Reading Lithuania by Lithuanian Culture Institute

Introduction

‘Where is it? Where’s the art? Where? Show it to me.’ These questions were once posed by Ričardas Gavelis, one of the authors presented in this special publication compiled for the 2018 London Book Fair, where Lithuania, celebrating the centenary of its restored independence, will be featured as “Baltic countries Market focus” for the first time. We do not know if we can answer him with a resounding ‘Here it is!’, without having to rummage for Lithuanian art under the table, like one of Gavelis’ characters from Vilnius Poker, but we do hope that an answer to the question ‘Where is the good Lithuanian literature?’ might be found in the pages of this special publication. Our goal is not to provide an in-depth study of the entire span of Lithuanian literary history, but rather to highlight authors and works that, in our view as editors, readers in other countries may find interesting. More and more, readers and academic critics are choosing to explore the periphery of world literature, not just the ‘central’ core of British, German, American and French literary works. The dramatic past century left a profound imprint on the literature of our small country, and while it may still be small in scope, for us this literature has emerged as a representative and substantial body of work. We hope you find the writings and contexts presented here both interesting and intriguing. We selected our authors based on a survey of experts and the current state of Lithuania’s publishing industry. As we are celebrating one hundred years of restored independence, we chose to feature writings from the past century that reflect a diversity of genres, resulting in a collection of representative examples of novels, essays, poetry, short prose and theatrical works. Some of the authors presented here as prose writers (including Antanas Škėma and Balys Sruoga) were also successful playwrights. As we selected our writings, the need to provide some historical context also became clear. As you will see, the majority of the selected works reflect Lithua-

nia’s past in their own way, finding a connection to the time in which these pieces were written. In this context, this publication has an additional goal: not just as a means to present our literature, but through that literature to open a window on to Lithuania’s past and present, to create a travel guide of sorts to our country’s geography, and, perhaps, to offer a glimpse, however small, into the mindset of the people who live here. Because the articles presented here have been written by renowned literary critics and scholars in Lithuania, we trust that this guide will have an enduring value, becoming more than just a simple catalogue or promotional hand-out. We have structured this guide in a way that makes it easy to use. The main body of articles and essays about authors and their works is followed by several appendices. The articles have been organised into three sections, according to the publishing circumstances of a given work, and, in part, based on the content of the articles. In the first section, we present works which are recently or soon-to-be published in English. The title of each work is preceded by a picture of the cover of the English-language edition, followed by a summary of information about it (date of publication, publisher, total number of pages, etc). This section features the following: Shadows on the Tundra, by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, a survivor of Siberian exile; White Shroud, by Antanas Škėma, who emigrated to America to escape Soviet repressions in Lithuania; and the Vilnius Trilogy, a satirical account of the rulers and the ruled in Soviet-era Lithuania by the irrepressibly ironic Ričardas Gavelis. The penultimate article in this section introduces two authors, Alvydas Šlepikas from Lithuania and Ruta Sepetys from the United States, who have both focused on uncovering ‘blank spots’ of history to tell the stories of simple people whose fortunes were often overlooked during the years of geopolitical catastrophe. We end this section with an overview of Darkness and Company, a novel about the Holocaust by Sigitas Parulskis that provoked considerable debate in Lithuania after its publication. Section Two is devoted to works which our editors and contributors feel are relevant and potentially interesting to English-speaking audiences and publishers. They include Silva Rerum, a historical novel about the Baroque period in Lithuania; Stalemate, one of the best-known East European novels about the Holocaust; Forest of the Gods, a memoir about life in the Stutthof concentration camp; an essay collection and literary nonfiction about Vilnius and its singular place in the Lithuanian historical consciousness; The Serpent’s Gaze, a unique mythological story about mindsets; Fishes and Dragons, a reflection on the experiences of multi-culturalism; Expulsion, a play about economic migration from the shelter of one’s own home; and Southside Chronicle, a spirited account of post-Soviet life in the town of Šiauliai.

Content

Eugenijus Žmuida 62 Deadly Game Neringa Markevičienė 70 The Sterilisation of the Novel of the Century

Loreta Mačianskaitė 83 King Jurgis: From Ariogala to Arcadia Virginija Cibarauskė 88 A Philosophical Tale for Adults about Passion and the Nature of Morality Antanas A. Terleckas 93 Homecoming 1 Introduction Vytenė Muschick 5 A Collage about Dalia Grinkevičiūtė Ežbieta Banytė 13 A Multi-Faceted Novel by a Man Broken by Catastrophe Jūratė Čerškutė 25 Ričardas Gavelis: The Creator of the Vilnius Metaphor

101 Antanas A. Terleckas Literature That Should Never Have Existed Kęstutis Navakas 109 I Write what I Breathe Neringa Butnoriūtė 115 Pensive, Restless, Free. Five Contemporary Lithuanian Poets 122

Index

Eugenijus Žmuida 17 Blank Spots

125

Selected Lithuanian Works Available in English

Tomas Vaiseta 31 The Chill of Sigitas Parulskis

127

Translation Grant Programme

Kristina Sabaliauskaitė and Romas Kinka in Conversation with Rosie Goldsmith

Laimantas Jonušys 43 Fishes and Dragons Laimonas Briedis 47 Writing Vilnius Mindaugas Nastaravičius 52 History Recreated: From the Clouds, from Lithuania Rimants K. 57 Southside Rugby, Lithuanian Style

128 List of Lithuanian Literary Organisations

The final section is a collection of articles that are not about specific works by a particular author, but about the history and present-day state of a genre or literary generation, and, in the case of past eras, how these were received on the Lithuanian literary scene at the time. Our survey reviews the literary legacy of the Lithuanian diaspora and refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation in the final year of the Second World War, including Jonas Mekas, an active participant in the world-famous Fluxus artistic movement, and the intellectual Jurgis Savickis, who fled Lithuania in 1940 and never returned; works written by members of the postwar, anti-Soviet armed resistance; the decidedly unique body of work by Lithuanian essayists; and contemporary poetry, particularly works by Lithuania’s youngest generation of poets. The eighteen articles included here seek to focus and shed light on specific people and trends, but do not purport to comprise a uniform, textbook history. They are less narrative and more collage, through which the traces of our turbulent century can still be seen. Several appendices follow these articles to make navigating the publication more convenient and to serve as additional, easily accessible sources of information. The most important of these is a list of books published by the authors discussed here, arranged in alphabetical order by surname, accompanied by the page number of the article about that author. We hope that publishers will find this information useful – a bibliography can be a practical guide when working with translations and the publication of Lithuanian literature. Our hope that the substantial body of literature from our small country may intrigue readers in other countries is reflected in an additional ‘To Do’ list, where readers can make notes about interesting works that are worth further exploration. Finally, we have included information about the Lithuanian Culture Institute, the organiser of this publication and the administrator of translation promotion programmes in Lithuania. We encourage you to contact us at the addresses provided with any questions you may have about translating Lithuanian literary works and the opportunities to publish them abroad. In closing, on behalf of all the editors, we wish to express our sincere thanks to you, our readers. We sincerely hope that, after turning the final page of this publication, you will reach the opposite conclusion to that voiced by a character in Ričardas Gavelis’ Vilnius Poker: ‘There is no poetry around; everything is familiar and deadly boring.’

A doctor and Soviet dissident, the writer Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (1927-1987) was deported from Lithuania in 1941 when she was barely 14, and spent the next decade in Yakutia and other regions of Siberia. She described her experience of exile in a book of recollections entitled Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Shadows on the Tundra). Hunger, cold, poverty, death, the severe Siberian climate, a thirswt for learning, and escape from exile to Lithuania: all of this horror is described dispassionately by the pen of a talented storyteller, accurately recounting the absurdity of the system and the human tragedy that resulted from it. These reminiscences were passed secretly to Russian dissidents, and published for the first time in Paris in 1979. They were published in Lithuania only in 1988.

Vytenė Muschick

I have studied your life from the day you were born: from the sap of the fir grove and the threshold of the barn to the seven brothers and little sister of a fairy tale. I have studied it to the taiga, to the steppes of Kazakhstan, to your father’s lonely grave to the long return home. I love your every scar and unhealed wound until my death. Aldona Šulskytė

Dalia Grinkevičiūtė Shadows on the Tundra Peirene Press, 2018 Translated by Delija Valiukenas

FROM WHEN YOU WERE BORN... A COLLAGE ABOUT DALIA GRINKEVIČIŪTĖ

Children of bank employees on a hillside in Žaliakalnis, Kaunas, circa 1931. Centre: Dalia and her brother Juozukas. (Photographer

unknown, from the private collection of Dalia Kotryna Baliutavičiūtė).

Illustration by Falk Nordmann

I first met Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (1927-1987), whose book Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Shadows on the Tundra) has been included in Lietuvių literatūros lobynas. XX a. (Lithuanian Literary Treasures of the Twentieth Century), an anthology series published by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union, when I was a child. I used to spend my summers with my aunt Aldona Šulskytė in Laukuva. She had offered Dalia a place to live in 1974, after the local authorities had dismissed her from her job and left her homeless. Until then, Dalia had overseen the Laukuva ambulatory clinic, her work was even praised by visiting dignitaries from Moscow. But she was a politically inconvenient and irreverent figure. When orders came from ‘on high’ to dismiss an employee of the clinic, Dalia would refuse, especially if it was an honest and capable worker. She also refused to dismiss employees deemed to have ‘tarnished backgrounds’, such as returned exiles from Siberia. She was no longer working at the ambulatory clinic when I met her, but I knew she was a doctor, because I saw how the local villagers would come to her for help and advice. The

main room in my aunt’s small two-bedroom apartment was the kitchen. That was where they received guests. A carpet hung on the wall, with newspaper and magazine cuttings, poems, notices of plays, and book reviews, in Lithuanian and Russian, pinned to it. The women subscribed to a great number of cultural publications from across the Soviet Union. The blanket of cuttings and excerpts was covered with comments, exclamation marks, plus signs, and question marks, written in ink in all colours. Both women loved to discuss and debate loudly, emphasising their comments with wild gesticulations, moving seamlessly from Lithuanian to Russian, and back again. Although I was only a child, I sensed that Dalia was intense, strong, expansive and different… Indeed, she was a true person of the city. Why she was in that provincial town was not clear to me… She died at Christmas in 1987, in Kaunas, her home town. I knew that she died a doctor, but I never suspected that she also died a writer. I was 15 years old, and no one talked to me about her writing. I only learned of it gradually, during the heyday of the Sąjūdis Reform Movement. And when I found out, I was amazed. Not only by her personal story, but also by the fact that I lived in a country, under a system, where you thought you knew someone, but in reality you knew nothing about them… Sometimes I would wonder what Dalia was like in her childhood. Was she always the irreverent and prickly person that later manifested itself in her manuscripts? Her cousin has shared some vivid memories about her childhood:1 Dalia was an interesting child from when she was very small: courageous, independent, with her own strong opinions on various subjects. Her behaviour was sometimes unexpected. One beautiful spring morning, she disappeared. Her anxious family went in search of her, looking in the yard, on the slopes around Žaliakalnis, and on Aušros takas. When they couldn’t find her, they were at a loss what to do. People walking down Laisvės alėja, meanwhile, were treated to an unusual sight: some toys had been arranged on the pavement of the broad avenue, and a little three or four-yearold girl with brown hair and freckles stood behind them, offering to sell them to passers-by. ‘That’s little Dalia, from the Grinkevičius family!’ someone shouted, and the girl was swiftly returned home to her concerned parents. When they asked her what she had been doing, she replied that she needed money for a trip. To where? She hadn’t yet decided...

