Gass, William. `The Philosophical Significance' in Literature in Exile ed. by John Glad (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991).

A study of the lives and work of exile writers reveals that the experience of authors in exile is far from being uniform and what is more their perceptions of their status and role differ enormously. This depends to a large extent on factors such as the circumstances in which the writer emigrated, his nationality, the country he moved to as well as the genre he favours, where prose writers usually take a different stance to poets. However, even two writers of the same nationality who emigrated as a result of being persecuted by the totalitarian regime may manifest a totally different attitude towards their condition and their perceptions of their position may be strikingly different. What arises from the examination of exile writers' careers is the extreme fluidity of the term exile. Whilst some writers identify exile with a loss of one's mother tongue, other would not classify themselves as exiles seeing it as term appropriate for denoting political refuges and dissidents. Hence the term exile writer has many different shades and depends on criteria which are used to coin(ukuć) the term exile.

Whilst some exile writers cannot (although they want to) return to their home country, for others, thanks to the changing political situation, the borders of their homeland have once again opened, however, having settled in their adopted country, they would find the new transplantation as traumatic as the original exile. Some are tempted to stretch the term exile so that it also covers `internal exiles'(s'il est avant tout individuel, donc toujours et seulement intérieur, donc placé dans le vécu, les souvenirs, dans un état de révolte - il est une dissidence ou pas? Parce qu'être dissident c'est lutter? Souvenir que selon Kundera (Sabina)chaque nouvel trahison nous éloigne de la première - c'est la meme chose avec l'exile), those who remain in their country with a restricted freedom of expression or simply writers who do not feel at home (for various reasons) in their native land. In the taxonomy of exiles we can distinguish between extreme cases - writers who were forced to leave (or they would have place their life in jeopardy-w niebezpieczeństwie) and can not return to their country. Then there are those, who emigrated in order to speak their mind and those who left to seek experience and refresh their perspective. There are also second and third generation exile writers (Julien Green, Roda-Gill).

Another criterion may be the intended reader. Some writers, having switched languages or adapted their writing to the needs of their new audience, do not consider themselves in exile anymore, although their original reason to leave their country was a political one. Thirdly we need to consider the magnitude of differences between the language and culture of the writer's homeland and his country of adoption. Are East-German writers finding refuge in West-Germany exiles? Another question is in which language the writer expresses himself and if the writer wishes to fit in the native or the adopted (international) literary tradition. When Nabokov switched to writing in English some literary critics proclaimed that he had ceased to be a Russian writer. That does not mean that Conrad(Józef Konrad Korzeniowski) ceased to be a Pole or that Beckett became French. Once again language fails to act as a watershed (punkt zwrotny) and it is difficult to perceive exile writers as an integral group.

For some nationalities (Polish, Russian) there exists a separate exile literary tradition, hence the émigré writers find themselves at home abroad more easily, examples having been set and being there to follow. Russian émigré literature has a tradition which goes back more than four centuries. In the 20th century alone five distinct groups left Russia: the peasants at the turn of the century who left for North America in search of employment, the Jews, the revolutionaries, the First Wave, following the Civil War, the Second Wave, following the W.W.II and the Third Wave in the 70s. There has been a continuous émigré presence outside Russia in the 20th century , but each of these groups kept itself as a separate entity. The maintenance of a separate, viable tradition as shown itself to be a will-o'-the-wisp for Russian émigré letters.

There are a number of themes which are important when talking about exile writers:

a) History - who do exile writers perceive as their predecessors and has the definition of exile changed over time?

b) Leaving - do writers leave out of admiration for another country or are they driven out by negative pressures? Once they have left what are their obligations towards their native tradition?

c) Politics - what role do exiles play in the politics at home, in combating the regime which had exiled them?

d) Literary tradition - is an exile primarily concerned with preserving(nostalgia rather, yes) his native literary tradition or with opening up to the new influences? What are his favourite topics? Is he a part of the incipient `world-literature”?

e) Language - does living abroad undermine or influence the writer's language? Can/should writer change languages? Is so is it an enrichment or an impoverishment? If the writer translates his book does he create a new novel?

f) Commonalties and Difference - what do writers have in common despite different literary traditions? Are some national literary traditions stronger than others?

Gass elaborates on Socrates's case who was found guilty by an Athenian court and consequently banished from his city-state. He says that exile `in ancient sense is severing of blood; it is a loss of family ties, of clan identity, of cultural definition.' he states that exile is much more dramatic for a writer (or a philosopher) for whom the tongue, the power of speech is a tool.

