Les Tableaux Lituaniens Dans L’oeuvre D’oscar Milosz
Images of Lithuania in the Works of Oscar Milosz

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines brief narrative and expository texts, also a poem, written by Miłosz, in which Lithuania receives explicit mention. Passages from the fictional autobiography Les Zborowski are seen as the building blocks of later representations of Lithuania; they evoke landscapes seen through the mind’s eye that convey a sense of a near mythic land recalled through memory. Some of the descriptive fragments of Les Zborowski recur in a lecture delivered by Miłosz on March 29, 1919, in Paris. They are brought together into a lyrical coda that invites the reader to imagine a distant land and at the same time, going beyond the surface of poetic language, suggests a dual vision of Lithuania as that palpable reality, both ancient and a newly born state, which best expresses life’s rhythms of decline and resurrection. Three months later, Miłosz delivered a second lecture on Lithuania. The lecture is noteworthy because of a brief account of the author’s near visionary experience when, walking the streets of Kaunas and seeing signs of both poverty and enthusiasm, he reads the scene as comparable to the resurrection of the biblical Lazarus. “La Berline arretée dans la nuit”, a poem, evokes the return to an ancestral home while at the same time pointing to an elsewhere beyond the known. For Miłosz, Lithuania was a native land, a trace of myth and a political entity, also a bit of the real that made poetic and visionary language possible.

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