1 Dalia Kotryna Baliutavičienė Dalia: Dalios Grinkevičiūtės gyvenimas. Kaunas: Naujasis lankas 2017, p. 25.

An interview with the British publisher Meike Ziervogel Your publishing company is called Peirene Press. Where does the name Peirene come from? Peirene takes its name from a Greek nymph whose eldest son was killed by Artemis, the goddess of hunting. Following his death, Peirene cried so much that eventually she turned into a spring. The poets of Corinth discovered the Peirene spring and drank its water for inspiration. The idea of metamorphosis suits the art of translation beautifully. What starts off as a foreign book turns into an enjoyable English read. And that’s the reason why I named my publishing company Peirene. What books do you publish? Do you have a specific publishing programme? All our books are under two hundred pages. I love the short form: short novels, novellas, Erzählungen. They can be read in a single sitting, which always leaves a beautiful feeling of satisfaction. Two years ago, I added a new series, Peirene Now! These are original fiction commissions, where I ask writers to respond to urgent political topics. So, we have a book on the Calais refugee crisis, a short novel about Brexit, and next year we will publish a collaborative work of fiction by nine Palestinian and Syrian refugee writers from the Shatila camp in Lebanon. Why did you choose to publish a book by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė? I never publish books that I haven’t read myself before I buy the translation rights. I don’t speak Lithuanian, but Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s book had already been translated by you into German. So I was able to read it. And it blew me away. It’s an absolutely extraordinary book. The immediacy of the writing and of Dalia’s experience is so palpable, it took my breath away. Yet, at the same time, that powerful instinct to survive shines through on every page. The philosopher Victor Frankl argues in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that we need hope to survive, indeed to live. Dalia’s book is a testament to that truth. It’s an outstanding piece of literature that should be read widely, and perhaps even taught in schools.

The book is known in Lithuanian as ‘Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea’. What will the title be in the English edition? The English title is Shadows on the Tundra. I discussed the title with the English translator of the book Delija Valiukėnas. Initially, she suggested ‘Survival in Trofimovsk’. But Trofimovsk is not known here in the UK, and ‘Survival in Trofimovsk’ sounds more like the title of a memoir. For me, however, Dalia’s book is literature, not a memoir. I wanted a strong image that is able to pull the reader inside the story straight away. Do you think the book will be easily understood by British readers who are not so familiar with East European history? That’s an interesting question. I tend to be a puritan in terms of literary texts, and feel they need to be able to stand on their own, without explanation. After all, a literary text is an experience. Shadows on the Tundra makes perfect sense within itself: we all know about gulags, we all know about deportations and labour camps. Yes, the names of people and places might be confusing for a foreign reader, but the writing is so intense that I’m convinced images will emerge in the reader’s mind. And if anyone wants to know more, they can go to the Internet afterwards. Where will the book be made available, and in what format? We will publish Shadows on the Tundra in June 2018, as a paperback and e-book. But we will have some pre-publication copies available for the London Book Fair in April. Our subscribers will receive their copies early in May. Then from June onwards, the book will be widely available in UK bookshops and online, on Amazon, and also in our bookshop on our own website. The official launch of the book will be held at our June Salon.

Very soon, however, she would have to pack for a 1,000-kilometre journey. On the night of 14 June 1941, at three o’clock in the morning, officers from the Soviet secret police began knocking on the doors of families in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Forcing their way in, armed soldiers announced that every member of the family was being deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union. They were given half an hour to pack essentials. Dalia chose to take a stack of opera programmes. Since the age of 13, she and her father had been regular visitors to the Kaunas Opera Theatre. That night, Dalia watched as a wristwatch, a gift she had received from her father on her 14th birthday, disappeared into the pocket of one of the members of the secret police. Dalia Grinkevičiūtė wrote about her exile several times. The first was in 1949-1950, when she returned to Lithuania without official permission, and lived in hiding at her mother’s home or with relatives or friends. This version was unique in several respects. Firstly, it was written under exceptional circumstances, in hiding, with external contact with the world at the bare minimum, when one’s inner world expands to distant boundaries... Secondly, it was written immediately after returning from exile, when the memory of the experience was still very fresh and alive, written at a time when no one had the courage to do so, for fear of renewed imprisonment or exile. Thirdly, Dalia rushed to complete her work amid these risks, leaving the text raw, unedited, unstructured and untitled. The result of her intense flow of memories was recorded on 229 loose pages. Dalia sensed that as an illegal returnee, she might be discovered at any time by the KGB. She placed her manuscript in a glass jar, and buried it near her parents’ home in Kaunas. She was soon discovered, arrested, and once again deported to Siberia. Her mother had already passed away, and was buried without official permission under the basement of the house built by Dalia’s father. The 229 pages, meanwhile, remained hidden near the house, waiting to be rediscovered. After all her time in hiding, exile and imprisonment, Dalia finally returned to Lithuania legally, and began searching for the pages. She looked and looked, but could not find them... However, in the spring of 1991, Nijolė Vabolienė decided to replant an unruly peony bush. Digging deep into the ground, she found the glass jar with pages covered in writing. Lithuania had already regained its independence, so recalling was no longer forbidden, and memoirs were no longer burnt... These pages are now to be published in English in 2018 by the Peirene Press in London, translated by Delija Valiukėnas, after being ‘unearthed’ in Lithuania by the publisher Meike Ziervogel. While working with Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s manuscript, I always thought about her fate: she died without ever finding her pages, without seeing them published or recognised, cut off by the authorities from a job she loved, humiliated, forced to live without an

Beyond the Article Circle, an installation by Elena Gaputytė for the book Reconciliation, dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the first deportations to Siberia.

Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s memoirs, written in Lithuania and buried near her parent’s cottage in Kaunas in 1949. Unearthed on 29 April 1991. Written in pencil and ink on sheets of paper (Photograph: Lithuanian National Museum).

income. All this seems to suggest that her life was an unfulfilled one… But one event this summer helped me look at Dalia’s life and work from a broader point of view, from what Frankl would call the perspective of eternity. I was travelling to Magdeburg in Germany for a talk and a reading with a group of 14-yearold ninth-grade students. I remember it happened to be 23 August. The students hadn’t yet begun learning about the Second World War in their history classes, and had heard nothing about forced exile, Stalin, and the remote northern regions of the Soviet Union. I was given 90 minutes to talk with them. We drew a rough map on the board, showing the three Baltic countries, the Baltic Sea and the surrounding countries, and we talked about the two dictators who ruled Europe in 1941, and how in 1939 they had divided the continent between themselves, and that the division of Europe had been agreed upon on the same date that year, on 23 August. Then we began reading excerpts from Dalia’s manuscript, a text the students were hearing nearly 70 years after it had been written. After the reading, I asked the students to take a pen and a piece of paper, and imagine that

all the girls in the class were Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, and that all the boys were her brother Juozas, and that all of them were living in exile, on the island of Trofimovsk near the mouth of the River Lena, 500 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. They had 15 minutes to write a letter to Anne Frank, a name every child in Germany knows. So, they wrote their letters, letters that explain why writers write, translators translate, and why publishers publish. One of those letters is below for you to read.

Dear Anne,

I can’t believe I actually have the chance to write to you. Who could have believed I’d be able to contact the outside world? I’m somewhere on the edge of Siberia, after all, and I have to struggle to survive. I live in constant fear of dying at any moment, from illness, from hard exhausting work, or just because there’s nothing to eat. But sometimes, at those rare moments of quiet and peace, I ask myself, how are you Anne? I’m worried about you. I know that Hitler is persecuting the Jews, and I wonder if your situation is even harder than mine. At the same time, though, can things be worse than here? For many of us, death is our best friend. It seems to me that dying is not such a horrible thing for some people, because death brings an end to their suffering, and many people around me have lost all hope. They no longer believe in themselves or their future. The same might happen to me. I too might fall into dark despair. Fortunately for me, I have my brother here. He is my only support. And I’m lucky to have a school to go to. Can you imagine that going to school is such a joy for me now? To finish, I’m going to ask you anyway, even if you can’t respond: how are you? Fondly, Dalia

Balta drobulė (White Shroud) is the only novel by Antanas Škėma (1910-1961), one of the most distinguished Modernists of the mid-20th century, a prose writer and theatre specialist from the diaspora, who introduced to Lithuanian prose the ‘stream of consciousness’ style of narrative. Through the lips of the main character Antanas Garšva, a lift operator, we hear frank discussions on insanity, sex, social alienation and political transformation in the early 20th century, and the fates of people shattered by war. With good reason, critics consider this novel of classic Modernism to be the author’s best work. After its translation into German, White Shroud received much attention from German readers and critics.

Elžbieta Banytė

‘I am a Lithuanian kaukas in the biggest hotel in New York.’

Antanas Škėma White Shroud Vagabond Voices, 2018 Translated by Karla Gruodis

A MULTIFACETED NOVEL BY A MAN BROKEN BY CATASTROPHE Following the publication of Antanas Škėma’s Balta drobulė (White Shroud) in Germany, and great praise from publications like Spiegel magazine, the novel is soon to be published in English, translated by Karla Gruodis, by Vagabond Voices (Glasgow). Born in 1910 in Łódź in Poland, Antanas Škėma is seen by Lithuanians as something between a teen idol (the decadently smouldering cigarette in his hand, the ironically crooked smile, the elegantly crumpled neckerchief) and a classic writer. He is extolled by academics for expanding Lithuanaian literature, with stream of consciousness and the blunt depiction of madness and sex, existentialism, and even nihilism. In the Sixties, controversy was guaranteed; and now? Written in the USA and Canada in 1952-1954, and published in 1958, what is so interesting and attractive about this book, which will turn 70 in 2018? What does it offer? And why is it still read and so well liked, and often cited by Lithuanians as their all-time favourite noveal?

‘With all his heartfelt and melancholic yearning for his homeland, to his great credit, Škėma neither allows Garšva to get sentimental nor to indulge in the nostalgic and nationalistically tinged homeland kitsch that is so often found in exile literature.’ Sabrina Wagner, literaturkritik.de

‘It’s amazing how current this novel still feels [...] Škėma can be ironic and sarcastic, but also existentially serious and even sentimental. This novel is no simple singalong tune, but rather a highly polyphonic symphony; indeed, a polyphony that is a pleasure to experience.’ Jochen Schimmang, taz

Antanas Škėma in New York in 1955. (Photograph: Vytautas Maželis)

First, we should establish the context. As the author confessed indirectly to his doctor and friend Julius Kaupas, his creative work is autobiographical. It is deeply rooted in its time, and depicts the time without frills, without sugarcoating, without polishing it to the extent of reducing it to the level of banner headlines about preserving national values. The author’s life was not an easy one. His family had returned to Lithuania in 1921, after living in Russia and Ukraine. On their return, he went to Lithuanian high schools to study medicine and law, but did not graduate. He entered a drama studio instead, and became an actor. During the war he performed and directed plays. When the Nazis retreated from Lithuania, he fled to Germany in 1944, like many Lithuanian intellectuals, alarmed by the threat of the Soviet occupation. According to some sources, 70% of members of the Writer’s Office, the equivalent of the present Lithuanian Writers’ Union, left Lithuania after the Second World War. Škėma kept writing, directing and performing in Germany, in a Displaced Persons camp. In 1949, he managed to emigrate to the USA. He took unskilled jobs right up to the end of his life, folding boxes and working in a factory, and as a lift operator in a large hotel. In his own words, he learned how to practise art while working, and his bosses thought him a decent but unambitious worker, a sort of ‘likeable savage’. He was an active participant in the large community of Lithuanian expatriates, and at the conferences held by the liberal émigré society Santara-Šviesa. On his way back from one of these gatherings in 1961 (which included a performance of a play he wrote in which a character dies because of a gem hidden in his pipe), the author was killed in a car crash. Interestingly, the French existentialist Albert Camus, whose ideas and work had a great impact on Škėma, was killed in a car crash as well, in 1960. A train ticket was later found in the pocket of the famous Frenchman: it was only at the last minute that he had decided to go by car, instead of taking the train. Strange but striking

