Voices from Istanbul and Tekerda/Rodostó

Forced displacement is conspicuously present in the founding literary and religious texts of ‘Western civilization’, for example in Adam’s and Eve’s eviction from Paradise as well as the Babylonian and Egyptian captivities of the bible, or in the exilic adventures of Odysseus struggling to get home to Ithaca. Exile was a social and political practice in Greece by means of ostracism; in Rome it was practised as a result of arbitrary decisions of the Senate, and, later, by whimsical or cruel tyrants. Cicero and Ovid were among the victims. The exile practices of the Medieval and Renaissance Italian city states adopted the Roman principles but adjusted them to the new political and social situations.Reference Starn⁴ The victims included, as we know, Dante and Petrarch.

In the modern period, writers were often exiled together with others, whether on ethnic, religious, or political grounds, but this did not necessarily mean that the writer continued his or her group affiliations in exile. Some did, indeed, devote much or most of their exile life to rectify the injustice done to their group. As a rule, these exile writers remained ‘captives’ of (or loyal to) their pre-exilic world-view, even if they modified it to some extent. Others, however, went their own individual way, or chose for another group affiliation via language, citizenship, or personal interest. In the post-medieval period, the mentioned new forms of violent mass displacements emerged: the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal, the flight of the Huguenots, the emigration of aristocrats and clergymen from the terror of the French revolution, and the barbaric repatriations of the 20th century. These have often enough been portrayed in literature, but relatively seldom by those that were actually involved in them. Take, for instance, the case of Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius), one of the first and greatest exiles in modern history, who led his Moravian Brethren into exile to escape the religious persecution of the Counter-Reformation. However, his truly nomadic personal life separated him from his group. He went (in this order) to Leszno in Poland, to Stockholm in Sweden, to Elbing in Prussia, to England, to Sárospatak in Hungary (then part of Transylvania), back to Leszno, and finally to the Netherlands, where he died in 1670. He became, how could it be otherwise, a European writer and educator, whose plurality of names already reveals his transnational identity.

The much less known Hungarian Kelemen Mikes (1690–1761) represents a very different exile, one that never meant for Mikes himself a ‘Europeanization’. In a historical retrospective, his life and writing do establish, however, an important transnational link – reason enough to regret that his only literary work, the Törökországi levelek (Letters from Turkey) has not been published to my knowledge into any foreign language.Reference Mikes⁵ In any case, these posthumously published letters (1794) constitute the highlight of 18th-century Hungarian literature.

Mikes, born into a Hungarian noble family of Transylvania, became at age 17 a page of the Transylvanian Prince Ferenc Rákóczy II, and he stayed in his service to the very end of his life. Rákóczy fought a famous religious and national war against the Habsburgs but lost and was forced into exile in 1711, which took him and his followers to Poland, briefly to England, a few years to France, and finally, in 1717, to Turkey. The Rákóczy exiles were settled in 1720 in Tekirda (Rodostó in Hungarian) on the Sea of Marmara, where they enjoyed the support of a series of Sultans for the rest of their lives. ‘Enjoy’ is hardly the term the Hungarians themselves would have used to describe their disposition in Turkey, although the support they received was rather generous, and the Hungarians were usually grateful for it. As Mikes wrote in a fictional letter dated January 16, 1725:

In the next decades, Mikes’ remarks about the Turks did not always replicate this high praise, but he continued to assert that the Turks were the most peaceful community in town. The Greeks were Christian but stand-offish, the Armenians worried about their womenfolk. The Jews, writes Mikes, are like everywhere else (one wonders what he means by this). The four ethnic groups had one Turkish judge, but each of them had also a judge to plead in front of the mayor (cadi). They lived in such isolation from each other that the plague seldom spread to all four of them (Ref. Reference Mikes5, pp. 60–61). The isolation of the Hungarians gradually worsened as their exile community became gradually older, without significant fresh young blood.

No, it cannot be said that Rodostó opened for Mikes and his fellow exiles the door to a broader and worldlier social universe. And yet, reading the gentle contemplative Letters from Turkey, one becomes aware that Mikes’s lack of inter-ethnic social contact, his painfully felt bachelorhood, and his generally dull life forced him to focus more and more on a virtual world of the mind. Inasmuch as his letters record empirical observations, they tend to be comparative and perspectival, indicating that he liberated himself from the limitations of his dearly beloved Transylvania.

