaitis' assistance to emigrate. Bely became disillusioned with both the Bolsheviks and their restrictions on literature. In 1921, Bely got as far as Kaunas, Lithuania, a safe distance from the Bolshevik regime. His plans at the time were to go to Berlin and from there proceeded to Switzerland to continue his collaboration with Rudolf Steiner. It is with the direct assistance of Baltrusaitis that Bely was issued a visa to.travel and live in Berlin. To quote Konstantin Mochulsky, pp. 222-3):

Finally with the help of the Lithuanian ambassador [to
Moscow] the poet lsymbolist] J.K. Baltrusaitis, a German visa
was obtained, and Bely departed for Berlin.

Baltrusaitis' and Bely's close professional collaboration went back to the founding of Vesy in 1904; both were members of the journal's editorial staff.
Perhaps the most dramatic account is Baltrusaitis' attempt to save Osip Mandelstam. Of the poets that were hounded and persecuted by Stalin, Mandelstam's is the most harrowing case. Mandelstam bitterly opposed Bolshevism. At an informal gathering in 1934, at the Moscow apartment of Boris Pasternak, Mandelstam recited scathing verses insulting to Stalin. The poem which does not explicitly mention the dictator by name, runs like this:

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer And his boots gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broadchested Ossete.

After the arrest for this poem about Stalin, Mandelstam was in danger of being executed. To save him from this fate, a number of prominent people interceded on his behalf, including Baltrusaitis. In her classical memoir, Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda, Osip Mandelstam's widow, provided the drama of the events:

At a congress of journalists taking place in Moscow just at that
time, Baltrusaitis frantically made the rounds of the delegates and,
invoking the memory of Gumilev who was shot in 1921, begged them to
save M. from a similar fate. I can imagine how this combination of
names sounded to the ears of our hard-bitten journalists of those
years, but Baltrusaitis was a citizen of a foreign country and they
could scarcely expect him to be impressed by the suggestion that it
was better not to "get involved". Baltrusaitis had long before had a
presentiment of what M.'s end would be. At the very beginning of the
twenties (in 1921, before the execution of Gumilev) he had urged M.
to take out Lithuanian citizenship. This would have been quite
feasible, since M.'s father had once lived in Lithuania and M. even
went so far as to hunt out some papers and take them round to
Baltrusaitis, but then he thought better of it: you can't escape
your fate and better not try. (Mandelstam, p. 27)

Well, we know that these efforts were abortive, Stalin made sure of that. There are other cases of Baltrusaitis' diplomatic intercession on behalf of fellow artists. Marc Chagall, the expressionist, famous Russian-Jewish painter, also had lost favor with the Bolsheviks. The government withdrew financial support because his art was considered decadent. Chagall made many efforts to emigrate abroad and finally succeeded with the aid of Maxim Gorki and Demian Bedny. Both writers, politically close to the new regime, prevailed on A. V. Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar of Culture and Education, to issue Chagall an exit visa. Baltrusaitis' role, in Chagall's case, was different from his other involvement. He helped save over forty major Chagall paintings belonging to the artist's early period. Baltrusaitis did this by permitting the paintings to be shipped by diplomatic pouch via a courier to Lithuania. The account is given to us in Sidney Alexander's Marc Chagall. (p. 241) Baltrusaitis therefore, saved Chagall's early work by sending it to the free West.

