The old poet who enters the stage in Munich is an institution in his world, one of the last - well, what exactly?

He is so many things at once.

Tomas Venclova, born in 1937, is a Lithuanian, contemporary witness, dissident, exile, poetic representative of a great tradition, former Yale professor for Slavic languages, but above all: a poet who, like his long-dead friends and Nobel Prize winners for literature, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky keeps alive the historical-cultural connection between Poland, Russia and Lithuania.

But you don't notice it.

He sits without a pose as he reads, for example about his mother conjuring up last phone calls with her spirit, about Odysseus on the ship's mast or the thoughts of an aging couple: "What has now merged will never melt again.

/ The children are grown and we are alone.

/ So many dead friends.

Every day / already swimming out of already faded photos / faces you won't see anywhere else."

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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Venclova's poems are composed evocations of places, landscapes and people, entering into a calm dialogue with mythological figures, but also with artists of the past.

The Munich Poetry Cabinet on Amalienstrasse invited him and his admirable translator Cornelius Hell.

Venclova's book "Variation on the Awakening Theme", with an afterword by Michael Krüger, has just been published by Hanser Verlag as the fiftieth volume of the Edition Lyrik-Kabinett.

For the small anniversary, the booth is full again.

One moves among thousands of volumes of poetry and one of the largest special libraries far and wide.

On the podium, Venclova mentions that Lithuanian is one of the six classic Indo-European languages ​​and actually the only one of them that is still alive.

His poetry therefore knows meter and rhyme,

works on a classicism without intricacies - a hell for the translator, as Cornelius Hell explains, because there are no articles in Lithuanian, so each German line is longer than the original.

And yet Venclova's “art of the unobtrusive”, as Durs Grünbein once called it, can also be heard in German.

"A Historical Optimist"

The poet does not say a word on stage about Russia's war against Ukraine, but he repeatedly alludes to the role of the individual before the powers of history.

He himself was very courageous when he wrote to the Lithuanian Communist Party in the mid-1970s that communist ideology was alien to him and also – “in my opinion – largely wrong.

Your absolute rule has brought many misfortunes to our country.

It was the step out that ended in exile and deprivation of citizenship.

He is more of a pessimist in his poetry, he says, but an optimist in his essays, more precisely: "a historical optimist".

The difference is important for Venclova.

The optimist believes that everything will be fine.

The historical optimist, on the other hand, believes everything will be fine, but he will certainly not see it himself.

Then they laugh in the audience, because at least Tomas Venclova did it: he experienced the downfall of the communist empire, which nobody could have counted on, and shortly afterwards he was allowed to see his home country Lithuania as independent.

He ends the reading, befitting the historical moment, with a short poem about Tibet, which he sees in the embrace of an overpowering neighbor: “The frescoes are full of nicks, like clouds, / even the rocks are not permanent, / and one could begin to hope / that the war is finally over.”

Long applause.

Questions from the audience are not planned, you go straight to the wine.

Much later, away from the podium, while his Russian wife Tatyana is standing next to him, Tomas Venclova says what he thinks about the war: Putin is on the way to “establish a fully totalitarian state in Russia.

He is not here yet.

Unfortunately, he's come pretty close.” Because of this subtle distinction, Venclova argues, it would be an overstatement at this point to equate Putin with Hitler.

Then again the precision, the comparative and weighing view of the historical optimist: "Hitler killed more than twelve million people.

Putin has not done so until now.

But Putin's actions today are very similar to Hitler's actions in 1939.” The rest, he says, everyone should think for themselves.