Mikes was a unique writer and personality, but his exile in Turkey was by no means a singular event. Roughly a century later, after the suppression of the 1848–49 Hungarian revolution and war of independence, another important group arrived in Turkey, consisting of Hungarians and Poles. Lajos Kossuth, the leader, and his entourage left fairly soon, followed by the Polish military commander Henryk Dembińsky and others. But the great Polish military leader Józef Bem remained there to the end of his life, and even converted to the Muslim religion – reason enough for the Polish Roman Catholic Church to deny him a religious burial when his remainders were brought home to an independent Poland. Count Cartorisky, who was for decades, in Paris, head of an unofficial Polish ‘government in exile’, started in 1842 in Istanbul a second Polish exile centre. Although it was never completed according to plans, Polonezköy (or Adampol) in the outskirts of Istanbul remains to this date a community with many Polish lieux de mémoirs.

The last significant European exile group came to Istanbul and Turkey in the 1930s, within a programme that Ataturk had started, to introduce advanced science, technology and scholarship in Turkey. The programme became politically controversial, as many of those who came were German Jews fleeing Hitler. Although there were no writers in this group, one of the greatest scholarly books for and on Europe, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, was written in Istanbul by a European exile. The distance from Central Europe and the absence of great libraries offered perhaps the kind of constraints and detachment that such a panoramic European book needed.

Literary exile in Istanbul and Turkey could contribute to a non-imperial conception of a literature for Europe because the Ottoman Empire and its successors were interested in aiding resistance against the two imperial powers, the Habsburg monarchy and the Tsar’s Russia, that dominated in the 19th century the central and eastern parts of Europe. We may add that Istanbul contributed in other ways as well to a literature for Europe, and not only through its own writers who were consciously oriented towards Europe, like the recent Nobel-Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. Curiously, Istanbul and Izmir were Albanian and Bulgarian cultural and publication centres in the early years of their national awakenings, even though these movements were directed against the Ottoman Empire in the first place.

Voices from Tomis, Buenos Aires, and Madrid

My introductory motto is taken from the title of a book that was published in Paris in 1960 and won the Prix Goncourt the following year.Reference Horia⁶ The title is puzzling, but the subtitle reveals the actual subject: ‘journal d’Ovide à Tome.’ This is a fictional diary that a fictional Ovid kept during his ten years of exile in Tomis, on the coast of the Black sea. It anticipates such recent fictional accounts of Ovid in exile as David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life,Reference Malouf⁷ Christoph Ransmayer’s Die letzte Welt,Reference Ransmayer⁸ and Alexander Zorich’s cryptohistorical Roman Star.Reference Zorich⁹

This fictional diary covers the first eight of Ovid’s ten-year exile. It opens with a rejection of the divine but tyrannical Augustus: ‘They adore him like a god, but nobody loves him. Though he is the author of Peace in general, and he created the greatest Empire the world ever had, he also generated Fear in people, and his own fear of them’ (Ref. Reference Horia6, p. 17). This Ovid has retained some nostalgic reminiscences of the imperial centre, of its splendour and of the personal glory in which he had basked there, but fear is still in his bones and religion cannot offer solace: ‘I cry. I am afraid and freezing, and the gods don’t exist’ (Ref. Reference Horia6, p. 19). As he gets gradually alienated from his past, the exile opens his eyes to a world around him that he was accustomed to reject as ‘barbaric’. He continues his former amorous life with local mistresses, but, more important, he develops an intimate but asexual relationship with Dokia, the local woman who takes care of his household. It is with the help of Dokia’s family and relatives that he is able to undertake an extensive roundtrip deep into the barbarian territory north of Tomis, all the way to the Danube delta. During the voyage he learns about the henotheistic religion of the Getes (or Getae), which comes close to monotheism, for the chief god Zalmoxis is practically exclusive. Death means returning to him. As Ovid gradually learns more and more about Zalmoxis and his veneration among the Getae, he comes to see how frivolous the Roman religion and its practices are. For him, the genuine and true god ‘is born in exile’.