The recent biography of Victoria Schweitzer on Marina Tsvetaeva gives us another factual entry on Baltrusaitis' efforts to get Tsvetaeva out of Russia. In 1921, Tsvetaeva wanted to get a travel visa to Riga, Latvia and from there make the attempt to join her husband, Sergey Efron, at that time living in Berlin. The prospect of departing Russia was undertaken by Baltrusaitis to procure a visa sometime in October of 1921. With much personal indecision and delay, Tsvetaeva did not depart Moscow until May 11, 1922 and successfully traveled via Riga to Berlin where she joined Sergey. All indications of the success of this enterprise point to the diplomatic service rendered by Baltrusaitis to one of the most important women poets of this century. (Schweitzer, pp. 216-18)
In an article by Leonid' Sabaneev entitled "My Meetings: the Decadence", appearing in Memoirs From the Silver Age, we find the mention of Baltrusaitis' close working association with Vyacheslav Ivanov during the early period of the Bolshevik regime. The two men worked for Lunacharsky's Peoples' Commissariat of Culture and Education. It is that section of Sabaneev's article that seems to be indicating Baltrusaitis' efforts to get Ivanov to leave Russia as well (i.e. to emigrate abroad). (Kreid, pp. 348-52) By the way, in 1918, Baltrusaitis was elected President of the Soviet Russian Writers' Union and Chaired its Section of Theater Performance, known as T.E.O. (Terras, p. 38) (Khodasevich, p. 347).
In 1922, he also helped two more friends escape Soviet Russia, the accomplished poet-critic Vladislav Khodasevich and his wife Nina Berberova. She writes about Baltrusaitis in her memoir The Italics Are Mine. (Berberova, p. 146).
The story was personally related to me by Nina Berberova herself, when she taught Russian at Yale University in 1961. At that time, I was taking a course in advanced conversation-composition Russian in which we did a great deal of reading and writing. The corrected homework was religiously handed back at the next class meeting. It was a relatively small group of students, about 12, meeting every day for two hours for six weeks. I remember Professor Berberova being impatient with students whose papers where sprinkled with corrections in scarlet. My performance in the class was average, but she never lost her patience or got angry with me. At that time, I wondered to myself why I was being spared!
We were all in awe of Professor Berberova. Her high level of cultural sophistication came through in the manner she conducted herself and her class. If we were reading Chekhov or Turgenev, or stories by other Russian writers, she would embellish the topics with the erudition and interesting anecdotes. There was a Russian table that summer at the university dining hall where those pursuing Russian language, met during lunch for practice with their professors.
Nina Berberova frequented these conversation sessions. At times she would reminisce on the pre-revolutionary Russian world of art and literature, of which she was a participant. It was on one occasion, towards the end of the semester, that Professor Berberova asked me to see her after class. I felt intimidated and anxious regarding this request to meet. It immediately occurred to me that my work might not be on par with the rest of the class and that I would be taken to task for my shortcomings. Berberova could be rather sharp in her correction of mistakes in the language. I hoped that I would not be reprimanded. As it turned out, she asked me if I would have lunch with her.
Nina Berberova said that she wanted to share some private thoughts with me and asked whether or not I had ever heard of Yury Kazimirovich Baltrusaitis or read any of his poetry. My answer was affirmative to knowing of and having read some of his poetry, but in Lithuanian, not Russian. And I followed up with the comment that when I am fluent in Russian I will read his Russian verse. During lunch, Berberova related part of the story about Yury Kazimirovich, as she called him. Nina said I would appreciate hearing it, because I was majoring in Russian language and literature and also because I was Lithuanian. In detail, she narrated how Baltrusaitis had helped draw up legal papers for Vladislav Khodasevich, her husband, and her permitting them to leave Moscow. This resulted in their safe passage abroad to Prague. Later the two established themselves in Paris, safe from Lenin's persecution of Russian intelligentsia.
In conclusion, Baltrusaitis may not be on the same scale as Schindler, but in a modest way he did save a number of Russian artists from Bolshevik repression and persecution in his diplomatic capacity as Lithuania's Ambassador to Moscow. As for Nina Berberova's influence on my career as a scholar of Russian literature, specialist in Russian symbolism, Baltrusaitis was the topic of my doctoral dissertation and has become a life long pursuit.

References:

Alexander, Sidney. Marc Chagall: A Bibliography.
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978.
Berberova, Nina. The Italics are Mine.
New York: Harcourt, Brace World, Inc., 1966.
Davies, Joseph, E. Mission to Moscow.
New York: Pocket Books Inc. 1941.
Khodasevich, Vladislav. Literaturnye statu i vospominanya.
New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1954.
Kreid, V. Vospominaniia o Serebrianom Veke (Memoirs form the Silver Age).
Moskva: "Respublika", 1993.
Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope.
New York: Athenaeum 1976.
Mochulsky, Konstantin. Andrej Belyj.
Paris: YMCA Press, 1955.
Schweitzer, Viktoria. Tsvetaeva.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992.
Terras, Victor. Handbook of Russian Literature.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Zaitsev, Boris. Dalekoe.
Washington D.C.: Inter-language Literary Associates, 1965.

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Some of his poems translated into English here.