Tomas Venclova: Vil’nius: Gorod v Evrope. [Vilnius. A City in Europe.] Perevod s litovskogo Marii Čepaitite. S.-Peterburg: Izdat. Ivana Limbacha, 2012. 264 pp., ill. ISBN: 978-5-89059-167-8. | Andrejs Plakans: A Concise History of the Baltic States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. XVI, 472 pp., 45 ill., 1 map. ISBN: 978-0-521-54155-8.

Tomas Venclova on Vilnius and Andrejs Plakans on the Baltic Littoral:
With Some Thoughts on Unfootnoted History

Tomas Venclova: Vil’nius: Gorod v Evrope. [Vilnius. A City in Europe.] Perevod s litovskogo Marii Čepaitite. S.-Peterburg: Izdat. Ivana Limbacha, 2012. 264 pp., ill. ISBN: 978-5-89059-167-8.

Andrejs Plakans: A Concise History of the Baltic States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. XVI, 472 pp., 45 ill., 1 map. ISBN: 978-0-521-54155-8.

We used to know – or so it appears in retrospect – what the historian’s scholarly apparatus should look like. In an article published in 1994, Anthony Grafton held it as a matter of course that “in the last few centuries … all histories – except those written to entertain the larger public of nonspecialists, and a few designed to provoke the small community of specialists – have taken some version of the standard double form. The presence of the footnotes is essential”.1 By “double form” Grafton referred to what he also called “the double narrative of the modern historian – the narrative in which a text states the final results, while a commentary describes the journey necessary to reach them”.2 Almost twenty years after, Grafton himself is presently writing a volume in the Penguin History of Europe, which David Cannadine is editing for Penguin Publishers. Some of the most distinguished historians currently working in English have been engaged in this series, which has been dormant for some time but sprang back to life in 2008 with the publication, to much acclaim, of Tim Blanning’s volume on the “long” eighteenth century, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815. As a matter of editorial policy, all titles in the Penguin History of Europe avoid the use of footnotes; less consistently, this policy is also applied by another important series, the Cambridge Concise Histories by Cambridge University Press. These histories thereby forgo the form of academic writing, which could still be called “essential” when both series were launched.

It is not my intention here to be judgmental or to defend an imagined scientific standard. There should be variety in the style and idioms of historical writing: having become accustomed to some, it is useful to be confronted with the potential of others. And it is primarily with style and idiom, much less with the factual detail a reviewer usually chases up, that I shall be concerned in what follows. This essay is occasioned by the reading of two recently published books, which have a number of defining features in common: both are historical treatments of the Baltic by scholars native to that region who have long taught at universities in the United States, where they are now professors emeriti; both books also keep distance from an idealization of their subject, such as might have resulted from the authors’ biographical connection with it; finally, the two books provide no bibliography or footnotes (only a list of suggested readings, corresponding to each chapter, and a less than comprehensive index are offered at the end of the second book we shall look at), as they also avoid any overt reference to “theory”. Their making do without such typical attributes of academic scholarship gives some room for reflection on the possibilities of historical writing today. These “unfootnoted” histories, ranging over centuries in the historical terrain they cover, necessarily synthesize large bodies of previous scholarship. There are some questions they trigger: First, as the immediate sources of “unfootnoted history” are not available for our scrutiny, by what other criteria can the books be evaluated and engaged in a critical conversation? Second, what strategies do their authors deploy to compensate for the absence of their usual tools? Third, which reader audience is being targeted here by the publishers and, conversely, by the authors?

Two Histories

The first of the two works I would like to discuss is a cultural history of Vilnius by Tomas Venclova. The new Russian edition of Vilnius: A City in Europe, which this reader noticed and picked up in a Riga bookshop last year, very soon after its appearance in St Petersburg, is a beautiful book in every sense. Exceptionally attractive in its paperback design, reproducing works by the Lithuanian graphic artist Petras Repšys, it comes from a publisher who cares about the aesthetic quality of his production. Conveyed into fluent literary Russian from the original Lithuanian, the book evokes a strong sense of what the author at one point calls the “magic aura” of his city (p. 193; henceforth bracket citation will be used for page numbers). Tomas Venclova, the poet and literary scholar, a long-time Vilnius resident and prominent Lithuanian cultural figure, tells here the Vilnius story by combining an insider’s intimate knowledge with an informed historical interpretation. An English language edition under the title Vilnius: A Personal History, appeared at The Sheep Meadow Press in the United States in 2009. The English translation, however, had been re-translated from the German version, published by Suhrkamp in 2006 as Vilnius: Eine Stadt in Europa.