‘What makes this novel so great is the tone that the protagonist Garšva uses to narrate his New York present and his Lithuanian past. It is a laconic, straightforward, dry tone, free of sentimentality and hatred [...] Every page of this book is shocking and intermittently funny at the same time.’ Peter Zimmermann, Ö1 ex libris

coincidences: the absurd deaths of people who had tried to understand absurdity itself. In his autobiography, Škėma alludes to the fact that he used to swing from the bodies of hanged White Guards during the Russian Civil War, then tosses out an ironic remark: perhaps that was where his love for corpses came from. The same style is also found in his fiction: tragedy is darkened by sarcasm, the grotesque, and a wide array of intertextual connections. The writer’s difficult personality is revealed too, further complicating the already complicated reception of his unorthodox works, which annoyed conservative postwar expatriates, who focused on national questions and the preservation of the national character and culture. Škėma was ironic and impulsive, and often acted without thinking. For example, he groundlessly accused a former lover of plagiarism. All his life, he dreaded succumbing to the mental illness that his mother had suffered from. He did not believe in the declarative patriotism of exiles: he once stated that all of them, including himself, had fled occupied Lithuania. He also stressed that there is no heroism in safe declarations of love for one’s homeland, when ‘real heroes are dying in Lithuania.’ This position seemed to prevent him from

‘As great as it is shocking, the gravity of this read is strong. Lithuania, which once shared a border with Germany along the Memel, is fortunate to have a translation of this important work from 1958 published in time for its appearance as the focus country of the Leipzig Book Fair.’ Gerhard Gnauck, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

writing romanticised works soaked in wistfulness for the lost homeland. Škėma openly mocked various stereotypes and clichés, and affected poses and ostensible decorum in his work. He did not attempt to conceal the tragedy of the individual, and the individual beneath the sentimental nationalist rhetoric typical of small conquered nations. White Shroud is Škėma’s only novel, rightly considered by critics to be his most important work. He also wrote a number of plays, poems, essays and short stories. The novel focuses on Antanas Garšva, who escaped from Lithuania at the end of the Second World War, and is now working as a lift operator in a hotel. The novel’s working title was Keltuvas (The Lift), as this is where most of the action takes place (not so much external action, as what occurs in the protagonist’s consciousness). Garšva is a creative person, a poet, hopelessly in love with a married woman. He is diagnosed with neurasthenia, and has repeated attacks of amnesia, a consequence of being tortured by Soviet agents who tried to force him to write propaganda poems glorifying Soviet leaders. The action takes place on a single day, starting with Garšva arriving at work in a big hotel in New York, and ending in his apartment the next afternoon. We find out about Garšva’s past in several unusual ways: each chapter is composed of two parts. The first consists of happenings in New York, the second is Garšva’s memories, or certain ‘texts within texts’, entitled ‘From the Notebooks of Antanas Garšva’ (observant readers may notice that the protagonist gives these notebooks to Elena, his lover, to read). Reconstructing the connections between the seemingly fragmentary parts of the novel is a great pleasure to the reader, as the memories explain why he goes through his present life in New York the way he does. Since he was self-educated, Škėma’s knowledge remained unstructured. He gained much knowledge from other expatriate Lithuanian writers, mostly

‘With this magnificent novel, Škėma has foraged for a language that escapes the “vices of logical thought”, page by page, sentence by sentence [...] White Shroud is a novel of beguiling poetic beauty, masterly in its construction and touching in its characters. A real discovery!’ Hartmut Buchholz, Badische Zeitung

from the poet Henrikas Radauskas, whose taste and erudition he trusted. Radauskas tried to deter Škėma from using excessive citations and references to various artists and works, but did not succeed. The extensive intertextual network, as well as the fragmentary composition of the novel, described by the literature expert Loreta Mačianskaitė as a literary collage, is a way of showing the complexity and fragmentary nature of modern individuals and the modern world. The novel’s fragmented composition echoes the protagonist’s fragmented mind. From his memories, we discover that his mother had schizophrenia (the protagonist later decides to reject the women he loved, because he does not want to burden them), that he raped his first love, that he shot a young Russian soldier when he was serving as a partisan during the war, and that there was a brothel providing ‘services’ to soldiers in his house during the German occupation. In other words, the story of one man illustrates the tragedy of many, stating clearly that, whoever the invader, whatever the purpose, war is a source of evil, as it merely turns everyone into enemies and allies, reducing humanism. An individual can only survive by looking for the truth, and by refusing to give in to slogans. ‘I followed the commandments for seekers,’ he says when accused of breaking the law in an allegorical courtroom scene.

‘The novel was written in the diaspora, and yet it is full of Lithuanian associations. But these are never nostalgically backward-looking [...] White Shroud is a breathtaking novel that leads into abysses and caves, intertwines the past with the present, and alternates between mythical and avant-garde narratives, the linguistic nuances of which are finely captured by the translator.’ Lerke von Saalfeld, Büchermarkt, Deutschlandfunk

White Shroud is thus more than just a schizophrenic novel about a schizophrenic, or a person whose world-view is completely detached from reality, and who cannot say anything about it. On the contrary, Garšva is intellectual, sensitive and observant, but he is damaged. The metaphor of ‘a replanted bush’ is used to express the personal drama of emigration. Someone who was brutally torn from his culture against his will can only vegetate and decline, instead of growing and blossoming in the new foreign one. In Garšva’s case, the state of exile further deepens his schizophrenia: he is forced to be ‘a Lithuanian kaukas in a Strauss operetta’. The already split personality is further split by the complicated unnatural identity of a noble European doing work that is unsuitable to his nature and physical condition in an American metropolis. This is also highlighted by the

‘In his novel White Shroud, the author, who died in 1961, powerfully and poetically reveals an utterly non-poetic life [...] The image of an elevator’s ups and downs become a metaphor for life. And between floors, time stretches. Associated with each stop are memories, pushing the novel and its hero ever more relentlessly towards a reckoning, both with himself and with those prolific writers who, after the war, infected Lithuanian exile literature with the virus of nationalist patriotism distorting history.’ Mirko Schwanitz, Bayerischer Rundfunk

stream-of-consciousness technique, the use of which here is probably the most impressive in Lithuanian literature. Consciousness seems to flow on three levels in Škėma’s novel. The first level is New York in the present. In the closing sections of the novel, as madness is nearing, that New York reality grows smaller. The second is Garšva’s memories, provoked by accidental details spotted in New York (for example, a carnelian ring reminds him of old family history). The third, which rapidly gains dominance over the others, is Garšva’s inner reality, where memories are transformed, strange visions and fantasies are created, and echoing snippets of forgotten poems and songs are heard. It is the second time that the word kaukas appears in the work, which I have not yet explained. It can be employed to unfold the mythological code of the novel, which, as a matter of fact, is most interesting. In Lithuanian pre-Christian mythology, a kaukas is the spirit of a dead child. This creature, an intermediate between birth and death, reflects Garšva’s existence: an unfulfilled poet, a Lithuanian intellectual in a foreign space, in an American elevator, hanging between the two poles of heaven and earth, without a stable foundation or a defined status: ‘Up and down, up and down in this strictly defined space. This is where the new gods have put Sisyphus […] Sisyphus no longer needs sinewy muscles. A triumph of rhythm and counterpoint. Synthesis, harmony, up and down, Antanas Garšva works elegantly.’ The myth of Sisyphus is, naturally, a reference to the famous story by Camus. It is both interesting and remarkable that, instead of taking the ideas of French Existentialism and converting them into his own language, Škėma transforms them, supplements them, and, I would say, even complicates them. White Shroud explores the meaning and the purpose of literature and art. This is where art’s (and an individual’s) aspiration to achieve authenticity is best revealed. In one of the most important scenes in the novel, Garšva argues with Vaidilionis, his roommate in the DP camp, and a famous poet, hailed as a ‘hero of the nation’. Vaidilionis persists in following the Romantic tradition, in an attempt to lift ‘the

nation’s spirit’. To Garšva, this seems untruthful and indecent. ‘Your fate has been spun. You shout out big words about the past and bright words about the future. You’re virtuous, or pretend to be. So, you’re lying,’ he tells Vaidilionis. A writer must be honest and faithful to the idea of art (and, at the same time, to himself and his potential readers), instead of seeking admiration, money, recognition and political goals. Another side of this unique work is its historical theme. This is disclosed not only through the protagonist Antanas Garšva, but also through the other characters: Stanley, Elena and Joe. Stanley, a Polish musician, functions as a type of mirror image of Garšva in the novel: he is an alcoholic, his wife has left him, and in the last chapter, he kills himself at the same time that Garšva loses his mind. They are two versions of the same fate. A sensitive artist doing mechanical work in the impersonal environment of a big city can either go mad or take his own life. Despite that, White Shroud is not all pessimistic or cruel. I fully agree with Loreta Mačianskaitė, who argues that the novel supports the imperative of being in the ‘here and now’, an ability to let go of trauma and resentment, rather than hanging out with the ghosts of the past. Identifying himself as a hero of the absurd, Garšva is not that: he is not able to find happiness in his stone, like Sisyphus, or to live in peace with himself, concentrating too much on his attempts to reconstruct something that is no longer there, and cannot be. The translation of White Shroud shows much more than the desire of a small nation speaking a minor and complicated language to spread its culture, and make its mark on the literary map of Europe, where, according to Miłosz, one may put down the phrase ubi leones. No, the translation and publication of White Shroud is a fusion of topics, motifs and states, at the same time specifically Lithuanian and generally universal, a drama of forced emigration, and, eventually, a story and interpretation of the disposition of the human being, not only individuals in the mid-20th century, but in some ways modern ones too.

‘White Shroud is an accomplished, powerful and musical witness to modernity, and its protagonist’s fate reflects that of the entire nation [...] In a series of breathless and abrupt turns of fate, Antanas Škėma, who died in a car accident in 1961, has Garšva wander through New York over a few days and nights.’ Jörg Plath, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

In the stormy course of Lithuanian history, there are still many ‘blank spots’, and the task of filling these in, of speaking about taboo or painful subjects, is not only a matter for historians, but also for writers. One of those who researches such ‘blank spots’ is the American writer Ruta Sepetys (born 1967), of Lithuanian origin but writing in English. Her novel Salt to the Sea (Druska jūrai) written in diary form, tells the stories of refugees from the Second World War, among whom were thousands of Lithuanians. It relates the tragic fate of those refugees who managed to board the German passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff with great difficulty, only for a Russian submarine to attack the boat, causing around 10,000 people to drown. The poet, screenwriter and actor Alvydas Šlepikas (born 1966) also reconstructs an episode from history that has been banished from the collective memory in his novel Mano vardas – Marytė (In the Shadow of Wolves), which tells the story of the ‘wolf children’. At the end of the Second World War, German women in East Prussia sent their children across the River Nemunas into Lithuania, to improve their chances of survival, to find food and to bring it back to their families. Quite a few of these became orphans, and were adopted by Lithuanians. Some of them only found out who they were when they had grown up. Šlepikas’ novel is evocative and shocking, based on true facts and authentic stories of survivors. The action is described in a concentrated, cinematographic style. In the Shadow of Wolves is a story about memory, love, compassion, and the will to live.

