Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
It is not by chance that the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova's only book of poetry published in English appeared with a laudatory introduction by Nobel Laureate Josef Brodsky and concludes with a dialogue between Venclova and Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Forms of Hope is a collection of Venclova's literary/political essays and lectures on post-World War II Eastern European cultural matters. Secretly, the book becomes a great moral document, and one of the keys to understanding postwar Europe, with some gentle religious implications. Venclova's work is almost a parable instructing us on the value of mankind and the literary arts.
Exiled from Soviet Lithuania in 1977, Venclova has found his way to Yale and Harvard, where he is a professor of Slavic studies. Some of these essays originally appeared in New York Review of Books and New Republic.
Synopsis
In this collection of essays, acclaimed Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova reveals the tangled relationship between poetry and politics in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. His perspective on Eastern Europe in the twentieth century is that of a political dissident, a human rights campaigner, a writer, and a critic. His political writings explore and clarify what it means to belong to a nation, while his analysis of the work of major Russian and Polish writers produces a definite view of what it means to be a poet. Included here are essays published in the New York Review of Books and The New Republic, such as ones on subjects from South Africa to Ivan the Terrible, as well as a famous dialogue between the author and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Venclova currently teaches Russian and Polish literature at Yale University.