Appealing as this book looks in shop windows, it could disappoint the hurried tourist as only seldom does it describe such city attractions that can still be visited. A prolific author, Venclova has also written a Vilnius guide, but this book is of another kind. It is best read – and it rewards close reading – as a scholarly meditation. Using a conversational tone that quickly takes the reader into confidence, Venclova displays a penchant for anecdotes and a dislike for dates. While his eight thematic chapters eschew strict chronology, they carry us from the Middle Ages through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to post-Soviet independence. Along the way, we hear about religion, architecture, Vilnius University, the Jewish community, literary life and political ideologies. As this listing already attests, the book is not only about Vilnius but also, and very much so, about Lithuania – even if other Lithuanian cities such as Kaunas, an important city in the author’s own biography, which served as “temporary capital” when Vilnius was under Polish control between 1920 and 1940, are rarely mentioned. Of all the themes Venclova treats, the one serving as an organizing thread of the book and which seems to lie especially close to his heart is city architecture: “architecture forms space, while space forms people’s lives as well as the people themselves” (p. 63; my translation from the Russian edition, here and below).

Baroque architecture, much of it the legacy of Italian architects (p. 71), had made the entire old town of Vilnius into “a work of art” (p. 87). Visually, to the author’s eye, the city may be compared with Prague and towns in Italy. But, even more than the built environment of Vilnius, it was its inhabitants that fashioned its unique character. The central message to which Venclova never tires of returning – he does so for the last time in the moving closing lines of the book – is that people of all ethnic origins, who lived in the city at different times, together made Vilnius what it was. This is far from being a trivial point, as historical memory in the formerly multicultural city is a battleground on which mutually exclusive possession claims are still being fought. In the opening chapter, the author is as if unaware of the political sensitivity of the issues he touches upon, as he tells readers that seven national groups, not just one, were native to the city. He lists these as Lithuanians, Ruthenians (the later Belorussians, see p. 149), Poles, Russian Old Believers, Tatars, Karaites and (a particularly important segment, which once made up half or more of the city population) Jews. In his only ‘theoretical’ aside in the book, Venclova acknowledges that nations are “imagined communities”, constantly in a state of interpenetration, and he calls Vilnius “one of the best laboratories in which to observe and reflect on this process” (p. 19). While he insists on a prenational view of Vilnius and Lithuania as the historical setting of people in motion (e.g. pp. 16, 99, 170) he is careful to avoid associating a multi-ethnic society with tolerance (p. 64). As he has done in earlier writings, he brings out to the open the thorny issue of Lithuanians’ collusion in the Holocaust, a period he sees as the darkest hour of Lithuanian history (p. 238).

As his narrative progresses, Venclova’s distaste for every nationalist appropriation of the city’s mixed history evolves into a sustained critique of modes of thinking which he subsumes under the notion of “myth”. He tends to be sceptical about expressions of Lithuanian nationalism, both in the nineteenth century and after 1991 (see pp. 162–163, 260), as he is about defining nations, in the Herder tradition, by the standards of ethnicity and language, preferring instead to test them by the criteria of civil society and civic responsibility (pp. 185–186). His own sympathies lie with the early twentieth-century movement that went by the Polish name Krajowcy: its cosmopolitan members, who recognized all the inhabitants of the Vilnius/Wilno region as one multilingual people (pp. 204–205), saw their dreams evaporate with the “Lithuanization” of Vilnius as soon as the city had been “returned” to Lithuania in 1940 (p. 230). Speaking of the Soviet mass deportations of June 1941, Venclova dismisses the anti-Russian “myth”, according to which the strategic aim of deportation was the extermination of the Lithuanian people (p. 234, pointing out that deportees also included members of other nationalities). He then disposes of the anti-Semitic “myth”, which during the German occupation justified violence against Jews by the claim that all Jews were Communists and supporters of the Soviet Union (pp. 237–238). Coming to the Soviet period, he rejects as yet another hollow “myth” the state-promoted image of the Soviet Union as the shared home of “fraternal nations” (p. 245).