Ruta Sepetys Salt to the Sea Philomel Books, 2016

COMING SOON

Alvydas Šlepikas In the Shadow of Wolves Oneworld, 2019 Translated by Romas Kinka

BLANK SPOTS Eugenijus Žmuida

the Nuremberg trials to hide the crimes against humanity committed by the communist Soviet state. Because this silence survived as policy for so many years, historical events that had an impact on thousands of lives remained largely unknown. They endured, however, in the memories of individual survivors and their descendents. The stories told in these novels by Sepetys and Šlepikas are based on authentic testimonials by witnesses, transformed by the authors into new knowledge about the past, helping us to fill in the long-suppressed, forgotten and neglected ‘blank spots’ of history.

Salt to the Sea

One of the surviving ‘Wolf Children’. Photograph by Claudia Heinermann as part of the project ‘Wolfskinder: A Post-War Story’, 2015

Dealing with 20th-century European history, particularly the Second World War, is not an easy task. Indeed, the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ But, then, how can we approach it? The so-called ‘blank spots’ of history, unknown episodes and events from the Second World War that have been overshadowed by other events, or suppressed for ideological reasons, are not, after all, just outstanding material for television programmes, history conferences, and sensationalist media articles. In order to avoid repeating historical traumas, nations must recognise and understand them. In Lithuania’s history, which has already been the subject of much study, one such ‘blank spot’ is the history and the fates of those who once lived along the coast of the Baltic Sea, a land that was part of Prussia and Germany for centuries, and which was only later returned to Lithuanian control. Disturbing historical facts (which were almost erased from Lithuania’s collective memory for years) about East Prussia and the lands within it which were home to large communities of ethnic Lithuanians are explored in two novels, Salt to the Sea (2015) by Ruta Sepetys (b. 1967), and In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Šlepikas (b. 1965). In the final days of the war, East Prussia came under the control of the Red Army. Catherine the Great once said ‘Victors are not judged’, a phrase that was echoed years later by the Soviet chief prosecutor Roman Rudenko at

Sepetys is an internationally acclaimed author of historical fiction, published in over 50 countries and 36 languages. She is considered a ‘crossover’ novelist, as her books are read by both youths and adults worldwide. Her novels Between Shades of Gray (2011) and Out of the Easy (2013) are both New York Times and international bestsellers. Her latest novel Salt to the Sea is a #1 New York Times bestseller, and winner of the Carnegie Medal. Her books have won or been shortlisted for over 40 prizes, they are included on over 20 state reading lists, and are currently in development for film and television. She was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Resident Fellowship for Salt to the Sea. Sepetys was recently awarded the Cross of the Order of the Knight by the president of Lithuania for her contribution to education and the preservation of memory. Lithuanians were already familiar with the history of the deportations of thousands of innocent people to Siberia (explored in Between Shades of Gray), an event that affected nearly every Lithuanian family, but it was largely unknown in the wider world. The story told in her novel Salt to the Sea, however, while also dealing with the repercussions of the Second World War, took both Lithuanians and foreign readers by surprise. It reveals the tragedy of refugees fleeing west in Europe in the face of the advancing Russian troops. Sepetys explores the fates of a group of fellow travellers of various national backgrounds, who, after considerable efforts, secure a passage on the Wilhelm Gustloff sailing from Kiel harbour. The passenger ship, filled with soldiers and civilians, mostly elderly people and women travelling with children and babies, was attacked without warning by a Russian submarine, sinking it in icy waters with over 10,000 passengers on board. The tragedy remains the greatest

Ruta Sepetys (Photograph: Magda Starowieyska)

maritime disaster in history, with nearly double the number of victims from the Titanic and the Lusitania combined. The story of this mass tragedy was long suppressed, since its perpetrators were considered allies in the war. In the Soviet press, the event (like many other similar war crimes) was considered completely taboo: the myth of the Great Patriotic War was sacred, and not to be soiled by moral ambiguity. Salt to the Sea exposes this event for the first time, developing it further through powerful artistic reflection. Sepetys herself said: ‘To understand Lithuania today, we have to look at the past. While I believe historical facts are dispassionate, once conveyed through personal experiences, they help us express something. As I was writing this book, I was most disturbed by the fates of the children, teenagers and innocent people.’ Sepetys was inspired to write the book by an encounter with her father’s cousin, Erika Demski, who never boarded the ship, and, as a way of expressing her thanks for her good fortune, told the author the story about her life and the ship’s tragic end. Sepetys spent three years researching and writing the novel. From a literary point of view, the novel is more fully developed than Between Shades of Gray. In addition to its unexpected subject matter, Salt to the Sea benefits from psychological exploration and narrative technique. The entire story is based on journals or stream of consciousness recorded by four main characters: Joana, a Lithuanian medic, a young Prussian called Florian, a Polish teenager called Emilija, and Alfred, a German sailor. Although the story never steps outside its circle of subjective observation, contemplation, memories and associations, the observers themselves change, picking up the narrative from where it left off, and allowing the reader to form a clear image of the external action. Through this inventive narrative strategy, Sepetys portrays several different points of view of the same event, revealing the temperaments, intellect and family circumstances of her young characters, their reasons for leaving their homeland, and their relationship with each other, which continuously shift, based on external events, their proximity to each other, their sympathies and animosities, and their own plans and intentions. The novel transforms into a drama of monologues, with the reader assuming a privileged position, able to see and know more than each character individually.

The tension and mystery of the novel endure until the final pages, since the subjective point of view prevents readers from anticipating external events or inner impulses. Each character, and there are more among the many travellers than just the personalities ‘recounting’ their individual stories, is unique and specific, each with his or her own personal secret, revealed to the reader over time and the course of the novel’s events. The band of travellers, sharing food, medicine and helping one another, becomes, sometimes unintentionally, a close-knit, symbolic family. The vain Alfred, always writing love letters in his head to his beloved, is particularly memorable. The young Nazi’s mind is infected with Hitler’s ideology, which guides him in all his decisions and actions, and resonates combatively throughout his ongoing letter. The clichéd notions of this ‘psychopath’, as Joana calls him in her own thoughts, and his unpredictable behaviour that threatens everyone around him, is reminiscent of the disturbed Benjy from Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. It is likely that Faulkner did indeed make an impression on Sepetys. The refined Florian, a man of the arts, who grows increasingly angry about being deceived and unwittingly taking part in the theft of valuable works of art, is a kind of counterweight to Alfred. Florian’s revelation and his rejection of stereotypes, his liberation from cold egoism, and his growing love for Joana, even against his own will, becomes the most interesting storyline against the backdrop of the novel’s dramatic events. With Salt to the Sea, Sepetys once again demonstrates the universal appeal of her writing. Her books are read eagerly by adults and young readers, as is evidenced by the award of the Carnegie Medal. In all likelihood, there are very few such hopeful books capable of showing that, while war may bring no victors, only suffering and horror, people are capable of remaining true to themselves, even under the most horrific conditions. The significance of historical memory is beautifully illustrated through the metaphor of messages in bottles: symbolic letters thrown into the sea, uniting people into one community with a shared hope, to be remembered. The novel’s end is as unpredictable as all the events that precede it, revealing man’s relationship with man, and affirming the true meaning of values in a human story that often sinks into epochs of the absurd.

In the Shadow of Wolves Alvydas Šlepikas’ novel Mano vardas – Marytė (In the Shadow of Wolves) also examines an episode in post-Second World War history that had previously been unexplored in Lithuanian (and perhaps also German) literature. It tells the story of the fates of people living in East Germany, on the border with Lithuania, after the arrival of the occupying Red Army. Although many readers may already be familiar with the savage treatment of local inhabitants by Soviet soldiers in the occupied territories (devoid almost entirely of men by this time), including the rape and murder of women and girls and the execution of children, these events have rarely been explored by authors. These were stories that seemed to be detached from Lithuania itself, not directly affecting the lives of Lithuanians as a whole, though Šlepikas is able to demonstrate that this long-held belief was, in fact, an illusion. German children, orphaned or separated from their hungry brothers and sisters, risked their lives to travel across the border into Lithuania, where they begged local residents for shelter and work, hoping to earn enough to bring home food for their families in the former East Prussia. Hungry and tired, the children crossed the border in droves. Although Lithuania had also been devastated by the war, the children saw the country as a fortunate land of plenty. But many people in Lithuania were unable to take in the children, or find work for all of them, so some survived by begging and stealing, growing progressively more aggressive, prompting Lithuanians to refer to them as ‘wolf children’. In truth, the children themselves were also subjected to savage exploitation, condemned to hunger, and freezing in the cold. Although the novel’s most glaring negative characters are, as a rule, Russians, Šlepikas also touches a nerve in the Lithuanian conscience, refraining from any idealisation

Alvydas Šlepikas (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

of his fellow countrymen, and not shying away from restoring to the country’s collective memory stories of less than honourable behaviour. Šlepikas focuses his attention on the experiences of the Germans, left to their own fates, the targets of the hatred of their new overlords. The novel centres around three women, Eva, Marta and Lota, driven from their homes and forced to shelter in a woodshed with their children of various ages. The narrator (and the reader) ‘lives’ with these characters, at times observing the women, at other times observing the wandering children. All are victims, the unwanted leftovers of war, and objects of hatred and contempt. The novel’s supporting characters are divided into good and bad, based on their attitude towards the German victims, on their ability to show compassion for them, or on the extent of their scorn and disregard. The novel’s setting in time is similarly divided, between the harmonious and happy times before the war (conveyed through memories), and the dark hell of the present. Šlepikas, who was previously known in Lithuania for his poetry and screenwriting for film and television, employs his experience in these genres successfully in his novel. His use of cinematic staging is felt frequently throughout the book, but to

the extent that it justifies a somewhat stock depiction of events and characters, this approach suits the narrative. The narrator almost appears to be standing behind a camera, observing everything from a great distance, and with considerable perspective. The ever-shifting camera focuses on images of the reality endured by the impoverished Germans: ‘There a woman’s headless body nailed to a wall […] Here a crowd of starving people, thrashing at the fallen body of the water carriage horse […] There, bodies carried along by the river, bruised, swollen and nameless. Here, pillaged graves’ (p. 7). This inventory of images is repeated in later passages. Detachment removes any obligation to provide detailed specifics: general contours and simple types suffice. The poetics of documentary film that predominate in the first half of the book dictate a lengthy absence of any main character: the reader simply ‘accompanies’ one or two children, experiencing their hopes and fears, or ‘lives’ with the women as they fight for every scrap of bread, defending their children and their own integrity. It is only in the second half of the novel that the author focuses on Renate, one of Eva’s daughters, describing several of her fateful days in greater detail. The feeble Renate resembles an orphan girl from fairy tales, protected at times by a good fairy

(Stasė, a Lithuanian woman), or singled out for ruin by an evil witch (Aunt Else). When asked if she is German, Renate repeatedly replies as she has been instructed by local villagers: ‘My name is Marytė,’ saving herself from peril time and again. The Christian name, popular throughout Lithuania, becomes the girl’s ticket back to survival and life. Šlepikas combines wide angles with close-up imagery, and does not refrain from openly engaging the reader or revealing his own bias. Poetic descriptions of nature bring lyricism to the novel, providing an artistic contrast to the harshness of reality: ‘The days begin to flow quickly and sweetly, like a drink with honey, or juice from sap that conjures up springtime from the very depths of the earth, flowing along branches, climbing towards the sun, thrashing out and bursting open buds, blossoms and scents, buds carrying within them the promise of fruit, tart and cool, to gently refresh the palate… Such are the days, then, flowing one after the other’ (p. 151). The criteria of psychological prose do not apply to Šlepikas’ novel. His narrative is a romantic one, meant to touch the emotions of his readers, particularly younger ones, expanding their horizons and appealing to their sense of humanity. Šlepikas has devised his own name for this type of story, calling his work an ‘impact book’. He seeks to wage an intense assault on the imagination through the use of terrible imagery. The war has turned against the Germans, and they are now its victims. This unusual perspective, as well as the depiction of a brief period when Lithuanians were better off than Germans, contributes to the novel’s overarching goal to be ground-breaking. Mitteldeutsher Verlag, the publishers of Mein Name ist Marytė in Germany, expect the novel’s sensitive subject matter to transform the work into a ‘long seller’. The book’s Estonian translator recounts seeing the book on a library shelf with a sticker attached asking borrowers to return the book within five days, a distinction usually only reserved for the most popular books, generally science fiction. This particularly sensitive story, highly readable and already published in seven languages, captivates readers from the first page to the last. Without doubt, both novels by Sepetys and Šlepikas are singular events in Lithuanian literature, and in the collective memory of the Lithuanian nation as a whole. The considerable number of translations of

both works indicates that the novels are also assuming a similar place in world culture. Victors can and must be judged. They must take responsibility for actions that exceed military necessity, becoming criminal acts in the process. Shared human values, the captivating simplicity of these books, and their well-structured narratives, will ensure their enduring appeal to readers of various ages.