However, the title has a second meaning as well, for the author weaves into Ovid’s exile story another divine birth, namely that of Christ. The connection is established quite clumsily, by means of a visitor to Tomis who claims he was actually present in Bethlehem at his birth. But the weak narrative device allows a coupling, not only of the two new gods, Zamolxis and Christ, but also of two post-Roman cultures, the Christian one and that of the Getae, the tribal name that represents here also the Dacians and the other ‘barbarian’ people living around and above the Danube delta. Ovid speaks the language of the Getae (the historical Ovid is said to have written now-lost poems in their language), and he envisages a time when their culture will flourish and the now glorious Roman one will decline and vanish. He is too old to participate actively in the dawn of this new civilization, but he is pleased when the secret around Dokia unravels: she is the lover of the Roman commander of Tomis, Honorius, and has a child from him. Towards the end of this book, Honorius deserts from his post, and this exemplary interracial family moves to Getae country to start a new life. Ovid, who had maintained a friendly relation with Honorius throughout, will now have to live a truly solitary life for the last two years of his life, but he is somewhat consoled by the vision of a new society that will supersede the decadent Roman one that treated him so unjustly.

Who, then, was the author of Dieu est né en exil? Somebody who has himself experienced the agonies of exile – and hence probably not a Frenchman? Indeed, it was the Romanian author Vintilă Horia, who fled in 1945 from Romania, first via Rome to Buenos Aires, and subsequently to Madrid, where he settled and lived until the end of his life in 1992. He was forced into exile because he wrote before and during the war a number of right-wing and anti-Semitic texts. A Romanian communist court gave him a life-long prison sentence in absentia.

This biographical information may have some relevance to our understanding of Horia’s book. There is nothing anti-Semitic or chauvinistic in it, but we now recognize that Ovid’s exile, and, above all, the new life of the Dokia-Honorius family, is Horia’s subtle way of reconfirming the so-called Daco-Roman ideology about the origin of the Romanian people, whose claim to historical truth is disputed. In a final note to his book Horia renders a ‘fervent’ homage to the Romanian archaeologist Vasile Parvan, for providing him with material on the history, religion and everyday life of the Dacians (Ref. Reference Horia6, p. 311). Exile may have changed Ovid’s world-view, but it only softened Horia’s.

Exile voices from Paris

The capital of European and world literature was, for a very long time, Paris. For the last two centuries it also acted as a magnet, attracting exiles, émigrés, and expatriates of all sorts, which were only partly counterbalanced by French writers, who left Paris because of the 1789 revolution (e.g. Chateaubriand), the tyranny of Napoleon (e.g. Mme De Staël and Benjamin Constant) and Louis Napoleon (e.g. Victor Hugo), and the German occupation in the Second World War. To these genuine exiles we may add a few French expatriates like Pierre Loti – who spent many years in Istanbul and maintained a residence that became a lieux de mémoire for tourists – and Marguerite Yourcenar, who went to live in the United States.

More important than this list of those who had fled Paris is the one that contains the names of exiled writers coming to Paris. In the 19th century, these were mostly from Eastern Europe: the largest and most important group came from partitioned Poland, but there were also important Romanian writers-politicians. The Russians (e.g. Turgenev) were expatriates rather than refugees. Interestingly enough, no significant exiled writers came to Paris during the 19th century from the other East-European countries and ethnic groups, although they suffered no less from political suppression.

Without exaggeration it may be said that the Polish artists exiled in Paris during the first half of the 19th century constituted the heart of Polish culture at the time. Furthermore, they had created a national romantic tradition that continued to play a dominant role in Poland’s political and cultural life in the 20th century – to the great chagrin of those who wanted to modernize Poland. The great Polish romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz, Julius Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, and Cyprian Norwid, were all political exiles in Paris at one time, though they were not involved in uprisings at home.

The greatest of them, Mickiewicz, came to Paris via a genuine expulsion by Russia to the Crimean peninsula and a stay in Lausanne as a teacher. When he came to Paris in 1840 upon an official invitation (by the philosopher Victor Cousin, then Minister of Education) to assume the chair in Slavic Language and Literature at the Collège de France, he had already written at his previous exile locations all the major literary works for which he is chiefly remembered. His lectures, delivered between December 1840 and June 1844, started his scholarly career with a mixed success in what may be called comparative European literary history. Doing an astonishing amount of reading, Mickiewicz prepared himself to present the Slavic literatures in a broad historical setting. His first lecture series in 1840–42 was followed by a select audience of Polish and French intellectuals that included Charles Montalembert, George Sand, Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve, Jules Michelet, and Edgar Quinet. Unfortunately, the second series was continued in a pan-Slavic vein, because Mickiewicz became inspired by a Polish mystic preacher, Andrzej Towiański, who came to Paris. Mickiewicz had to terminate his lectures prematurely, also because of his criticism of Russia and of the Catholic Church as an institution. What could have become a genuine first assessment of what the Slavic literatures have contributed to a ‘literature for Europe’, ended with a glorification of Slavdom and a critique of Western cultures as old and decadent. Mickiewicz broadened the horizon of literary history by shifting from a national to a transnational literary history, but his pan-Slavic approach remained caught in an ethnic conception. The other mentioned Polish exile writers wrote in exile significant literary works that remained intensely national yet acquired a universalist perspective. Such is, for instance, the case with Krasiński’s great drama Nie-boska komedia (The Undivine Comedy), published in Paris in 1835.Reference Krasiński¹⁰