Jan Vladislav, a Czech poet living in France says that he is torn apart between languages, the German which he speaks in Vienna, the English which he speaks with his American and English colleagues, the Czech which is the language of his poetry or the French which has become his second language. `This is the problem of exile: language [...] this opportunity to use many language, to speak and experience them, is one of the positive aspects of exile.'Vladislav suggests that the notion of exile artists has changed over the centuries and that it may have had a different meaning in the Middle Ages or in the 17th and 18th century than it has now. he points out that many of Czech speaking musicians lived outside the borders of their homeland (e.g. Rejcha who taught Berlioz and Gounod at the Conservatoire de Paris and obtained Légion d'Honneur) and who could be simultaneously Czech and French, English or Italian. They did not think of themselves as exiles but felt at home everywhere. He suggests that we might have to view the notion of exile as `a legacy of 18th and 19th century nationalism. Borders were created, which then required passports.'

Jorge Edwards points out that in the past (before the right-wing regime took over Chile) writers travelled freely, often to Paris to become French writers (due to the high status of French literature in South America). They felt at home everywhere which was an altogether different experience from the government-imposed exile.

Miroslavsky, Yury. `Deprived of Fire and Water'.

He notes that the once authoritative Great Encyclopaedia published at the end of the last century defines `exile' as `the general condition of a person unable to live in his native land due to government decree, personal circumstances or choice.' He adds that the encyclopaedia continued that `The Romans did not consider exile to be a punishment... A person found guilty of a crime might move to another country. To prevent such an exile returning ..... a sentence of banishment, interdictio aquae et ignis, was decreed i.e. he was to be cut off from the communal fire and water; if the exile nevertheless chose to return, it was lawful to kill him'.

Vladislav, Jan. `Exile, Responsibility, Destiny'

Vladislav believes that home is not necessarily a geographical, but perhaps a temporal concept. `Our country, our home, our anchorage, the centre of gravity which prevents us from falling back into nothingness, is fixed above all in time.' `Ultimately man is at home at those moments which his memory has led him to accept as his country, his home [...] This is not only a question of individual memory, for a man's home, fixed in time, is shaped not only by his own history, but also by the histories of those who surround him, by his family and tribe, and by the palpable history of tilled(uprawiany) fields, of ancient villages and new cities(habitus INCULQUÉ, ENDOCTORINAGE AND MENTALITY OF CLOSED PEOPLE), and above all by that changeable, unfathomable(niezgłębiony), mythic reservoir of his native language.' The study of ancient or primitive cultures teaches us that rejection of a man by society is an age-old rite. It is a deprivation of that quintessential thing, a man's personality. The proscribed person is abandoned to die as he/she is exposed to all kinds of dangers. In modern times exile is a death penalty in effigy which aims at destroying everything that makes up man's life: history, culture and language, and make him a foreigner somewhere else.

He goes on to discuss the relationship between an individual and the state, placing it in the context of individual's responsibility towards his society, towards the state. Some writers understand their responsibility as a `service to a common cause'(time as mean/outil to change, to ameliorate his society - responsibility placed in time, stretched in a space of time). In Czechoslovakia (and other Central European countries) this cause was conceived primarily in national terms and frequently in the crudest sense of serving immediate needs that usually fell outside the scope(tutaj: poza ramami dehors des cadres de la litterature) of literature. In the name of such needs works of poets like Karel Hynek Macha or Bozena Nemcova were reduced to the level of anecdotal tales and folklore(we're aperceiving the differences beyond the country/ society/group borders). Over the last 100 years many programmes have been announced, more or less overtly(otwarcie) and for every possible political or ideological motive, all of which have stressed the need of literature to serve. Although some writers have contributed to the advancement of such ideas, their aims and aspirations were mostly defined from without with disregard for the intrinsic meaning of literature. In the times when a number of such aims coexist literature finds itself in no danger as writers can choose with which aim they wish to ally if at all, according to what their conscience dictates them. The situation is quite different when a regime proclaims that a particular political programme is universally applicable and binding. Even if a writer agrees with the programme he will find himself sooner or later in a state of inner conflict which is bound to bring him into conflict with the authorities and make him face the consequences of his rebellion: rigorous censorship which forbids them publication or even banishment to forced-labour camps or into exile. Czech history of the post-war years has provided a number of flagrant instances of such practice.