The prose writer, publicist and screenwriter Ričardas Gavelis (1950-2002) is most famous for his novels known as the Vilnius Trilogy, Jauno žmogaus memuarai (1991), Vilniaus pokeris (1989) and Vilniaus džiazas (1993), which examine the life and the psyche of the Soviet citizen. In the novels, the writer, who qualified as a physicist, uses scientific precision in stripping bare and taking apart piece by piece the mechanism of the totalitarian system. He creates a comprehensive picture of Homo Sovieticus, the Soviet man, and shows how the system destroyed the personality and left the soul and the mind to rot. His novels are full of fantasy, the grotesque, irony and philosophical and cultural allusions, and are shocking and provocative.

One of the surviving ‘Wolf Children’. Photograph by Claudia Heinermann as part of the project ‘Wolfskinder: A Post-War Story’, 2015

RIČARDAS GAVELIS: THE CREATOR OF THE VILNIUS METAPHOR

‘I’m going to be a writer and tell the truth. I’m going to live true to myself, no matter what it costs. I will be alone, alone, alone. Tenacious, unhappy and unbroken.’

Ričardas Gavelis Memoirs of a Life Cut Short Vagabond Voices, 2018 Translated by Jayde Will

Jūratė Čerškutė

‘I’m going to be a writer and tell the truth. I’m going to live true to myself, no matter what it costs. I will be alone, alone, alone. Tenacious, unhappy and unbroken.’ Such was the resolve of Rimas Vizbara, the protagonist of Ričardas Gavelis’ sixth novel Septyni savižudybės būdai (Seven Ways to Commit Suicide), and one of Gavelis’ most evocative alter egos, who first appeared in one of his early short stories Galbūt (Perhaps), published in 1982 in a collection of short stories entitled Įsibrovėliai (The Intruders). The work, and the multifaceted human concept or theory of internal inhabitants (‘inside every person live many different internal inhabitants’) it articulated, would go on to inform all of Gavelis’ future novels, and become a distinguishing characteristic of his life and work.

‘I wrote what I wanted, but published what they allowed. And they allowed nothing after 1978. Nothing that I wrote after 1978 was published. Not a single word. Everything was put away in a box.’

Ričardas Gavelis (1950–2002) contained many different internal inhabitants within himself: a prose writer, playwright, screenwriter, columnist, longtime social critic, and one of the first public intellectuals of newly independent Lithuania. According to the philosopher Leonidas Donskis, Gavelis was ‘perhaps the perfect dissenting intellectual’, openly disagreeing with and challenging the prevailing core political and cultural trends of the time. Generally speaking, ‘ruffling other people’s feathers’ to provoke debate was one of Gavelis’ main distinguishing features: ‘When I was young, my motto was “contra”, against the flow. As I grew older, this softened a little, but I still don’t like going with the flow.’ This ‘contra’ affirms that Gavelis, just like his hero Rimas Vizbara, was alone, tenacious, unbroken, well read, critical, and a bit cynical. Gavelis’ own internal inhabitants, a physicist by training, a writer by vocation and deliberate choice, an urbanite by his inner intellectual and aristocratic posture, and a true child of Vilnius to the last pages of his work, helped to ensure his transformation into one of the most prominent creators of the mythology of contemporary Vilnius in Lithuanian literature, and an unparalleled pathologist of Soviet ideology, dissecting the body of communism with a scalpel. He was born in Vilnius on 8 October 1950 (although his passport records his date of birth as 8 November), in what was then the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Until the age of 11, he lived in a rather dreary but unspoilt courtyard in the Old Town of Vilnius, near the famous Gates of Dawn.

Vivid details of that courtyard from his childhood later graced his work, and in particular his most famous novel Vilniaus pokeris (Vilnius Poker) the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity, which came to be known as the ‘Vilnius Poker Church’, his ‘deep, class-based hatred of pigeons’, an ingrained affinity with the Jews of Vilnius, and his unquestionable love for Vilnius itself, its Old Town, cellars, darkness and various gloomy corners and recesses. Gavelis liked to emphasise his basic difference from most Lithuanian writers, not merely due to his unique and remote solitude, but also because he had come to literature ‘from a profession completely outside the humanities, completely solitary, angry and extremely well-read’. He had been considered one of the most promising theoretical physicists of his generation, and had participated actively in new studies in ferro-electricity and phase transition. His work at the Institute of Physics and Mathematics coincided with the start of his literary career: his first short stories were published in 1973, followed by his first book, the collection of short stories Neprasidėjusi šventė (A Celebration That Hasn’t Started). Resolving in 1978 to devote more time to ‘writerly pursuits’, Gavelis left his promising and safe career as a scientist (to the deep dismay of his colleagues), and committed himself to his life’s most important work: writing novels about life in Soviet Vilnius, giving literary form to the universe of Soviet imagery, and creating metaphors to expose and criticise Soviet ideology. As he wrote, he was not entirely successful in concealing his physicist’s nature, defining clearly initial conditions, and then using them as a

‘We all owe this writer, with his rare sense of perception, irony and capacity for critical thought, our acknowledgement of the intensity and precision with which he identified and courageously named the most problematic aspects of our lives after the restoration of independence.’ Leonidas Donskis

Ričardas Gavelis in 1997. (Photograph: Algimantas Aleksandravičius)

‘When I was young, my motto was “contra”, against the flow. As I grew older, this softened a little, but I still don’t like going with the flow.’

guide in writing his work, a feature that permeates all of his novels. In the last decade of the Soviet period, from his decision to become a writer to the publication of his first work, Gavelis created or laid the foundations for his first three novels: Jauno žmogaus memuarai (Memoirs of a Life Cut Short), Vilnius Poker and Vilniaus džiazas (Vilnius Jazz), which are often referred to publicly as the Vilnius series, and which are viewed from the perspective of Lithuanian literary history as the most significant works recording the imagery of the late Soviet period. Memoirs of a Life Cut Short and Vilnius Poker were both published in 1989, a critical year not only in Gavelis’ career, but also in the history of Lithuania, and Europe overall. It was the year the Berlin Wall fell, shattering the Iron Curtain and signalling the final end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. The Sąjūdis Reform Movement was reaching the pinnacle of its prominence in Lithuania, and the people of the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, joined hands on 23 August 1989 to form the Baltic Way, an unbroken human chain of protest, from Tallinn in the north to Vilnius in the south, condemning the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that had led to the occupation of the three countries. Until his creative breakthrough and subsequent prominence, Gavelis was best known as the author of three collections of short stories, A Celebration that hasn’t Started (1976), The Intruders (1982) and The Punished Ones (1987), and as a playwright, screenwriter and contributor to the cultural press. He once commented about this period in his career: ‘I wrote

what I wanted, but published what they allowed. And they allowed nothing after 1978. Nothing that I wrote after 1978 was published. Not a single word. Everything was put away in a box.’ Entries in one of his notebooks confirm that he wrote both Vilnius Poker and Vilnius Jazz between 1977 and 1981. This significant historical detail became an integral and singular part of Gavelis’ image: he was among a handful of authors writing works ‘for the drawer’ during the period of Soviet censorship, and his novel Vilnius Poker is the most celebrated example of such writing in Lithuania, written between 1979 and 1987, without any real hope of ever seeing it published. After its eventual publication in 1989, a milestone that effectively defines the end of one creative period and the start of another, Gavelis became one of the most prominent, noteworthy and prolific writers of the generation that was born in the 1950s. During the first decade of Lithuania’s restored independence, he went on to publish seven novels, one every two years, the core of his body of creative work. On the eve of Lithuania’s second decade as an independent state, he commented: ‘I had the courage and misfortune to show people their life as it truly was.’ Ten years after his death, the philosopher Leonidas Donskis observed that ‘We all owe this writer, with his rare sense of perception, irony and capacity for critical thought, our acknowledgement of the intensity and precision with which he identified and courageously named the most problematic aspects of our lives after the restoration of independence.’ Reading his Vilnius novel series, it becomes clear that Gavelis was a visionary, who, much like James

Joyce, used his writing to forge a non-existent Lithuanian spirit, an undertaking in which he was far ahead of his time, and which was so vital for a country liberating itself after nearly half a century of Soviet occupation. Most of his ideas and critically assessed problems are only now emerging as part of the public consciousness and discourse. He created a body of open literature, writing actively and with a degree of impertinence, casting a curious gaze at a world concealed for so many years behind the Iron Curtain. His novels were also meticulous records of life in Vilnius, simultaneously deconstructing urban myths and images, even as he created true love stories about his own city.