As already the book’s subtitle indicates, Venclova sees Vilnius as a quintessentially European city rather than a city one could call, after its main cultural orientations, “Polish” or “Lithuanian” (see, for example, p. 99, with reference to Vilnius University), and he emphatically identifies its periods of growth and development with openness to the West. The other side of this coin is decline once the city’s ties with Europe have been severed, as they were by the repressions of Nicholas I in the 1830s (p. 166) and by the installation of Soviet power. This brings us to Venclova’s position with regard to the long history of Russian political domination in Vilnius and the Baltic region. A former Soviet dissident and a lifetime devotee of Russian literature, Venclova uses a bitingly ironic tone when speaking about the pretensions of the Soviet regime. This habitual irony turns into scathing condemnation when he describes the brutality of the first invasion of Vilnius by the army of Tsar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, in 1655, as a prefiguration of the twentieth century (pp. 82–83), or as he notes that the KGB established its Vilnius headquarters in a building previously put to similar use by the Gestapo (p. 247). The author’s spending only a few pages, at the end of the book, on Vilnius and Lithuania under Soviet rule, partly derives from his determination to limit his own role in the narrative when treating a period he has lived through. Alternatively, it may be understood as reluctance to contaminate his vision of Europeanness by accepting the full weight of the Soviet imprint, since Venclova believes that historical memory in Vilnius had survived the attempt to blot it out by the imposition of Communist eschatology (p. 248). In view of what Venclova does say in his concluding assessment of “the regime that for decades had demeaned, corrupted and poisoned its subjects” (p. 257), the current publication of Vilnius: A City in Europe in Russia should not be taken for granted, while its appearance in an unexpurgated form is all the more welcome and timely.

A Concise History of The Baltic States by Andrejs Plakans is a volume in the Cambridge Concise Histories. In the body of the work, the author prefers the term “Baltic littoral” to “Baltic states”, as this can serve him well for the entire era he covers, from the first mention of the region’s population in documents about a thousand years ago to the situation in the three Baltic republics by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. At over 450 pages in length, this is no “concise” but a fundamental comparative history of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The emphasis is on political history, with changes in state power in the region providing the chronological scaffolding for the book’s nine chapters. Attentive as the author is to dates and events, he is as interested in tracing more subtle cultural and social shifts, such as the gradual formation of “Estonian”, “Latvian” and “Lithuanian” identities.

The panorama Plakans paints is vast and only some of his insights into Baltic history can be highlighted here, focusing on the modern period, in which the author is clearly most at home. The movements of “national awakening” among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, a major theme of the book, did not progress in linear fashion from early struggles to achieved independence: rather, the nationalism that had been important for the emerging intelligentsia from the mid-nineteenth century gave way by the end of that century to interest in modernity, including socialism, among the younger generation (pp. 258–262). The three declarations of independence in 1918 had their origins in political circumstances, which the author subjects to a careful and dispassionate analysis (pp. 299–300, 309). He offers a cogent critique of the types of thought that later encouraged the rise to authoritarian regimes in the three Baltic states (p. 320). The same matter-of-fact pursuit of historical truth is characteristic of the author’s approach to the most contested events in Baltic history: the Soviet invasion following the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the subsequent German occupation and the practices of collaboration and resistance by the indigenous populations (on which, see pp. 352–357).

Dealing with the Soviet period from 1945 to 1991, Plakans includes commentary on the way in which history was rewritten during this time as “a morality play” (pp. 366–367; cf. 435–441 on re-imagining the past after the 1991 watershed); there is also a nuanced interpretation of the space “Pribaltika” occupied in the Soviet imaginary (pp. 377–378). Writing about the 1990s, the author attends to the tasks of having to identify the new political formations of the post-independence years as well as to provide a critical reading of the new political discourse. A frequent expression of that discourse was the slogan of “return to normality”, the implications of which come under close scrutiny (p. 402; on “normality”, see also pp. 428, 441, 444–445). The book concludes with a consideration of the process which, in the title of his last chapter, the author calls “reentering Europe”. He elaborates here on the “rites of passage” (p. 434), which the three states – not the almost forgotten prewar republics, but the actual lands and people, which faced the wider world with the ethnic makeup and popular mentalities that were theirs by the 1990s – had to go through as their governments led them into membership of the European Union and other international structures.