The Czech history has proven to be a series of different interpretations of the writer's role, as expressed by subsequent regimes. According to Communists the writer was responsible to the proletariat, the Politburo, the General Secretary and the principle criterion for evaluating the role of a Czechoslovak intellectual could be summed in Stalin's term, devotion. Similarly tedious description of the writer's role can be found on the other side of the barricades, in the article `Critical Remarks on the Civic Movement for Mutual Assistance' published in 1982 in the exile magazine Svedectvi. Its author, Maritn Sreda, considers the meaning and the mission of non-official literature. His concept of literature is every bit as utilitarian as that of the old-guard communist ideologue. Sreda accuses Czech literature of not being sufficiently active which has its roots in the artists' defence of their freedom of expression, as `their greatest joy derives from the formulation of their personal feelings'.

Vladislav opposes the essay `Spistovatelova vec' by the philosopher, Jan Patocka, who stated that the writer's job is literature , the communication of literary expression by means of language. It is neither the everyday spoken language, not the language of precise concepts and definitions used in philosophy. According to Patocka literature has a third path, to search our `the meaning of existence and its formal expression in the natural language.' He sums up `the creative writer is not ...only a man of imagination and ideas created in `literary' form, or of stories incarnated in conceptualised ideas; the writer is a revealer of life, of the meaning of being, both general and particular.' The responsibility which derives from such a concept of literature is quite a different one from that imposed upon writers by ideologues and politicians who only see their own interests and goals. This is a role which issues from the intrinsic meaning of literature and which searches for the meaning of life and which searches to re-establish and defend its integrity. In short the responsibility of a writer is exactly the same as that of any free man who chooses not to follow the orders of others and who prefers to listen to his own conscience, it is a responsibility which refuses to come to terms with any authorities whatsoever. Vaclav Havel's plays are often concerned with the question of writer's responsibility. With reference to(w nawiązaniu do) Vaculik's novel `The Czech Dreambook' he said that it is `a novel about responsibility, will and destiny - responsibility that is ... stronger than will. It is a novel about the tragedy that arises from this responsibility; about the futility of all human efforts to break out of the role that responsibility has imposed; about responsibility as destiny.'

Liehm says that Czechs are not very good at exile, unlike(w odróżnieniu od) Poles or Hungarians and Czech intellectual emigration is almost entirely a 20th century phenomenon. Czechoslovakia has no equivalent of Polonia, no traditions of two literatures like Russia. Poles have a great romantic literary tradition created abroad and so do Russians. The Czechs don't. In the 17th century, before the birth of the Czech nation, the creation of national entities, national literature and languages, there was a tradition of religious emigration. Comenius was the only great Czech writer and intellectual exile. He became a European writer in exile and his experience of exile constituted of service to humanity in a lingua franca of Europe at the time - Latin. Liehm states that the experience of exile is different for everyone who is forced to leave his homeland, depending on the circumstances. Liehm poses a number of questions such as whether exile writers ought to integrate into their new culture, how they can communicate considering that their instrument is language, whether they should switch language and if so whether they would be accepted, if they should join the émigré ghetto and what, as exile writers, they can bring to the dimension of humanity. Liehm sees the limited importance of testimony of the writer's experience of life under communism. According to him to testify is not enough for a writer who needs another dimension to his existence. Liehm remembers how traumatic exile was for him, a journalist and a writer. He says that it took him fifteen years to become integrated into his new community and many a time he thought that to make a living he would have to abandon his profession. Those who have transformed their work to theatrum mundi (like Joyce or Ibsen) were considered at home unpatriotic. He cites Jakobson who, despite the fact that he spent most of his life abroad, wrote in English, dreamt in Russian, talked about politics in Czech and spoke Polish with his wife, still considered himself a Russsky lingvist.

It is very difficult to define the meaning of exile as every exile's experience is essentially different and the perception of the term has been and is still changing, varying from culture to culture. Virgil Tanase says that he does not suffer as a result of his geographical and linguistic displacement in the same way as Czech writers seem to do, as `in Rumanian culture there is a long tradition of writing in other languages.' However `Rumanian is .... a language I love and in which I wrote with great delight, because it allows more scope than French for artful and sensual literary games. i left for a simple reason - I belong to a small culture, which from time to time feels the desire, the temptation, the arrogance to confront the great writers of humanity.(so, they left their society to wright- it's their aim, goal that pushed the Rumanian) To do so one must arrive at a common denominator: a major language.'