‘Reading his Vilnius novel series, it becomes clear that Gavelis was a visionary, who, much like James Joyce, used his writing to forge a non-existent Lithuanian spirit, an undertaking in which he was far ahead of his time, and which was so vital for a country liberating itself after nearly half a century of Soviet occupation.’ Jūratė Čerškutė

Memoirs of a Life Cut Short Memoirs of a Life Cut Short (published as a stand-alone book in 1991) is a novel consisting of 14 letters written from beyond the grave by the main character Leonas Ciparis to his contemporary, friend and teacher Tomas Kelertas, and letters Ciparis addressed to renowned cultural, political and public figures of the 20th century, including Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, José Ortega y Gasset, Leonid Brezhnev and Emanuel Swedenborg. Within the overall context of Gavelis’ body of novels, Memoirs of a Life Cut Short stands out by its scope, succinctness and restrained tone, as a concentrated form of nearly all of the central themes explored in his work, and the genesis of his celebrated metaphors and concepts. The novel portrays the Soviet system of government as a ‘vast community’ that skilfully replaces a paradoxically notional sense of security with an even greater degree of restriction and obedience. People living under the Soviet system had become infected by its strange ‘phantasmagorical spores’ that twisted and ravaged the human soul, taking away its freedom and destroying its dreams. The crowning symbol of the despotic Soviet regime in the novel is personified by the Father-in-Law, Gavelis’ perfect facsimile of a Communist Party Central Committee First Secretary, the true picture of a ruler and king of the Soviet nomenklatura, which the author develops to shed light on the scope and network of the man’s power, and his methods of maintaining it. These metaphors and their accurate illustration of the many facets of Soviet existence came to shape Gavelis’ unique system of Soviet imagery, and his own account of the Soviet order. In one sense, Memoirs is a very typical Gavelis novel, in that it portrays and dissects the Soviet system, describing

the regime’s practices and the fates of those living under it. At the same time, it is also very atypical, because of its nearly complete omission of Vilnius. Indeed, the city plays only an implied role as the central setting, but is not one of the story’s principal or most influential characters. Vilnius Poker Vilnius Poker (translated into English by Elizabeth Novickas, 2009, 2016) remains Gavelis’ best and most famous novel. The central metaphor for the Soviet era developed in the novel is assumed by ‘They’, the kanukai, a word dreamt up by Gavelis to describe the regime’s ideologues and strategists, and all those who symbolise the rotting corpse of communism, and coerce the people imprisoned within its system. The portrayal of the kanukai is amplified in the novel through the detailed description of two other types of personalities existing within the system: homo sovieticus and homo lithuanicus. Vilnius Poker is exceptional in both its theatrical imagination and structure: it is a Rashomonic narrative consisting of four parts, defined by the stories (or monologues) told by four of its central characters (Vytautas Vargalis, Martynas Poška, Stefanija Monkevičiūtė and Gediminas Riauba) about events that took place one October’s day in the 1970s. Rashomon is a specific narrative technique, creat-

ed by the Japanese writer and film director Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and later expanded on and popularised by the film director Akira Kurasawa, which presents several different versions of the same event, without revealing which of them is the correct one. In Vilnius Poker, this approach serves as a perfect means to expose the hypocrisy of Soviet ideology, and the absence and impossibility of (historical) truth within it. Vilnius Poker burst on to the Lithuanian literary scene, bringing with it the powerful structure of the novel and an incisive depiction of the Soviet system that was still in existence at the time, as well as a particularly bold and often dramatic portrayal of the human body, a (sometimes destructively) pulsating eroticism, and, of course, the city itself, through the previously untarnished image of Vilnius. It caused a true frenzy among the ‘dark-spirited and the prudish’, gaining a large and sustained following in the process, and was printed in hundreds of thousands of copies, in two further editions, inconceivable numbers in publishing in Lithuania today. Vilnius Jazz Vilnius Jazz (1993) is one of Gavelis’ more entertaining novels, and the most lively of his Vilnius series, which he himself called the spiritual brother of Vilnius Poker, and which is its own form of monument to the Lithuanian version of the 1960s and 1970s, an ode to youth, and a unique set of instructions for life and survival in the Soviet era. Perhaps because it was Gavelis’ last novel to be set entirely in the Soviet era, the critique of the Soviet system within the novel reaches grotesque heights, as the author focuses on the quintessential example of Soviet ideology, the Soviet army. Over the course of the novel’s three parts, the story moves from the dreary Vilnius of the 1960s, and university life as experienced by physics students, to military service in a training camp, obligatory for young men, where the author’s expression of irony truly triumphs. ‘Soviet rule was brought into this world by two unapologetic thugs called Lenin and Stalin, upsetting the natural course of history,’ which is why ‘the Soviet regime is nothing more than a schizophrenic episode in the psyche of the world,’ says Bakneris, the novel’s central character confidently, transforming the medical term schizophrenia into one of the most potent metaphors to describe the entire Soviet era.

‘the Soviet regime is nothing more than a schizophrenic episode in the psyche of the world,’

The Vilnius series and the scenes from life in the Soviet system explored in the books were extremely consequential in their depiction of and reflection on the Soviet legacy. After their publication, Gavelis was viewed as Lithuanian literature’s strongest, most evocative and most unwavering recorder and critic of totalitarianism. As the Soviet order collapsed, he was the first, and to all intents and purposes remains the only, writer capable of quickly, and more importantly, analytically and critically, assessing the processes and events taking place during the Soviet era. His work is a sharp and precise analysis of what took place in those years: watershed moments and changes in eras, regimes and systems, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, the rise of the Sąjūdis Reform Movement, the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, social and cultural change and reorientation, attempts to find a new understanding of the country’s new sovereignty, his own identity, and what it meant to be Lithuanian. This ability to use a work of literature to reflect critically and metaphorically on the time in which one is living was intrinsic to all of Gavelis’ novels, even those set in the years after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence. The entire body of Gavelis’ work stands out in Lithuanian literature with its declarative anti-romantic perspective, and its critically unrelenting, dispassionate language. His prose is logical and deliberately constructed, incorporating a detailed analysis of his time and the recent past that consciously avoids any kind of nostalgia or sentiment. He deploys rich imagery, never seen before in Lithuanian prose, to

‘I had the courage and misfortune to show people their life as it truly was.’

depict the city, death, the human body and eroticism, incorporating critical reflection on images central to the national identity, and toppling long-held myths of what it means to be Lithuanian. What is particularly intriguing is that Gavelis, who was born in the dismal Stalinist era, raised under the regime of Leonid (or ‘Lavonid’, a play on the Lithuanian word for ‘a corpse’) Brezhnev, and who dissected the Soviet system and its components in such detail, remained a true European, not only in the spirit of his writings and the authentic mindset of an unbroken man, but also in his values. In 1989, when Lithuania was still officially part of the Soviet Union, Gavelis confidently expressed his own vision for Lithuanian culture and literature in an interview: ‘I believe we have to seek out a unique Lithuanian character, and express it in a European context. There is no other way. We are Europeans, so let’s be European.’ A reader of consequential Western literature, despite the ban on such works under the Soviet regime, a translator of Kurt Vonnegut and James Joyce (translated manuscripts were found in his personal papers), and the author of novels hidden safely away in a drawer that exposed the Soviet system, Gavelis only received recognition for his work in a European context 13 years after his death, after the publication in France of Vilnius Poker (translated by Margarita Le Borgne) in 2015. Critics welcomed it as a work with a particular relevance to the present day, and as an indisputable masterpiece of contemporary Lithuanian literature. Favourable reviews propelled him into the ranks of the most influential and re-

‘I believe we have to seek out a unique Lithuanian character, and express it in a European context. There is no other way. We are Europeans, so let’s be European.’

nowned names in world literature. Numerous reviews enthused: ‘This is Dostoevsky. This is Burroughs, Bukowski and Kafka. This is Kundera.’ But in truth, this was Ričardas Gavelis and his literary vision.

The poet, prose writer and essayist Sigitas Parulskis (born 1965) has never fought shy of uncomfortable, taboo or controversial themes, and is considered one of the enfants terribles of Lithuanian literature. In his novel Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness and Company), which appeared in 2012, he tackles one of the most painful topics for Lithuanians, the Holocaust. Through the novel, he tries to understand and explain how as many as 94 per cent of Lithuania’s Jews came to be exterminated. These terrible events are shown through the eyes of the photographer Vincent, a member of a local death squad. In this painful novel, historical events, biblical references and elements of magical realism are skilfully woven together, while staggering beauty and love clash with violence, death and betrayal. The author was given the Person of Tolerance Award for this novel in 2012.

Tomas Vaiseta

Sigitas Parulskis Darkness and Company Peter Owen Publishers, 2018 Translated by Karla Gruodis

THE CHILL OF SIGITAS PARULSKIS

From 1941 to 1944, when Lithuania was occupied by the Nazis, between 195,000 and 196,000 Jews were murdered — 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population.

Sigitas Parulskis (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

The first sentence in this article is more significant than any that comes after it, and, in truth, more important than any of the discussions that have occurred about this one horrific and incomprehensible fact. The Holocaust was conceived, initiated and organised by the Nazis, but several thousand local residents, mostly Lithuanians, also took part in the mass murder of the country’s Jews. Lithuania was soaked in blood, particularly in the summer and autumn of 1941, when 80 per cent of its Jews were murdered in less than six months. Neighbours’ homes in villages and small towns were emptied instantly, in a month, over a week, or in one day. It was impossible not to see the tragedy befalling the Jews. They were marched down streets, confined in temporary ghettos, and, unlike in Western Europe, where Jews were transported for extermination to German and Polish concentration camps, they were shot not far from their ancestral homes, sometimes witnessed by Lithuanians. In the larger cities, the witnesses had a different experience. Jews were corralled into more permanent ghettos, and ‘liquidation actions’ were carried out in more remote locations. City dwellers

usually experienced the Holocaust in a less immediate way, not through the sudden disappearance of familiar faces on an unfathomable scale, but as a long process of death that took on an almost aberrant stability which one could avoid witnessing first-hand. While it is unclear if there is a direct connection between these experiences and the fact that authors writing about the Holocaust hail from smaller Lithuanian towns, it is nevertheless symbolically signifi-

‘I’m from Molėtai [...] Everyone knows Molėtai, Lithuania’s summer holiday paradise. During the war—on one summer day in 1941, to be precise—two thousand Jews were shot dead here […] The killing was overseen by German Nazis. The shooting was done by local Lithuanians.’ Marius Ivaškevičius

cant that, of late, questions pertaining to the memory of the Great Catastrophe have been most vividly presented by such writers. ‘I’m from Molėtai [...] Everyone knows Molėtai, Lithuania’s summer holiday paradise. During the war, on one summer’s day in 1941 to be precise, two thousand Jews were shot dead here […] The killing was overseen by German Nazis. The shooting was done by local Lithuanians,’ wrote the renowned playwright Marius Ivaškevičius in his 2016 appeal to all concerned Lithuanians to come to Molėtai to commemorate the anniversary of the Jewish massacre there. The initiative drew a surprising amount of support, and its organiser admitted that he had lived ‘in complete ignorance for forty years, right in the shadow of such an enormous tragedy, without ever suspecting a thing’. Several years earlier, Sigitas Parulskis wrote his novel Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness and Company) about the slaughter of the country’s Jews, and the Lithuanians’ part in it. Parulskis, who hails from Obeliai, another small town, gave a similar explana-

‘I even found my own unfortunate small town in the north of Lithuania on that diagram. With only the numbers and the bare facts: 1,160 Jews were killed by the Nazis and local collaborators. I don’t know how to explain it, but I suddenly felt unmasked. For forty-five years I had taken no interest in this subject, I had avoided it, evaded it, because, most probably, I had been afraid of the truth.’ tion to that by Ivaškevičius for his decision to tackle the subject. On a visit to the Imperial War Museum in London, he saw a diagram showing the locations of the extermination of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. ‘I even found my own unfortunate small town in the north of Lithuania on that diagram, with only the numbers and the bare facts: 1,160 Jews were killed by the Nazis and local collaborators. I don’t know how to explain it, but I suddenly felt unmasked. For forty-five years, I had taken no interest in the subject, I had avoided it, evaded it, probably because I had been afraid of the truth.’ Where does it come from, this amnesia, ignorance and avoidance on the part of children and grandchildren raised by the inhabitants of small towns who could not have been blind to their neighbours being driven from their homes and savagely murdered so close by?

