A Chance to Listen to a Nation Finding Its Voice

On Friday, President Bush will stop for a visit in the very small Baltic country of Latvia. The Latvians are dyspeptic over the visit. Much newsprint is going into speculation over why Bush is coming, what he will think. The Latvians -- an attractive, unsentimental people -- have the unfortunate distinction of having been free and sovereign for only 37 years of human history. This will be only their second visit by an American president.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army. In the name of “mutual assistance,” the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia, in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash. I am not politically cynical, but I think political cynicism is a perfectly understandable reaction to something like the Hitler-Stalin pact, a copy of which hangs in the Museum of the Occupation in Riga. Written in 1939, it represents the secret agreement in which these two men coolly divided, in advance, territory over which they would also do passionate, horrifying battle. At the end of World War II, the Baltic nations -- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania -- were left as a terrain of humiliations, three swollen mouths.

Last year, I taught creative writing and American literature in Latgale, the poorest region of Latvia. Latgale, with its postindustrial countryside and high unemployment, is a place that bares little resemblance to Riga, three hours away by train. Riga, where Bush will make his stop, is a calm, refined city. Buckets of dahlias sit on street corners all winter. Cafe windows glow. In the blue evenings, the sound of ladies’ heels resounds on the cobblestones, and cello players haunt the archways. Out of this place, a culture is reawakening. Many exiled Latvian writers have returned; there are 60 active publishing houses in Latvia.

But Latvia is still a terribly small country. I do not mean small just in terms of size. There are many small countries -- Britain, to name one -- that loom large in the world and the imagination. I mean that Latvia often feels small to itself. In his “Collected Works” Rudolfs Blaumanis (1863-1908), one of the fathers of Latvian prose, posed the question, “Shall we Latvians ever create a writer or poet of such stature that his shadow will fall beyond the narrow borders of our Motherland?” His answer? “I am inclined to say -- no!”

During the long Soviet occupation, censored writers did not have the freedom of heart or speech that works to create great art -- art that doesn’t have one eye on the door. The pall of this gap persists. One of my students put it this way: “No one cares about Latvian literature. They think it is small. They read books from other places. Russia. America.”

I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence. Even speaking only of physical presence, it’s true -- there they are, bookends on the map. I visited Moscow, and there I saw Tolstoy’s desk and walked the streets Akhmatova walked. I felt the presence of those writers. I felt also the gray, scrambled magnificence of their country. Later, I returned home to the country of Whitman, Faulkner -- big-voiced writers who holler out of our libraries and universities and bookstores as if through their work they never planned on dying. As a writer, I suspect that this sort of personal mythology may be crucial in the attempt to create visionary literature.

Quietly, the three Baltic nations joined the European Union in 2004. As new member states they receive priority for funding until 2007. What I know of the EU’s influence is only what I saw in Latgale: a desperately needed new computer building, generous student scholarships. And yet, support for joining the magnanimous EU was not high in Latvia. In a May 2003 survey, only 37% of the country considered EU membership a good thing. Why? “We know unions,” drawled one fellow Latgale teacher, “the first one was red and the new one is blue.”

It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy. In Latgale this year, one political party bribed citizens at about $20 a head to vote for its candidates in municipal elections -- and won. (In a surprising act of political empowerment, the citizens called for a revote and were granted one for this summer.) The parliamentary government is so mired in alleged corruption and unstable alliances that it’s assumed it will get expunged regularly, as in some sort of political menses. As for Russia, it often takes an anti-Baltic slant in its media, and to this day does not acknowledge that its occupation of the countries was unwanted.

It is into this scenario that our enormous, unblinking American president and, behind him, we ourselves step.

“Does not the whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature?” asked Virginia Woolf in “The Common Reader.” Do bigger, more confident countries really heap more behind their literature than smaller ones? Is every line more freighted, richer, like pears in August? If so, I believe it will be a gift to us all when small countries such as the Baltics get their confidence back. In the meantime, perhaps for a short time -- for example, tomorrow -- we could get very quiet and listen.