Lithuania is a void?
- dorapakozdi
- May 26, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: May 27, 2020
9/10
I couldn't wait to write about this book. I've included it in my dissertation, but the restrictions concerning both word count and civility didn't allow me to disintegrate my review into quite that seedy rave that this book deserves. When I finished Vilnius Poker and checked out its Goodreads reviews, I gladly noted that the general bullet points of discussion are universally: heady language, postcolonialism and boobs. I will arrange this discussion of Ričardas Gavelis masterpiece along these topics mostly because I can and secondarily because it makes sense. My intention for the Book Rave series is to include in my review some music I associate with each read. This happens when I'd like to retain the atmosphere of my current book but I can't do it the normal way: reading it. Shopping for groceries, having a bath, and my personal favourite: having five excellent books but no blood pressure to read on a plane. So keep reading for a Bookish Rave!
Heady Language
I started this book with tremendous motivation. I had just finished rereading Sofi Oksanen's novels, Kapuściński's Imperium and a volume of Baltic postcolonial scholarship bound in a godawful colour of biting mint green. I've spent time and energy on figuring out how to take a photo of that book for about a year now, because no amount of editing gets rid of that pungent headache one gets just by looking at it. Now, the contents of the book are excellent, they survey a wide range of topics and works essential for the understanding of the postcolonial motives in Baltic literature. In this volume there is an essay by K. Račevskis titled Towards a Postcolonial Perspective and in it he goes:
“From the perspective of those who have experienced the totalitarian colonialism of the Soviet empire, the defence of the right of individual to human dignity expresses a most obvious and most deeply felt need. It is a need, moreover that finds itself expressed in its simplest most basic form of human communication: the story.”
Defending human dignity, of course is no easy aim for a work of prose. Vilnius Poker goes about it with tightly woven stream-of-consciousness narratives and a fugue-like structure of ideas. Vytautas' narrative is at many times contradicted by Martynas' and when all four of them have finished, we have four different yet eerily similar explanations with four different murderers. Vytautas killed Lolita. He didn't. Stefanija did. All four of them killed her. Lolita's father was the murderer. He is also a KGB officer. He is not, he is but a jovially gardening neighbour. Vytautas' story ends the same place and minute it started. This kind of oppressive claustrophobia firstly enhances the Vilniutian atmosphere and secondly confines the principal characters to a small selection of ideas to discuss.
All of them have a chance to contribute something on what it means to be Soviet Lithuanian. Vytautas diagnoses most of the country with the Vilnius syndrome; a condition that results from giving in to propaganda, terror or false hope and manifests in blank stares, pudgy faces and various bodily deformations. Martynas invents the homo lithuanicus; a type of human born out of the doublethink caused by the clash between the collective pretence of building a communist utopia and experiencing the deportations, killings and repressions of daily life. What differentiates them from the homo sovieticus – who trusts Soviet principles and obeys out of hope – is that Lithuania is lethargic.
“Lithuania is a void, stuffed with rotting memories . . . there’s nothing, nothing, nothing left—only the language. But a language can’t be an object of faith.”
And since language in Vilnius Poker is not to be trusted, Gavelis' proves his diagnoses page by page.
Postcolonialism
The colonial experience of Eastern Europe is different from other parts of the world in one crucial way: Russia and the Soviet union, the colonising force has been considered less civilised than the culture the locals embraced. Annexing capitals like Vilnius or Riga were considered a momentous victories because they helped enhance Russia's cultural significance. This is how one of Gavelis' narrators talks about them:
"It’s simply that there are Russians, and then there are Russians. I’ve already described the one, and as for the other . . . They dragged themselves into Lithuania after the war, frequent- ly on foot, with bundles on their backs, hungry and rude, not even very well aware that this country is called Lithuania. Another category of this gang arrived in Party automobiles, still another—in tanks. These Russians don’t honour or cherish anything; they just spit phlegm on the sidewalks and pretend not to understand Lithuanian. The bad part is, they’re constantly showing their ass, while the others, the real ones, live far away."