Throughout Europe, contemplating the Holocaust has always been a complicated process, taking place differently and under different circumstances in each society, but always slowly and painfully, confronting arguments and accusations, albeit with great difficulty. But in the countries reoccupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, including Lithuania, such reflection would only become truly possible beginning from the years 1988 to 1990, as the Soviet universe collapsed. Commanding strict control over the public sphere and the memory articulated within it, the Soviet regime prohibited any singling out or commemoration of the Jewish Catastrophe as the unique tragedy of one people. Jews, as a word and as a people, were meant to melt away into the mass of all ‘Soviet peoples’, and the Holocaust was to be classified as just another ‘Hitlerite crime’. In its drive to create one ‘Internationalist Soviet People’, the Soviet regime had no interest in singling out the suffering of one group, perhaps hoping to conceal the fact that its concern for the Jewish tragedy was limited to its utility in focusing attention on the ‘fascist evil’, and the Soviet regime’s victory over it, nothing more. Which is why various Jewish execution sites across Lithuania were marked simply, if at all, as places to commemorate ‘Soviet citizens felled by Hitlerite crimes’. During this era of imposed silence, the memory of the Holocaust lingered only in the thoughts of those who had witnessed the slaughter, or in private conversations, often being transformed into stereotypes and historically inaccurate stories, claiming that while Lithuanians may have participated in the killings, they only did so to take revenge on the Jews for their part in the process of sovietisation during the first Soviet occupation, or that they had already suffered so much that pondering the Jewish misfortune was inadvisable. Those who managed to escape to the free West also rarely engaged in any critical reflection on the Holocaust, because they often considered it a purely Jewish, and not Lithuanian, tragedy, although there were attempts, particularly in literature, to broach more painful historical episodes, such as the Lithuanians’ role in the killings. The society that fought to restore independence was then faced with addressing the problem of historical memory, tightly wound into a ball of pain, guilt, shame, indifference, nightmares, stereotypes and lies. The newly restored state, ever wary of falling into traps left behind by Soviet ideology, began promoting the memory of the Holocaust carefully. But the young state and the society building it were initially concerned with preserving the stories emerging from the prison of Soviet imagery and consolidating the Lithuanian people, so most of their efforts were devoted to the study and commemoration of their own suffering experienced during the war and foreign occupations, as well as romanticising and idealising the pre-Second World War indepen-

dent republic, and feelings of grandeur inspired by the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The memory of the Holocaust was cultivated from a safe distance, for fear of tainting fragile romantic ideals and diminishing Lithuanians’ own suffering. As noted by the historian Hektoras Vitkus, this may explain why, instead of prompting critical reflection through analysis and debate about sensitive and awkward questions, the memory of the Jewish Catastrophe was deemed sacrosanct. As soon as those sensitive and awkward issues did arise, they immediately generated sparks and a smouldering smell, tinged with an unpleasant whiff of confrontation, accusation, fear, complexes, conspiracy, anger and anti-Semitism. Maintaining a safe distance was a more convenient strategy, but the formality, sacredness and prudence of this approach prevented it from reaching the public, to say nothing of the ability to understand the Holocaust as Lithuania’s own catastrophe, the catastrophe of our own country’s Jewry. And, like a fungus in their minds, the amnesia, ignorance and avoidance of those children and grandchildren festered, until it brought 40-year-old men to turn red with shame, like six-year-old children. Never specifically approached and asked about it, even witnesses and observers of the Jewish massacre remained silent. But once asked, they suddenly exposed a thorn in their past, deeply embedded within their consciousness, which they neither knew how to manage nor to properly address. For ten or 15 years, historians lived an entirely separate existence. Although small in number, they undertook a thorough and professional study of issues pertaining to the Holocaust, reconstructing events, analysing complicated questions, and presenting their findings about how the killing of the Jews was organised and executed, and how and why many Lithuanians took part, refuting the myths and stereotypes that had long circulated in the nation’s collective memory. Working with other academics, cultural historians and public activists, historians took another, even more significant, step: they gradually marked out the way back to awareness, a path for society to follow: to recognise the Holocaust as a tragedy that befell the Jews, not anonymous ‘Soviet citizens’; to recognise it as a Lithuanian, not just Jewish, tragedy; to expose the Lithuanians who took part in the execution of that tragedy; to recognise the Jews as a people who had not just been murdered in the Holocaust, but who had a centuries-old culture and tradition as inhabitants of Lithuania; and to recognise the Jews as their fellow citizens, neighbours, partners, classmates and friends. In other words, to reverse the optics of memory, and remember the Jews of Lithuania, not the Jews in Lithuania. But society barely noticed the work of the historians. Although their efforts contributed to the schooling of a new generation through new educational

programmes and initiatives, a stronger, bolder and more influential stimulus was needed to truly rekindle the memory of the Holocaust. No one campaign, programme, initiative or artefact could do this, but if one had to identify a symbolic point of departure that signalled the start of a new, more open and more profound (though not always universally successful) consideration of the Jewish Catastrophe in Lithuania, one might look to the early 2010s, to a watershed moment that came with the publication in 2012 of Sigitas Parulskis’ novel Darkness and Company. Darkness and Company In retrospect, it may be that only Parulskis is capable of such a feat, presenting society with a bold, provocative, and even shocking novel about the Holocaust, and asking the most essential questions: what role did Lithuanians play in the tragedy, and why did they take part in the killing? Parulskis emerged on the literary scene at the same time as the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, first as a poet, and soon afterwards as a literary critic, publicist, playwright and essayist. Alone, plagued with longing, communing with the dead and with death itself, rebellious, impertinent (towards authority), merciless, presenting himself as an outsider, a stranger, as an idle humanitarian, Parulskis was all of these things. But in contrast to that same image, he became a widely read and highly treasured author, an influential and much-sought-after literary voice. The same motifs were repeated throughout his career, creating a uniquely new, stark existentialism in post-Soviet Lithuania that corresponded to the spirit of the times: the solitude waiting at the end of all human relationships; a sometimes deeper, but also sometimes more vulgar psychoanalytical struggle with his father; a woman’s insatiable desire, tainted with the smell of death; a complicated relationship with faith, with God, and a highly sceptical view of the Church as an institution, but a sensitive, aesthetic relationship with churches as architectural creations. His first novel Trys sekundės dangaus (Three Seconds of Heaven), published in 2002, a story about coercion and the griminess of daily life serving in the Soviet army, is a quintessential example incorporating all of these motifs. A new age seemed to have just begun, and the best novel of that age seemed to have already been written. Older generations were moved by its description of the brutal experience of compulsory service in the Soviet army, still fresh in their

memories. For his own generation, one that Parulskis himself described as distrustful, indifferent, idle and unenthusiastic after all the great political upheavals, his work was a contemplation of oneself and one’s own fate. But perhaps its most significant impact was on the younger generation and the youngest readers, who may not have been familiar with Parulskis as a poet or as a literary critic, and for whom the Soviet past was only a time barely remembered from their early childhood. Reading the book ahistorically, with little interest in the Soviet era, they discovered and identified with his existentialism. This bond with different generations was significant in later years, as he came to be seen as speaking a common language with his readers, regardless of age or experience. Darkness and Company appeared ten years later, but the author’s style was unchanged. On the contrary, the essence of his principal creative motifs was even sharper, only now Lithuanians were no longer depicted as victims, but as executioners. Under the Nazi occupation, the main character Vincentas hopes to save his Jewish lover Judita by agreeing to photograph the massacre of the Jews at the bidding of a Nazi officer. He wanders through the countryside accompanying a squad of Lithuanian executioners, but remains a passive, apathetic observer caught between killers and victims, never expressing any clear position, and avoiding taking any firm position on questions of moral responsibility. Photographing the killings simultaneously draws him in and distances him from it. He is permeated by death and horror, by the frigid cold of the most profound darkness. As if the images of bodies of brutally murdered Jews thrown into pits were not enough, as if unsure that this amount of frigid cold would suffice, Parulskis incorporates all of the symbolism he is known for, biblical motifs, inexorable desire and perverse sadistic scenes, to approach the very edge of shock, without stepping beyond it, to ensure that his chilling imagery will have its freezing effect. Parulskis was not the first, and yet he was the first: this is perhaps the best way to describe his literary impact on readers. The subject of the Holocaust and Lithuanians’ role in it had been written about previously in novels, short stories and poems, by Balys Sruoga, Antanas Škėma, Algimantas Mackus, Jurgis Blekaitis, Icchokas Meras and Grigorijus Kanovičius, but these works had become distant, both in time and spirit (and perhaps in their very language) from the

readership of newly restored, independent Lithuania, and thus could not really have an effect on it. To allow the sacralised memory of the Holocaust, preserved under glass, to reach readers, there had to be an author bold enough to desacralise that memory, thus paradoxically making the subject newly relevant, and bringing his readers closer to the Jewish Catastrophe. ‘I don’t know how anyone can read this book, but I did,’ wrote one reader on the Goodreads website, giving Darkness and Company four stars. This sentiment was a good reflection of the opinions expressed by a majority of the novel’s readers. The ‘sex and God’ formula (according to another reviewer) set against the backdrop of the Jewish massacre was difficult for many to negotiate, but public reaction showed that it could nevertheless facilitate the novel’s principal aim: to re-examine and find not only a collective but an intimately personal connection with this great tragedy of the past. The novel’s proactive approach, the subject of the Holocaust, and the images of Lithuanians as passive observers and as butchers, were also inevitably accompanied by that well-known smouldering stench of hatred. Parulskis’ email inbox was flooded with anti-Semitic messages, followed by publicly and privately expressed regret that the novel would only serve to further diminish such a small and maligned nation. Writers of anonymously posted comments and participants in virtual discussions accused the author of betraying Lithuania, and ‘selling out to the Jews’, often drowning out the occasional more rational and substantiated reflections on the problem of individual and collective responsibility, about the historical validity of Parulskis’ interpretation of the genesis of the Holocaust, or about equating the Lithuanian nation with murderers, and the overall significance of the national origins of the killers. All of this only served to affirm that a new, more profound and more open reconsideration of the Jewish Catastrophe had only just begun in the early 2010s. One could say that this ‘having just begun’ continues to this day. Darkness and Company caused passionate discussions. We might understand these discussions, in which one side argued for the importance of the search for historical truth, and the other for the right of artistic interpretation, as a learning process for Lithuanian society to address the Holocaust in the proper way: how to break the glass of the protective dome, and how to find one’s

voice once it has been shattered. Conversations that seemed to focus on discerning the purpose, function and meaning of a work of art were also, it seems, a discussion (though not always articulated) about whether the purpose, function and meaning of that work of art was truly suitable for addressing the subject of the Holocaust. Darkness and Company brazenly obliterated the safe detachment from the Holocaust, opening up an unknown, and therefore risky, space for discourse. Parulskis understood this risk. He told one group of readers that we fear the path to memory and the past as much as we fear walking on thin ice. Perhaps this is exactly why Darkness and Company is so permeated by that freezing chill: so that the ice might one day thicken, and our fear of crossing it might disappear?

SILVA RERUM

KRISTINA SABALIAUSKAITÄ&#x2013; AND ROMAS KINKA IN CONVERSATION WITH ROSIE GOLDSMITH

Kristina SabaliauskaitÄ&#x2014; (Photograph: Rokas Darulis)

Art historian Dr Kristina Sabaliauskaitė (born 1974) is currently the most widely read contemporary Lithuanian author. Her Silva rerum (Silva Rerum) historical novels, still called the Great Saga of Vilnius, tell the story of a Lithuanian noble family, the Narwoyszes, in the 17th and 18th centuries. The author masterfully weaves a plot of intrigue, while paying close attention to historical, cultural and social details. The skilfully developed narrative, the

colour of the Baroque era, the elements of adventure, love and romance, and the painstakingly crafted historical background, make these novels stand out from the rest of Lithuanian literature, and appeal to both the ordinary and the refined reader. Silva Rerum is also a successful attempt to draw Lithuanian literature away from its traditional themes of the countryside, the romanticisation of nature, and life on the land.

