What Can Be Seen in Wiesław Szymański’s "The Vilnius Stained-Glass Window"?

Abstract

The poetry of Wiesław Szymański, a radio journalist with lifelong ties to Białystok and Podlasie, has yet to be fully understood and interpreted. Stained Glass in Vilnius is a cycle of poems arranged in a poetic reportage, portraying Vilnius as a city of two cultures—the post-Soviet Lithuanian one, and the Polish one, obscured by the legacy of communism. Szymański’s imagination is a force that transcends cultural boundaries, capable of connecting the romantic, forgotten land of his ancestors with the image of disinheritance, with the brutal reality rooted in poverty, the destruction of monuments, and the spiritual depletion of its inhabitants. The poet seeks in poetry a way to save from complete destruction what was one of the sources of Polish culture. The main motif in this poetic cycle turns out to be spirituality, religion and prayer, the invisible bond of scattered bricks and stained glass in which the writer encloses the project of an imagined city.