Now, I don't feel like including a comprehensive recap of the modern history of the Baltic states, but if you're interested, I recommend checking out Shadowlands, Memory and History in Post-Soviet Estonia by Meike Wulf. It's a cool book because it directly links Estonia's tumultuous 20th-century history to the difficulties Eastern European nations face when trying to meaningfully interact with their past. Wulf compares this historical residue to a shadow looming over half of the continent. I myself have seen this shadow many times. It's there when you peep inside the dilapidated Budapest courtyard, walk through an abandoned rural Jewish cemetery or encounter yet another tracksuit-wearing London youth who exploits the perceived originality of desperate 1990's Eastern Europeans trying their hands at consumerism and gender expression while their economic circumstances were steeply getting worse. But I'm getting carried away.
Vilnius Poker was published in 1989, about a year before Lithuania announced its independence. By this Kafka and Solzhenitsyn have been circulation, and readers were ready for a more particular point of view. Vilnius poker has four of those. The novel consist of four different parts, each narrated by a different person. By far the longest and of most importance is the 269 pages devoted to Vytautas Vargalys, a Brezhnev-era postmodern imprint of Vytautas the Great, XVth-century ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. I've tried to summarise this once, so I'll proceed and cite my dissertation here for the sake of not going insane. " This Vytautas, however have found himself in the oppressive stagnation of Brezhnev-era Vilnius. He was born into the rural Lithuanian intelligentsia and captured as a member of the Forest Brothers. As a hero, his quest is to slay the Basilisk of Vilnius and thus defeat Them. He is however, a faulty hero. Instead of the glory of his partisan days, he is left with paranoia and narcissism. The ideal socialist realist hero is healthy, truthful and warm-hearted and modest. With his history of alcoholism, sexual promiscuity and delusional thinking Vargalys is a parody of this type as well. No matter how deeply he identifies with the great men of history, no matter the ceaseless descriptions of his intellectual and physical superiority, a different, underlying narrative of infertility, anxiety and obsessions exposes him as the colonial subject desperate to overcome the deep-seated inferiority and helplessness planted in him by his camp guards, KGB officers and collaborators. He is constantly denying his condition as a colonised person, although diagnoses the 70-90% of Vilniutian population with the Vilnius syndrome; an illness that affect people who lost themselves to assimilation, propaganda or lethargy. The symptoms are pudgy faces, blank stares, and bodily deformation. This is a common condition of camp survivors, relationships are cherished with a small circle of family and friends, but moral responsibilities towards the state are entirely gone. Vilnius is filled with drunks, cockroaches, rotting leaves and fog. This dynamic sets the circulatory pattern of the narrative in motion and leads right up to the murder of Vargalys’ one true love, Lolita, and then back to the same time and place it had begun."
Boobs
Just searching for the word 'breasts' yields 84 search results in my ebook. That means a striking average of 5.22 boob mentions per page. I have a general advice for male authors™: if the average boob mention per page is higher than it is in most lesbian erotica, you gotta tone your novel down. Here are some depictions of female bodies narrated by Vytautas:
“There didn’t seem to be anything special either about her oval face, or in the predatory thighs, visible even through the cloth of the coat, or in her indolent breasts.”
“The newcomer Beta got truly intrigued, she even leaned forward. I’ve such an urge to stroke her little short-haired head, and then her firm, probably not very large breasts.”
“Janė wasn’t my woman, she wasn’t anyone’s woman; she was the live embodiment of a vagina, a mystical symbol, the goddess of a teenager’s wet dreams.”
I like making fun of the classic unnecessary body descriptions male authors™ have a tendency to bestow on us. They upset the ecology of the text and even a novel as subversive and complex as Vilnius Poker starts reading itself like a scene from League of Maidens. My initial plan was to compile a list of different ways breasts are described in this novel. Earlier, I mentioned how the branching, tangled narration helps amplify the discussion being had. Now, when that discussion is broken by lurid descriptions of female body parts, it breaks the flow and defeats the purpose of the whole setup. The reason why Vytautas speaks about women he does is because he was shut in a GULAG camp for a long time, and didn't see women for about a decade. The one time he did, during that time was traumatic and I will not describe it here. My only substantial critique of this novel is that reading these descriptions of female bodies is horrible to read through, and one mention of the roots of such misogyny is simply not enough for 439 pages.
Bibliography
Gavelis, R. (2009). Vilnius Poker. Rochester: Open Letter.
Račevskis, K. (2006). Towards a Postcolonial Perspective. In: V. Kelertas. ed., Baltic Postcolonialism. 1st ed. New York: Rodopi.
Wulf, M. (2016). Shadowlands: Memory and History in Post-Soviet Estonia. New York: Berghahn Books.
Rave
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