The Romanian national movement also had deep roots in Paris. Indeed, the 1848 national events in Walachia were to a considerably degree inspired by the 1848 revolution in Paris, and they were carried out by young Romanians returning from Paris. As Ion C. Brătianu and C.A. Rosetti wrote to Edgar Quinet, their former professor at the Collège de France: ‘France has raised and educated us. The spark that set our country ablaze by us from her hearth […] we took her as an example in everything we did’ (Brătianu 108; qtd. by Mircea Anghelescu in Ref. Reference Cornis-Pope and Neubauer11, p. 282). Similar was the view not only of the poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu, a participant in the Parisian revolution, but also of many, though not all, later historians (Anghelescu in Ref. Reference Cornis-Pope and Neubauer11, p. 282–283).

In the 20th century, the role of Paris as a European refuge changed considerably. The first great wave consisted of Russian émigrés fleeing the turmoil of the revolution and the subsequent consolidation of Soviet power. During the next decade or so, only a trickle of genuine exiles came to Paris. Among them was the Polish communist Bruno Jasieński, who was soon expelled after publishing his novel Je brûle Paris Reference Jasieński¹² (see Ref. Reference Wat13, p. 8), and the Hungarian Ervin Sinkó, looking for a publisher for his voluminous manuscript novel on the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. Both Jasieński and Sinkó went on to Moscow, the latter on Romain Rolland’s recommendation and suggestion that he should have no problem finding a publisher there. Jasieński first made a quick and spectacular career in the hierarchy of the Soviet establishment, but was then arrested and died during transportation to a camp in 1939. Sinkó was luckier: no Soviet publisher dared to publish his book and he was expelled. The long arms of the Soviet regime continued to follow him though, by means of orders sent to Louis Aragon: Sinkó should not be allowed to publish and speak in the leftist circles of Paris. Sinkó had to return to his native Yugoslavia, where he joined the partisans.

Most of those who came to Paris in the later 1920s and early 1930s did not flee from their home countries; they were, rather, émigrés and expatriates. Witness Tristan Tzara and such other avant-garde writers as Claude Sernet, Ilarie Voronca, and Benjamin Fundoianu, (who changed his name to Fondane), as well as the philosopher E.M. Cioran, who became one of the great French stylists.

The next wave of genuine exiles coming to Paris should have consisted of Spanish writers fleeing Franco. But, quite conspicuously, the leading Spanish writers passed via detention camps through France to settle elsewhere: Jorge Guillén and his friend Pedro Salinas, both of whom had taught earlier at the Sorbonne, went to the US; Luis Cernuda went in 1938 to Great Britain and later to the US and Mexico; Rafael Alberti, a Marxist and an ardent Loyalist during the Civil War, fled to Argentina in 1939; Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados, both deeply involved in the war against Franco, settled in Mexico (Altolaguirre after a five-year interlude in Cuba).

The writers that did come to Paris in the pre-war years were mostly, but not exclusively, Jewish writers from Central and East-Central Europe, fleeing Hitler. After the outbreak of the war and the German invasion, most exiles tried to flee further westward, curiously often via Spain or Portugal. Among those who didn’t manage this was Ödön von Horváth, who was killed in 1938 on the Champs Elysée by a falling tree, Joseph Roth, who also died in Paris, and, famously, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide at the Spanish border, after his first attempt to cross was unsuccessful. Franz Werfel, in a similar situation, found temporary shelter in Lourdes and promised to write the story of Saint Bernadette Soubirous if he and his wife (Alma Mahler-Werfel) should survive the ordeal. They did, and this is how Werfel’s sentimental bestseller The Song of Bernadette (1942) was written in California.Reference Werfel¹⁴