The author’s relentlessly comparative perspective on the territories and cultures with which he is concerned, is impressive: the extraordinary alertness of this vision, permeating and giving shape to the entire book, makes A Concise History of The Baltic States a remarkable achievement in comparative history. The last term does not appear in the book itself, drained as it is of any metahistorical matter, while only in the back-cover blurb is the work described, presumably by the author, as “the first integrated history of three Baltic peoples”. This characterization is understated. As if integrating Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into a composite history did not pose enough of a challenge, Plakans offers a lucid analysis of Baltic German and Russian perspectives on the Baltic littoral and its peoples, while adding in comparative asides on Western Europe. Throughout, he pays an uncommon amount of attention to the Latgale region, now in eastern Latvia, with its own local language and difficult history of integration into the Latvian state. Despite its length, the book is densely written, condensing a wealth of information into every page. There are touches of gentle irony, as in the description of the relationship (or lack of it) between eighteenth-century Gelehrten and Literaten – the Baltic German gentleman scholars – and the native peasants, about whom they composed sentimental poetry and published historical and ethnological studies (pp. 145–151). One then encounters a somewhat similar description of the attitude of “established” European states towards the Baltic republics preparing to join (or rejoin) Europe in the 1990s: the former “viewed them and all the erstwhile European communist societies through the prism of ‘post-communism’, making the same allowances that parents make toward teenage children” (p. 434).

The narrative has an uninterrupted flow to it. Other than occasions on which the narrator’s voice acknowledges that information could not be obtained or ascertained, a single late passage in the whole course of the book hints to the presence of an author behind it, a helmsman in charge of the vessel: this happens when an overview of the movements for independence in the three Soviet republics begins with the words “a summary of events over the next two years can only do scant justice …” (p. 390). Published in an age more accustomed to flashy titles, self-advertising and name-dropping, this “concise history” by a retired professor never uses the singular personal pronoun or, anywhere beyond the last paragraph of the preface and the “suggested readings”, lists the author’s colleagues and members of his academic network. The effort that was obviously put into the structuring and composition of the work, the reflection on method and theory behind it, have left no visible traces on its surface.

Unfootnoted History: Some Thoughts

The two books defy an easy genre definition. If the design and format of Venclova’s Vilnius make his a ‘popular’ history, it is not immediately apparent why serious work in this category should be considered a lesser contribution to historical understanding than the conventional, properly footnoted, monograph. It certainly reads better and gives more food for thought than many of the academic histories, which one struggles to finish. A handsome blue paperback bearing an image of Tallinn by the British artist Valerie Barden on its cover, A Concise History of The Baltic States opens with the following single-sentence series title: “This is a series of illustrated ‘concise histories’ of selected individual countries, intended both as university and college textbooks and as general historical introductions for general readers, travelers, and members of the business community.” The twice-repeated insistence on the “general” is misleading in the case of Plakans’s magnum opus, which also stands out among other histories in the Cambridge series as one of only two books so far to treat a region, not a “selected individual country” (the second such case is a new volume on the Caribbean islands). Certainly, the clarity and intelligence of Plakans’s writing should help his work reach beyond academic circles, while translations into the national languages of the Baltic states and into Russian should spread it even further. But professional historians, the author’s peers, are at least as likely to engage with this book as other audiences: their exclusion from the publisher’s target list may only be attributed to misplaced fears of scaring off the non-academic reader.3 Historians of Eastern Europe, who would allow themselves to be put off by the series title and format, would miss this unfootnoted and untheorized history at their own peril.

There are good reasons why books on history need footnotes. Beyond the basic tasks of identifying sources of information and acknowledging or disproving alternative interpretations, notes have further conceptual and stylistic functions in relation to the main text. These many functions and the evolution of the footnoting art have been eloquently explored by Anthony Grafton in the book, which followed his above-cited article.4 At its best, the bottom-page matter maintains a dialogue with the lines above it. Footnotes also allow the authority of the author to be challenged, as they enable the reader to track back to the sources, which had served the historian in reaching his or her conclusions, and so to question the way in which those sources have been interpreted. Footnotes therefore make history more transparent. Some academic writers feel that inserting footnotes helps them structure their thought; as readers they enjoy following the “double narrative” of other authors. Others regard footnotes (now usually placed at the end of books and so more often “endnotes” than notes en bas de page) as hurdles raised by an outdated convention, a recurring stumbling block rather than an aid and complement to writing. Various means make it easy to minimize the use of notes in books today, especially since publishers, whose pursuit of the elusive “general reader” has only intensified in recent years, never did like footnotes, or bibliographies for that matter. One such means is offered by notes that, placed at the end of long paragraphs rather than of sentences, list a number of sources, the relation of which to parts of the text is difficult to establish. Some publishers have begun moving the paratextual apparatus of their books to the internet, setting up “online companions” and “supporting websites” which may also enrich the printed page by the addition of visual and audio materials. The more common method of simply giving up the footnote facilitates unoriginal compilation; speculative and sensationalist history climbs in through the same window. Although “the presence of the footnotes” offers no intrinsic stamp of quality, examples of poor practice have earned “unfootnoted history” the bad reputation that it largely deserves. Rather than the innocent victims of publishers, university professors are often happy to collaborate in the effort to achieve higher sales while broadening their audience. But our reading of Venclova and Plakans shows that there are also creative possibilities which the genre offers. One may suggest an analogy with music: a book using the traditional format of academic history can perform in many voices as its notes, bibliography, even a thorough index or a chronological table, all add tunes of their own to the leading voice, the main body of the work. Encountering a good book of this kind, a trained listener will hear a chorale. Unfootnoted history is, by contrast, a cappella singing. The musicality of the performance will ultimately depend on the gifts and skills of the singer more than it can be determined by the genre.