Jiri Grusa says that `the exiled writer is a person who has lost everything but his accent'

Bienek, Horst. `Exile is Rebellion'

Horst Bienek says that `The loss of language is probably the most decisive factor in determining exile; it is what makes exile so wretched for a writer. In the process you lose almost everything: childhood, upbringing, mentality, myth. Even if the exile learns quickly the words of the new language, he still needs a long time to express himself on a literary plane in the new tongue.' Nabokov started writing in English twenty years after he became an exile, after fifteen years Brodsky writes his prose in English but his verse in Russian. Thomas Mann continued writing in German even after 15 years of exile. For Bienek exile is inseparable from the loss of language and he does not regard those who are able to continue to express themselves in their mother tongue and live in a cultural milieu similar to their native one, as exiles. He says that exiles are those who suffer linguistic deprivation. Bienek says that the lot of exile is usually that of misrecognition and deprivation and many exiled writers have fallen into oblivion or even committed suicide as their host countries were unwilling to provide an outlet for their output. He quotes names of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who after spending several years in München accepted a post at Oxford as he received no help from the German authorities or intellectuals. Similarly Ivan Divis, considered the greatest living Czech poet, lives in München but no poetry of his has been so far published in Germany. `For every Milan Kundera, he says, there are a hundred other writers ... who are not even published. A few are translated, only to go unnoticed by the critics and unread by the public. And there are no literary prizes for them. After all they write in a different language.'Hilde Spiel once remarked that 'an exile must not necessarily live within an alien reality. His existence can take place .... in a realm which is spiritual in nature, international.... and should he make a leap into the new idiom.... surprising gains are to be made.' Quoting the example of Witold Gombrowicz, Bienek says that some artists have been inspired by exile giving their work a more universal dimension, enriching it thanks to their experience. He says that this may be relevant to those exiles who have been able to continue writing in their native language (like the Spanish writers who fled to South America), but Russian or German authors find it hard to re-adjust. `The poet can learn this language [of his host country] but it is unlikely that it will serve him as an instrument of his creativity.'

Tanase (just like Makine) says that a writer must learn the literary language almost as if it were a foreign language `to think of the literary language as a simple means of communication .... is not an astute way of looking on the writer's medium .... everyday Rumanian.... did not say what literature wants to say'. `I felt obliged therefore to learn the writer's language as if it were a foreign tongue.... The French I write is ... the literary French which a Frenchman must earn to write - with the same efforts, the same pains, the same difficulties as I myself had. I don't believe in the impoverishment which supposedly occur when one moves from one language to another. I regard this as an enrichment'. He invokes the example of Tzara whose poems in Rumanian he judges inferior to those he wrote in French. In Germany there is Paul Celan and in France Cioran and Ionesco. The difficult writer who does not sell well may encounter the same problems as an exile writer.

Libuse Monikova, a Czech writer who expresses herself in German, says that it was the experience of exile that inspired her to write. When she arrived in Germany she began writing in Czech but felt she was caught in the double trap of language and topic. `My themes were difficult to approach; I felt I was raping them. And I realised how locked I was by the language, I sensed an inability to find the right words, a lack of sufficient distance.' She says that strangeness led her to a greater precision and she felt she had an advantage of not having grown up with German clichés thus being able to use them consciously for stylistic purposes. She says that German language makes one sober and lean and she decided to follow the example of Kafka hoping that German would have the same impact on her style as it had on his. He used the lean language which was the German spoken in Prague (which lacked the full vocabulary of the German spoken in Germany) and he refused to follow the example of Brott who tried to embellish his bare language with Baroque elements.

Limonov, Edward. `Thirteen Studies on Exile'

Limonov believes that life in a foreign country is more interesting than in the country where you were born and grew up, if only because the newness is so stimulating. He says that he consciously moved to France (from the States) knowing that France has a respect for a written text, for the book without any ideological riders clinging to it. The problem often encountered by an exile writer that he is supposed to manifest a stance against the regime that had caused him to emigrate and his novels are expected to be largely political.

Gürsel, Nedim. `Words of Exile'

He says that to him `language is clearly the central problem in our condition as [exile] writers.' He compares his exile to a cave `where Kafka's lamp is always lit' (K. said that he wanted to sit in a cave lit by a lamp in order to find enough peace, darkness and solitude to write). He says that he does not inhabit a city or a country but a language. `Turkish is the cave, where I lie like a stone in the fruit.' He feels thwarted by the French language which surrounds him and begins to structure his phrases. he feels he no longer masters his own tongue. `Although I continue to write in Turkish my syntax is being distorted.'