Those who fled further also included the Polish poet Antoni Słonimski, who managed to reach London, and the Hungarian poet György Faludy, who barely made it to Morocco. After an extended stay there he was allowed to enter the US. Of those that remained in France, Fundoianu/Fondane was discovered (after a denouncement) in hiding and perished in a concentration camp. The Polish writer Andrzej Bobkowski wrote highly critical notes of the French, which he published under the title Szkice piórkiem (Sketches with a Quill) in 1957.Reference Bobkowski¹⁵ By that time, however, had moved on to Guatemala, where he lived until the end of his life.

Many writers settled in Paris during the decades of the Cold War, especially from Romania, even if many preferred by now London, New York, Munich, and other cities. The reasons for Paris’s declining reputation are complex, but two major factors may be worth singling out. The first relates to what may be called bureaucracy and a certain French standoffishness. Most of the exiles fleeing Hitler had already complained about it with various degrees of bitterness. The exiles that fled the communist East-European regimes were received with outright hostility by the French communists and communist sympathizers that dominated the French intellectual and artistic scene for several decades, even if the popularity of Stalinist Communism declined after the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and of the Prague Spring of 1968. Of the many examples that one could cite I mention only one, related to Dieu est né en exil, which was enthusiastically greeted in the foreword by Daniel-Rops, not only for its literary qualities but also as another proof of the universality of the French language (Ref. Reference Horia6, p. 9). However, when the communist critics, as well as Sartre, discovered the author’s past, the attacks on Horia became so vicious (and obviously so embarrassing for the Prix Goncourt jury) that the author finally refused the prize. The second reason probably concerned job opportunities, especially for writers that continued to write in their mother tongue. The English and the North American institutions of higher education had many more job opportunities for exiled writers. Thus, for instance, Czesław Miłosz left Paris for Berkeley, and Mircea Eliade, who was quite attached to Paris, for the University of Chicago.

However, Paris remained a major centre for exile journals. This is where the highly valued Polish Kultura was published by Jerzy Giedroyc, as well as the Hungarian Irodalmi Újság by Tibor Méray, and the Czech Svědectví by Pavel Tigrid. For several decades, Monica Lovinescu sent out from here over Radio Free Europe her highly effective Romanian cultural broadcasts. It is disappointing, however, to observe that the national exile groups and their exile journals, with the exception of Kultura, had very little contact among each other, and contributed little to the softening of chauvinism’s sharp edges in Eastern Europe. The missed opportunity revenged itself after 1989, when renewed forms of extreme nationalism led to the disintegration of two federated nations and to a revival of nationalism in general.

Literature for a European Republic of Letters?

My all too short sketch of exiled writers in Paris may give us a revealing sidelight on Pascal Casanova’s fascinating The World Republic of Letters,Reference Casanova¹ which reformulates the old adage that Paris has been the world’s (and hence Europe’s) literary capital. Casanova admits that the domination of Paris in the literary universe is perhaps giving way ‘to a polycentric and plural world in which London and New York, chiefly, but also to a lesser degree Rome, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, among other centres, contend with Paris for hegemony (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p. 164), but, she suggests that the power of French philosophy and film may slow that process (Ref. Reference Casanova1, pp. 165–167). Her view is disputable, and she recognizes this. If I turn to her book at this point, it is not to join those of her critics that find her Francophilism just a bit too overbearing. It is not always sufficiently recognized that Casanova is not making a case for the superiority of French culture (even if she sometimes sounds like it); instead, she claims that in the last two centuries of nationalism and nation states Paris has offered a certain freedom to those writers that wanted to cut themselves loose from the dominant national movements in their home country. Her main witnesses are Joyce, Beckett, Cioran (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p. 215–217) and others. My question is, rather, how much of the production of exiles in that literary capital was ‘Literature for Europe’. Casanova’s framework is complex and hence my question necessitates a broader answer.