Having begun by positing similarities between the two works under discussion, we should now point out some differences between them. Venclova’s trademark essayistic writing and the broad lenses of his cultural history join together to produce a book that, as a delicate mixture of the personal and the public, amply justifies its form. Plakans, in a volume conforming with the publisher’s policy for the book series, copes with the loss of his usual working tools by an almost fastidious commitment to collecting detailed data on aspects of life across the “Baltic littoral”, and by the superb organization of his material. Perhaps the genre of historical literature into which we could still fit the two works would be the “big book” on a personally important subject, which university teachers often hope to write by the end of their career. They have expressed some of their thoughts on that subject already, but have not yet given them their full form. It may be that, seen from this vantage point and weighed against the opportunity of speaking to a larger readership, the outer trappings of the profession no longer matter. Venclova and Plakans have much to enlighten any interested reader on their respective topics and the books they recently published must have been on their mind for years. In their self-effacing way, both authors have given us excellent histories while raising some questions about what history, in its various guises as academic, popular and “general”, can do.

Mark Gamsa, Florence

1Anthony Grafton The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke”, in: History and Theory 33 (1994), 4 (theme issue “Proof and Persuasion in History”), pp. 53–76, at p. 57.

3Variations in the series title, as in footnoting policy, also suggest that Cambridge University Press cannot quite make up its collective mind about who the intended reader of the “concise histories” should be. The series has been running since 1990. A Concise History of New Zealand, by Philippa Mein Smith, first published in 2005 and issued in a second edition in 2012, appears the only volume to carry a longer series title, in which insistence on “general” appeal is slightly toned down, while the academic identity of the author is highlighted as a positive asset, as follows: “this is a series of illustrated ‘concise histories’ of selected individual countries, intended as historical introductions for the general reader (including tourists and business travellers) and as textbooks. All are readable but authoritative surveys of the country’s history by professional historians. The books cover social, economic and cultural as well as political history.” This volume includes extensive endnotes, placed under the compromise heading “sources of quotations” – a solution to the footnote problem that was also applied in A Concise History of Australia, by Stuart Macintyre (originally published in 1999; second edition in 2004 and third in 2009) and A Concise History of Wales, by Geraint H. Jenkins (2007). The last two volumes offered no word of reassurance about the “readable but authoritative” produce quality of “professional historians”. Surprisingly, A Concise History of Canada, by Margaret Conrad, published in 2012, features twelve pages of “Notes” among the back matter; in this book, the author’s title of “Professor Emerita” is even attached in italics to her name. To conclude this excursion into the bewildering arcana of the publishing world, one may point out that the adjective “new” before “series”, originally used in the series title when the Concise Histories were launched, with a volume on Germany, in 1990, was sensibly dropped in the 2000s but inexplicably has reappeared since; it may thus be found in the preliminary pages of the volumes on Bolivia, The Caribbean and, notably, Russia (by Paul Bushkovitch), all published in 2011. As it appears in the India volume (first published in 2002, with a second edition in 2006 and a third in 2012), the series title has one “general” less: in this happy case, like in that of the New Zealand volume, the word has been omitted as a necessary qualifier of “historical introductions”. The Cambridge Concise Histories thus remain a genre hybrid, balancing between desires for (academic) respectability and (general) readability.

4Anthony Grafton The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Incorporating sections of his 1994 article into this book, here at p. 24, Grafton omitted the words “the presence of the footnotes is essential”, which may or may not reflect a change in perspective.