Tanase says that `one should not try to transpose the genius of one's own language into another language. Likewise any attempt to translate yourself results in a new book.'

Jan Novak says that at first he was writing in Czech for Czech about Czechs whilst living in the States. The he began translating his poetry thus writing for Americans, about Czechs, in Czech. Subsequently he switched languages and was writing about Czechs, in English for Americans. He then went through another phase and began writing about Americans. As far as responsibility towards one's culture is concerned he says that the only responsibility he feels is towards his native literature. He says that although he has switched languages he feels he still in some respect belongs to Czech literature and has some impact on it. Whilst the fate of the nation can only be decided in its country, the fate of literature can be decided anywhere. On reading his English novel in translation he says that `had I written it in Czech it would have been a totally different novel.....I saw how arrested my linguistic development was in Czech and how American the voice was, and it was a very powerful and odd experience.'

Adam Zagajewski says that the art of a writer who is a political exile is under constant pressure to be political, to condemn the totalitarian regime, to fight the forces that had banished the writer from his homeland. But the writer's inner voice is saying `be artistic, be metaphysical'. `It may be that the struggle of these two voices is an ancient one, but I think this dualism is a particularly significant for our time, and perhaps for my generation.'

Karpinsky, Wojciech. `The Exile as Writer: A Conversation About Sorrow and Joy'

Karpinsky points out that for two centuries emigration was the destiny of Polish literature and that the fundamental works of Polish letters, those which shaped its language and imagination, arose outside the borders of his country. He invokes Cioran's La Tentation d'exister and the essay `Avantages de l'exil', in which Cioran comes to the conclusion that novel is not the right genre for an exile writer as it demands a differentiated social base, traditions, precision. Poetry on the other hand gushes; it is direct. He goes on to say that for a poet exile is the perfect state as in the beginning the ground slips from under the exile's feet. But the danger is that the exile poet may become an epigone of his own despair or that the source of his inspiration may run dry. In his commentary Gombrowicz says that there are different types of exiles (internal and external for example), writers who do not writer for their readers as they value themselves more than commercial success, writers who are foreigners in their own land. Milosz said in 1967:

`Exile is the fate of the contemporary poet, regardless of whether he lives in his native land or abroad, because he is almost always torn away from the little familiar world of customs and beliefs that he knew in his childhood. [...] exile simply has to be accepted and everything depends on what use is made of it. In any event, one must discard the myth of creative impotence that supposedly afflicts the poet from the moment the mystic bond between him and his native land is severed.' In The Land of Ulro he admitted that his writing for foreigners was only a pragmatic effort as he did not believe that a deeper understanding was possible outside a shared language and shared historical tradition. In `Notes on Exile' published in 1975 Milosz says that an exile writer becomes sucked into the life of the country to which he has emigrated and his knowledge of his homeland changes from tangible to theoretical. If he remains interested in the same issues as before, his work is bound to lose its immediacy. Thus, to avoid sterility, he needs to undergo a transformation. He has two options: either write in the language of his adopted country or use his native tongue in such a way that he is understood and accepted by his new public. In that case he ceases, in Milosz's opinion, to be an exile. Both Gombrowicz and Milosz felt that they were the future of their native literature, vehemently criticising bo the the Western culture and the culture at home. Milosz argues that certain literary genres such as the realistic novel cannot be maintained in exile. On the other hand, exile, which force one to look at reality from a new perspective, encourages other genres and styles, such as those which deal in the symbolic transformation of reality. he claims that the tragedy of an exile lies in the loss of one's name, the fear of failure and moral anguish. The writer shapes his image by discerning it in the eyes of his readers. He belongs to a community of writers who dispense praise and scorn to each other; by emigrating a writer loses that point of reference. Karpinsky wonders if Milosz's observations could not be applied to writers in general. Even in one's homeland one can feel disinherited and lonely. However, the ultimate test of the writer's achievement is the power of his language and his language may not be able to maintain and develop a sufficient force to be effective in a foreign setting. Milosz believes that whilst the language may become impoverished in certain areas (day-to-day language) in other it may be strengthened and purified.

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Patocka, Jan. O smysl dneska (Purley: Rozmuvy, 1987).

Tenase is an author of several novels in french and in Romanian

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