Casanova’s conception of a ‘World Republic of Letters’ has a curious double face, neither of which corresponds to traditional notions of a (bland) cosmopolitanism. Her basic metaphor, taken in part from Paul Valéry, is an economic one: world literature is not a harmonious, organically or spiritually integrated global phenomenon but rather a teeming and conflicting jungle of national literatures based on national (ethnic) languages. These national literatures are unequal because they posses unequal traditions and because different communities have unequal political, cultural, technical, scientific, and other forms of power. The resultant impermanent hierarchies constantly change. Thus, for instance, the classical French literary hegemony came to be contested in the 18th century by new forms of English and German literature, and, above all by what Casanova calls the Herderian revolution. Herder criticized the French tradition, but, more importantly, he established an equation between language and Volk, and founded thereby the notion of national literature. By the 19th century, the landscape of world literature had radically changed: the literary space was teeming with national literatures competing against the (formerly) hegemonic literatures and against each other; the process repeats itself in today’s post-colonial period (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p. 77–81).

Casanova’s image of an economically understood struggle for the literary market takes up, however, only half of her painting of world literature, for she perceives next to a competition between national languages and literatures a second process, in which writers who have gone through the national phase seek ways to overcome the national paradigm. For these writers, Paris has offered, more than any other metropolis, a certain denationalized, depoliticized, and perhaps even autonomous space. Using that opportunity well, writers have been able to develop the beginnings of a new world literature, not one of an enchanted island (one of her favourite metaphors) but one that interweaves various linguistic and literary traditions.

Casanova’s thesis surely contains a kernel of truth, although many of her subsidiary claims are questionable. One may ask, for instance, whether other metropolises have not offered equal or superior freedom to those seeking to emancipate themselves from the national bonds. Raising such questions is not, however, my purpose here. My questions emerge, rather, from a simple one, based on my previous discussion in this paper. Where in Casanova’s scheme are we to place exiled writers and their works? Have exiled writers not been (forcefully) denationalized, robbed of their national rights and their identity? The question seems legitimate, for Casanova pays surprisingly little attention to exiles. At the centre of her study are, rather, expatriates and émigrés who became alienated from their native culture, and literary works that have received insufficient attention at home but were discovered in Paris (e.g. Faulkner). Of the genuine 20th-century literary exiles, only Emil Cioran, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, and Danilo Kiš receive adequate attention in Casanova’s book, and, it seems to me, she is interested in them mainly because these ‘genuine’ exiles come close to her book’s real heroes, Joyce, Beckett, Juan Benet, Arno Schmidt and others, who were in my book not literally exiles but rather émigrés and expatriates. True, they became alienated from their culture, but they were not forced to leave it.

Does it make sense to distinguish between exiles, émigrés, and expatriates? I believe so. While it may sometimes be difficult to decide in individual cases whether a writer is one or the other, there are general criteria to distinguish between them. In former centuries, exiles used to be ejected from their home; in the 20th century they usually leave illegally, by their own decision but under great duress, and for an indefinite period. They cannot return unless the regime at home changes radically. Émigrés usually leave legally and permanently, but in principle they can return any time. Expatriates, finally, are abroad temporarily; they may be alienated from their home culture, but they can return to it any time.

These existential and political distinctions are probably technical and secondary from Casanova’s perspective. All that matters from her literary standpoint is whether those that depart from home transgress also in literature, namely from a national-political orientation to one that seeks literature’s autonomy: ‘For writers from nationalized spaces, exile is almost synonymous with autonomy’ (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p 110). To support this position Casanova cites Stephen from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Reference Joyce¹⁶ who refuses to serve home, fatherland, church – concepts and institutions he no longer believes in. The only arms I allow myself to use, says Stephen, are ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ (Ref. Reference Joyce16, pp. 246–247). Casanova adds: ‘Of the three, exile is surely the major weapon of the writer who seeks to defend his autonomy against attack at any cost’ (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p. 110).

What precisely Casanova means by that ‘autonomy,’ whether it refers primarily to the freedom of the artist as a person or to the created work, whether it is primarily political or commercial, and, if we are to understand it in the commercial sense, whether genuine artistic autonomy is possible at all in an increasingly globalized and commercialized art-world – these questions find only vague answers in Casanova’s book. They are too broad for the present paper as well. All I can do is to come back in conclusion to the question of whether there aren’t, after all, significant differences between the exiles that Casanova writes about and the ‘real’ exiles, for whom I have given a few examples above. It is not accidental that of the four writers that Casanova lists in connection with her key passage on exile – namely Danilo Kiš, Henry Michaux, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce – none was literally forced to leave his place of birth (although Danilo Kiš came close to it).

