Louis Hjelmslev and the Baltic countries.

This paper deals with texts by Louis Hjelmslev on Baltic topics, in particular an article from 1946 in which he defended the right of the Baltic countries to independence.


In 2005, Axel Holvoet published my book on the phonology of Lithuanian and
Latvian viewed through Hjelmslev's glossematics (Vykypěl 2005), which is perhaps the best-looking one of my books. I wish to contribute to his festschrift with a small paper on a topic which is even more thrilling than the phonology of the Baltic languages, namely Hjelmslev's relationship to the Baltic countries.
In the summer of 1921, Hjelmslev visited Lithuania as it behooved a student of comparative linguistics. He depicted what he had seen there in two journal articles with the title Impressions from Lithuania (Hjelmslev 1922). These articles are, indeed, more impressions than a deeper analysis; only the attempt at characterizing the nature of Lithuanian nationalism is perhaps noteworthy, this being, according to Hjelmslev, an opportunistic reality-nationalism. As Gregersen (1991, I, 175) remarked, Hjelmslev did not see in his 1922-impressions the differences between the individual groups of Lithua-nians, treating the nation as an ideal whole. Similarly, in a later booklet on the Lithuanian people and their language (Hjelmslev 1930) he wrote in a romantic vein about the antiquity and beauty of Lithuanian or about the dainos as the most typical expression of Lithuanian psyche, belonging to a nation that had, in spite of oppression, managed to maintain its own language and culture. Hjelmslev's texts on Lithuania seem to be a typical product of a member of the Western European upper middle class of his time: their middle-class character is manifested by the mentioned "holistic" treatment of the concept of nation; the Western European perspective, in turn, prevented the author, apparently, from seeing more "heroic" or active aspects of Lithuanian history (such as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a regional great power of its time, the foundation of Vilnius University in 1579, the second oldest university in the Baltic region, or some of the remarkable works of Lithuanian literature which are not a few).
Besides these published texts, Hjelmslev also gave several public lectures on Lithuania as well as Latvia and Estonia: 1928 broadcast lecture on the occasion of the Lithuanian national day; 1930 lecture on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; 1931 lecture on the Latvian language and folk poetry in the Danish-Latvian Association; 1933 lecture on Lithuania in the Danish-Lithuanian Society (see Registrant,5,13).
Hjelmslev also had a practical knowledge of Lithuanian as is attested by his letters written in Lithuanian and published by Palionis (1978). Three of them concern the visit to Lithuania in the summer of 1921: Hjelmslev described briefly what he had visited travelling around the Lithuanian countryside, and after returning home, he expressed gratitude for the hospitality he had met with; in addition, we learn that Hjelmslev (1922) was first not accepted for publication in the newspaper Politiken, and the author was then promised that the text would be published in the journal Tilskueren. More interesting are two other letters: they were written in 1924 when Hjelmslev was studying in Czechoslovakia, 1 and their topic is a lecturer position at the University of Kaunas for which Hjelmslev applied unsuccessfully. It was a different time: a Dane who was awarded a generous Czechoslovak scholarship was writing about his application for an academic position in Lithuania; it was the time before the communist destruction of the eastern half of Europe.
The largest text devoted to a Baltic topic was Hjelmslev's dissertation in which he dealt with some intricate problems of Baltic phonology (Hjelmslev 1932); he returned to these questions in a later text (Hjelmslev 1956). Baltic phonology also provided material on which Hjelmslev demonstrated an early version of his glossematic theory (Hjelmslev 1936(Hjelmslev -1937. These contributions by Hjelmslev to Baltistics have been discussed and analyzed elsewhere (see -besides the special works on Baltic phonology - Sabaliauskas 1979, 225-226;Gregersen 1991, I, 208-218, II, 32-36;Rasmussen 1992, 476). In my view, however, his most important "Baltistic" paper is a newspaper article from 1946 (Hjelmslev 1946). This article was a polemic against an article with the title Three small anti-democratic states which had appeared in one of the previous issues of the newspaper. Hjelmslev refuted the claim that the Baltic countries had been fascist dictatorships and that the exiles from these countries were fascists. He defended the right of the Baltic countries to independence and rejected the absurd contention that the Baltic nations had asked for accession to the Soviet Union. 2 Having said above that Hjelmslev's early texts on Lithuania are in essence a product of his time, I have to say that his article from 1946 seems, in contrast, not to be typical of the period. Certainly, more detailed research would be needed (of which I am not aware) on the question of how the occupation of the Baltic countries after World War II was reflected in the world. But I am afraid that reactions of the type manifested in Hjelmslev's article were in the minority. For instance, one finds neither in the texts nor in the extensive correspondence of the Czech linguist and Balticist Václav Machek a single mention of the fate of the Baltic nations (see Janyšková et al. 2011;Boček-Malčík 2011-2016, which is, however, rather understandable in a country in which the NKVD arrested in 1945 not a few of its citizens of Russian nationality. More difficult to understand is, in turn, the poor Archbishop of Canterbury, who called the Baltic partisans fascists whose deportation was justified (see Lowe 2013, 352); recently, he has even found a sad continuator in Jean-Claude Juncker who refused to watch in the European Parliament The Soviet Story by Edvīns Šnore in order not to support such an "anti-Soviet movie".
What is remarkable is that Hjelmslev's article also mirrors, as I believe, general features of his thinking which is empirical, contextual and inspiring.

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First is the empirical foundation: the starting point should always be the experience data, not aprioristic constructions, in this case Soviet propaganda. Next is the structural contextuality or the relative nature of values and the participative character of the inner arrangement of each system as opposed to thinking in absolute terms: 3 before World War II the Baltic countries indeed were, as Hjelmslev writes, dictatorships, but not fascist ones and the context in which they existed and in which their leaders had to act was intricate and not that in which contemporary Western democracies existed. In connection with this, what is inspiring -in particular for a historian of the Czech countries -is the comparison sketched by Hjelmslev of the pre-war Baltic countries and the so-called third Czechoslovak Republic (1945Republic ( -1948 (Hjelmslev 1946, 7).
The third Czechoslovak Republic, with its "socializing democracy" as even Edvard Beneš put it, viz. democracy allowing only those political subjects which agree with a basic socialist programme, may be considered as a left version of the traditionalistic or conservative dictatorships in the Baltic countries in the 1930s.
We can lastly pose the question of Hjelmslev's motivation for his defence of the Balts. He surely had an emotional relationship with Lithuania as Gregersen (1991, I, 177) remarked. However, as noticed more accurately by Blatt (1965), the reason why Hjelmslev "was immune to Eastern propaganda" was not only his "familiarity with Baltic conditions", but also his "common sense" (gode forstand). Indeed, I think that it is even possible to find eloquent links with his linguistic theory.
Readers of Hjelmslev have perhaps felt a certain utopian flavour in his linguistic thinking (pointed out recently by Cigana in press), based on a belief in the power of theory: in this respect Hjelmslev is a son of his time believing in science and its force. What is, however, striking is that he did not connect this belief with sympathy for totalitarian regimes, as is witnessed also by his text from 1946; thus he stood in contrast to many others professing such a utopian scientism. 4 The reason is perhaps that Hjelmslev differentiated between universal or realized (which is necessary) vs. general or realizable (which is possible) as Cigana (in press) put it, 5 whereas other structuralists or neo-positivists did not: what is realized is not open for discussion because freedom is the realized necessity as communists used to say in a pseudo-Hegelian manner; "voilà pourquoi, au moins de ce point de vue, l'interprétation essentialiste de cette démarche structurale nous semble échouer" (Cigana in press).