Vasko Popa is one of the leading poets of contemporary Jugoslavia, and a voice of these very regions. In one of his poems he has a scene in which kissing is going on in the public gardens in Vršac, beneath the bust of Lenau. Vršac is the administrative centre of the Jugoslavian Banat, only a few kilometres from Bela Crkva and from the Rumanian border. It was to the women of Vršac, his birthplace, that Ferenc Herczeg – the brilliant, superficial Hungarian novelist who entranced a vast audience throughout Europe with the embellished passions of fashionable elegance, the tinsel circus tricks of the gentry – in 1902 dedicated his novel The Pagans, a fresco devoted to the struggle between races and religions, between Magyars and Pechenegs, between the Cross and the sacred oak of his ancestors, at the very dawn of Hungarian history. His rhetorical, kaleidoscopic narrative re-evokes the Golden Horde of the Pecheneg nomads, the wind of the “puszta” which prevents the spirit from rising to heaven and drags it down into the flatlands, and the barbarian migrations absorbed and vanished in the Balkan-Pannonian mists.
In a far more forceful way the poems of Vasko Popa – who originally wrote in Rumanian, but has for many years been writing in Serbo-Croat – evoke barbaric winters and the wolves of yesteryear. The literature which is already written is a concave mirror set down on the earth like a dome, as if to shelter our inability to give direct utterance to things and feelings. A well-cultivated literary taste and a measure of cautious modesty prevent a mere follower from speaking of the solitude and the wind of the great plains, of the tracks of migrations printed in the muddy soil of his homeland. But if a second-rate novelist, or indeed an exacting poet, recalls that wind or that age-old asperity, a perfect quotation may permit us to mention them, through the medium of the words of others, without fear of falling into sentimental “local colour”. So literature rests upon the world like one hemisphere resting upon another, two mirrors reflecting each other, as at the barber’s, exchanging between them the elusiveness of life, or at least our own inability to grasp it.
Lenau’s bust used to be in the park, but has now been removed to the museum in Vršac. His birthplace, however, is now over the frontier in Rumania, not far from Timişoara, where the German lycée is called after him. A great Austrian poet, whose origins were also Slav and Hungarian, Lenau, who died a madman in 1850, was an outstanding poet of solitude and suffering. His character was at one and the same time charming and eaten away by nothingness, by a cosmic sadness experienced throughout every fibre in a sensitive nature that was ultra-musical, neurotic and self-destructive. His Faust, negative and desperate as it may be, is one of the great Fausts written since Goethe, when the classicism of Goethe, loyal despite everything to the notion that human history had some meaning, was subverted throughout European culture by a profound crisis, the conviction of meaninglessness and nullity.
His Faust, who kills himself because he feels that he is no more than a vague dream dreamt by a God, or rather, by an Everything that is as indistinct as it is wicked, is a work of great poetic merit, in which the errant multi-nationality of Lenau overflows into a universality innocent of any Danubian local colour. Lenau has an international literary society which now bears his name, formed in the spirit of the cultural unity of Mitteleuropa. In 1911 Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn, the great champion of German culture in the Banat, resisted the attempts of the Magyar elements to “appropriate” the poet, and opposed their raising a monument to him in his hometown (which is now in Rumania), inscribed “To Lenau Miklós, a Hungarian who wrote in German”. Herczeg is sometimes bitterly anti-German; his mother-tongue was German, and he is a Hungarian nationalist who shares to some extent the chauvinistic attitudes of István Tisza. This emerges even in his Pagans, while on occasion he even indulges himself in sympathies for the Bunjewatzi. Nonetheless, in his novel The Seven Swabians, published in 1916 but set back in the 1848 Revolution, his protagonist remarks that he feels it his duty to side with the Hungarian rebels in the very name of “German loyalty”, because he has lived his life side by side with them and now, as a German, which is to say an upright man, he cannot abandon them in their time of peril, even though they are raised in rebellion against the power of Austro-German Vienna.
The plain surrounding Vršac is wreathed in melancholy. Milo Dor, a contemporary Austrian writer born in Budapest of Serbian parents, and now a resident of Vienna, wrote a book called Nothing Other Than The Memory, in which he described the slow decline of a prosperous Serbian Banat family, the melancholy torpor which is embodied in a bottle of slivovitz and transforms it, once empty and discarded, into a bottle jettisoned in the Pannonian sea, but containing no message. This melancholy, like Lenau’s nihilism, wears a sense of emptiness, which is nonetheless linked with nostalgia and the need for values and meanings. In one of his poems Vasko Popa addresses himself to “our forgetful children, without original sin”. With the sometimes facile enthusiasm of the avant-garde poet he celebrates the freedom of this new generation, but also the absence of memory and lack of awareness of moral conflict give those children the appearance of a crowd on this side of good and evil, amorphous and colourless, without sin and without happiness, innocent and vacuous.