Does this matter? It may. Let us for the moment accept Casanova’s somewhat questionable thesis that true globalization of world literature means a gradual emancipation of writers and texts from the political-national constraints that have been effective in the last several centuries. Is there a difference in this respect between the émigrés and expatriates on the one hand and the ‘genuine’ exiles, those that were forced to leave, on the other? I believe there is, even if the two groups cannot be split neatly in terms of political/national and autonomy orientations. Casanova does not claim that all those ‘unforced’ émigrés and expatriates sought personal and literary autonomy. Many surely left for commercial reasons, or because they found the national-political climate of another country more attractive, without, however, having an ambition to transcend politics altogether. At the same time, it would be incorrect to say that all those who had to flee remained caught in the national/political paradigm. Think of Vladimir Nabokov, Witold Gombrowicz, and perhaps Milan Kundera. All three of them play an important role in Casanova’s book, together with Emil Cioran, whose rejection of Romanian culture becomes for her an important (perhaps exaggerated) paradigm.

Having allowed for this cross-referencing, we come to the final and, for this paper, most important group, those ‘genuine’ exiles that remained ‘caught’ in the national paradigm of literature during their banishment and, if they were lucky enough to live to see it, even after homecoming. There can be no doubt that this group within the ‘genuine’ exiles encompasses the vast majority: most exiles remain patriotic and deeply political precisely because they were forced into exile due to their ethnic, national, or political identity. In exile they could explicitly criticize those who expelled them, or they could write literary works that express in some way the ideology for which they had to suffer. Vintilă Horia, and many others, belongs to the latter category: Dieux est né en exil reformulates and refines his former ideology, but it shows no intention to move towards literary autonomy. I could add many more examples.

Returning to the title of the Vadstena Conference from which this article arises, we may ask in conclusion whether works exemplifying the striving towards literary autonomy – which constitute the basis of Casanova’s conception of a world literature in the making – whether these works also constitute a ‘literature for Europe’. It depends, in part, by what we mean by ‘for’ and ‘Europe’, but in part also on our perspective of literary autonomy. Casanova quotes Valery Larbaud to support her claim that Paris was the literary capital because it gave a certain autonomy and freedom to writers who came there from other parts of Europe (and now the world): ‘Every French writer is international, he is a poet, a writer for all of Europe […] All that which is “national” is silly, archaic, disreputably patriotic […] It served a purpose under certain circumstances, but that time has passed. There is now a country of Europe’ (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p. 87).¹⁷ Amen! However, many, from the political left as well as the right, would question this passage. For now I only wish to ask how a Larbaudien literature ‘for Europe’ would fair on Casanova’s European or global market. Revealing in this respect is Casanova’s other quote from Larbaud: ‘The European writer is one who is read by the elite of his country and by the elites of other countries. Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Pirandello, etc. are European writers. Authors whose works are popular in their native countries but which are not read by the elites of their countries are […] let us say, national writers’ (Ref. Reference Casanova1, p. 110).¹⁸ Here, in the distinction that European writers are read by an elite while national ones by a broad public (their sales are high), may well lie also a deep problem for Casanova, who regards the critics and philosophers as the literary ‘kingmakers’, not the literary agents and commercial advertisers.

Whether we like it or not, nationalism is on the rise worldwide, and specifically also within Europe, in spite of the growth of the European Union. And the appetite of this ‘renationalized’ public asks for old-fashioned (or new-fangled) patriotic literature, as the recent ‘homecoming’ of some exiled writers in Central Europe spectacularly shows. Vintilă Horia, condemned to life-long prison in absentia after the Second World War, is now being rehabilitated. So are the Slovak Catholic writers that supported Josef Tisot’s puppet government during the war. The Hungarian-Transylvanian writer Albert Wass is still condemned to death in Romania, but in Hungary he is probably the most popular writer today, which hardly contributes to a Romanian-Hungarian reconciliation.

Casanova acknowledges that two antagonistic forces operate in the world of letters, and that the tendency cannot be simply described with a linear progress towards autonomy:

The formulation (which misuses the metaphor because inertia is centripetal rather than centrifugal), leaves no doubt on which side Casanova herself stands, and, with many of my colleagues in academia, I share her sympathies. However, I wonder whether those centrifugal forces of nationalism and national literature are really nothing more than remnants of a historical past, unable to rise as a revenant. And I suspect that some form of the particular and local will have to find its space in the emerging ‘literature for Europe’ and the global world of letters.