Kristina Sabaliauskaitė Silva rerum (Silva Rerum) Vilnius: Baltos lankos 2008 18 editions

Kristina Sabaliauskaitė, the author of Silva Rerum, and her translator Romas Kinka are two of London’s most famous Lithuanians. Romas is a full-time translator into English, and Kristina is a full-time writer in Lithuanian. Together, they hope to introduce Silva Rerum to English readers. They tell their remarkable story to the British journalist Rosie Goldsmith, the director of the European Literature Network.

Kristina Sabaliauskaitė Silva rerum II (Silva Rerum II) Vilnius: Baltos lankos 2011 13 editions

Rosie: Kristina, how did you become a Lithuanian novelist living in London? Kristina: The city drew me in. I graduated as an art historian in Vilnius, specialising in Baroque painting, and came to London to study at the Warburg Institute and research my PhD thesis. Then I was invited by a major Lithuanian newspaper to be their UK correspondent. After Lithuania joined the EU in 2004, the number of Lithuanians in the UK grew, and, as a journalist, I got to know them and this country well. I sometimes joke that I am more familiar with Lithuanians here than I would be in my Vilnius bubble! It was a good life, but I began asking if there was more to life. I’d dreamt of writing a novel ever since my PhD studies, researching Lithuanian documents stored in archives in Poland and Lithuania, and wondering why there were no decent contemporary Lithuanian historical novels based on those amazing memoirs and letters. The time was right: London liberated me, because my British friends are very creative and are not afraid of changing careers and trying new things. Rosie: Sitting with us here on my sofa in London is Romas Kinka, who I got to know when I interviewed him for the BBC as Lithuania’s UK spokesperson after independence in the 1990s. Romas, what’s your potted biography?

Kristina Sabaliauskaitė Silva rerum III (Silva Rerum III) Vilnius: Baltos lankos 2014 8 editions

Kristina Sabaliauskaitė Silva rerum IV (Silva Rerum IV) Vilnius: Baltos lankos 2016 5 editions

Romas: I was born in Lithuania during the war. We left in 1944 as the Red Army approached. We spent four years as displaced persons in camps in the British zone in Germany. In 1947, the British invited Lithuanian adults in the camps to come to Britain because of the labour shortage. I was six when we arrived, and already spoke Lithuanian, German and English. My father, who was born in a small town on the East Prussian border, spoke six languages, as did my mother. If I’m asked when I began translating, I answer ‘At the age of six’. It’s in my genes. I first translated literature back in the 1970s, although there was little chance of publishing anything. It took a long time to meet Kristina! In 2009, I was at the Lithuanian Embassy in London. Kristina’s first Silva Rerum novel had just come out. She read an excerpt, I loved it, and went up to her and offered my services as translator. My wife and I read it all in Lithuanian. For me, Kristina has not just written a wonderful historical novel, the language itself is so multi-layered. She is considered a challenge for translators, some sentences go on for a page or two, but for me she’s a gift. Kristina is a fantastic example of best-sellerdom meeting quality fiction. As a literary translator, I am an ambassador, crossing borders into other countries, helping to acquaint citizens with the best of the written word.

Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Vilnius (Photograph: Kontis Šatūnas)

Rosie: Let’s hope that Silva Rerum finds a UK publisher and makes Romas happy! We love page-turning historical novels and family sagas in this country. Kristina, you wrote the quartet between 2008 and 2016; tell us more about Silva Rerum. Kristina: It means ‘forest of things’ in Latin. For noble families in Lithuania and Poland, this was a handmade book to keep records for future generations, like speeches at funerals or weddings, even recipes, household tips, poetry and pamphlets. It’s a treasure trove or scrapbook of family life. What I’ve done is to take the Silva Rerum of one noble family, the Narwoyszes, and written four books about them over two centuries, starting in the mid-17th century, after the Muscovite and Swedish war in Vilnius, and ending up with the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian state. One book covers one generation. ‘Four’ also refers to the Baroque concept of four elements. The first book is ‘earth’, because it describes the family estate in Samogitia, gardening, earth, attachment to the land. The second is about the plague, so, naturally, it’s ‘air’. The third is ‘fire’ and is set in the mid-18th century during the great fires in Vilnius. And the fourth is ‘water’, about the seafaring travels of the main character, Franciszek Ksawery Narwoysz, a professor of mathematics and astronomy, philosopher and freemason, who is well known in

Lithuanian history. Silva Rerum is based on real people. It starts with the story of the 17th-century twins Casimir and Ursula. Casimir, as was typical for the nobility then, studies law at Vilnius University, and belongs to a liberal group of students who get into street fights with the radicals. Ursula is fearful of death, and vain, and wants to become a saint, so she enters a convent. For me it’s a chance to look at some fascinating themes: religion, superstition, tradition, women’s rights, intellectual life in the 17th and 18th centuries, life behind the walls of a convent. Rosie: Silva Rerum is a bestseller in Lithuania, the Baltics and Poland, with many reprints and prizes. It’s been called the novel of the decade, it’s an absolute phenomenon. Were you surprised at the impact? What was your goal? Did you always intend to write four novels? Kristina: Yes, from the very start, I mapped out each of them, and told no one that I was writing. I was superstitious. At that time, I hadn’t yet quit my journalism job, but I had to after the success of the first novel. I wasn’t trying to achieve anything beyond telling the story of an historical period and people that fascinated me. I hoped I might find readers like me, in their mid-30s, interested in our history, living in Vilnius, but I never could have imagined the outreach of the novels

to readers of all ages and walks of life and countries. The paradox is that Silva Rerum is quite complex: it’s dense with facts, cultural history and philosophy. But I was taught by my professors here in London that the greatest art is to describe complex things in the simplest way. I truly believe that all good works of art, whether paintings or literature, must be multi-layered and accessible on different levels. A teenager might read Silva Rerum as a page-turning adventure, but someone interested in philosophy or religious history can delve deeper. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been able to restore interest in those lost centuries of our history. Our history books were heavily censored, especially in Soviet times. Earlier too, museum collections and archives were removed. Our national memory was cleansed. Rosie: So, you’ve helped give people back their history. What about language? In that period, across centuries and across Europe, everybody was speaking several languages. It was an incredible multilingual, multinational, multicultural period of European history. How do you translate that, Romas? Romas: I grew up in a multilingual family. It was my everyday life, and what I am today. That will help in translating these novels. I have an interest not just in Lithuanian history, but in Polish and Jewish history, which feature prominently in Kristina’s novels and short stories. Rosie: How would you describe Kristina’s language? Romas: It’s a gift. Kristina’s sentences are rich, Baroque, and often long, but they make perfect sense: you get carried along, like in a boat on a river. Kristina: When editors see my writing for the first time, they are in shock and start panicking. They say, ‘Look, she repeats the same word six times in one sentence!’ ‘Look, that sentence is fifty-two lines long!’ But I say it is like breathing, it has a certain rhythm. I need the repetition for structure, to keep the reader mesmerised. Rosie: You also employ very little dialogue. Why? Kristina: Partly because of the multiculturalism and multilingualism we mentioned. The same character in the novel may speak several languages, depending on the situation. Casimir Narwoysz, the young nobleman, may speak Lithuanian and the Samogitian

dialect at home, but at university in Vilnius he speaks Polish and Latin. On the streets we also hear French, German, Jewish, Italian, Russian, Dutch and Scottish, as there was a notorious Scot living in Vilnius. The main character in my fourth novel was a polyglot, so in London he speaks English, and in Paris French, but he also knows Lithuanian, Polish, Latin and Latvian. However, as I was writing in modern Lithuanian, there was no way I could reproduce the diversity of their speech in those days. Linguistically, that epoch is ‘silent’, unfamiliar to the contemporary Lithuanian reader. So, I made my characters emerge as a ‘silent choir’, through description not speech. Rosie: Your novels have been called ‘magical Baroque’, not ‘magical realism’. But that’s how I see your writing too, a special confluence of your art history background and passion for history. Your style has been compared with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco and Woody Allen. You’ve tapped into a style which is very accessible, funny and readable, as well as literary and academic. Kristina: Again, that’s the essence of Baroque. Each Baroque work of art is an attempt to link times, knowledge, form and style, whether we are looking at the paintings of Jan Vermeer with the camera obscura, or the universe of the architecture of a Baroque church, or three-dimensional frescoes at Il Gesu. Science and art: those are the two things I write about. Rosie: Your novels haven’t yet been translated into English. As you know English, you could be the nightmare author, or you could be the best kind of author! Kristina: I am a nightmare author! If Romas sends me a translation, I email him back saying, ‘In that sentence could we look for a synonym with two more syllables, because the rhythm requires it? It should go “tah-tah; tah-tah-tah-tah”. Instead of “bad”, could we use “sinister”?’ But Romas and I have already worked on short stories, and it’s very productive. I wouldn’t say ‘collaboration’, because Romas translates. Translation is like playing the same musical score with a different instrument. So, if you have a virtuoso translator, a virtuoso player of a different instrument, then it works. Rosie: Well, you need a virtuoso author as well! Romas, how is the situation of Lithuanian translation into English today?

Romas: The problem is a lack of native speakers of English to translate from Lithuanian. For me, it was different. I was born in Lithuania but grew up in England, and have used both languages since childhood. You must have a native control of English to translate fiction; publishers won’t hire you otherwise. There are more translators in the USA, Lithuanians or people of Lithuanian descent, but often their Lithuanian isn’t good, even if they have native control of English. It’s a problem. Rosie: How can we change the situation? Romas: It’s important to change it. We want more Lithuanian literature translated into English, but Lithuanian children growing up in this country begin to lose their Lithuanian early on. Their parents complain to me all the time. What happens is that once they start going to school, their Lithuanian gets worse. The parents may speak Lithuanian at home, but the children answer in English. And if there is more than one child in the family, the children start speaking English among themselves. Rosie: Added to which there is a chronic drop in language learning and teaching in this country. It’s not a healthy language environment, which has repercussions for translation, and, ultimately, literature. Kristina, does this worry you? Kristina: I agree with Romas about the danger of a possible decline in Lithuanian if the child attends British schools. But it all depends on the family. You can regard the multilingual environment as a curse or as a gift. My husband and child speak Lithuanian at home, I speak five languages, and we have an unwritten rule in our family for generations that a child eventually has to learn all the languages that the parents are fluent in. I’m an optimist about the young generation and their command of both languages. Rosie: But is there a problem promoting Lithuanian literature? Kristina: Probably the question I hear most in Britain is, ‘Why should we read a novel from Lithuania about Lithuania?’ When I hear that, I get really angry. Since when is reading only about reading familiar things? It should take you out of your comfort zone. It’s a means to get to know the world and different cultures.

Rosie: Kristina, how much of a legacy did the Soviets leave on Lithuania and its language and literature? You grew up under the Soviets, also speaking Russian. How much do you think writers like you have absorbed Soviet culture? Kristina: Very good question. I grew up in a bilingual public space, with signs and street names in both Lithuanian and Russian. Lots of Soviet colonists came to live and work in Lithuania and never bothered to learn Lithuanian. At the supermarket checkout it was normal to hear Russian. The Writers’ Union was totally Soviet. That’s baggage we still sometimes carry today. There are writers still alive from those times, former members of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Literature was a propaganda tool. If you wrote something dissident or ambitious, which didn’t fit into Soviet Socialist Realism, you were censored, or not published. So usually to get published, authors already self-censored when writing. Everything had to pass Soviet censorship. Luckily, this is not the case any more!

FISHES AND DRAGONS

Rosie: Romas, what are your hopes for Lithuanian literature in English? Romas: What I want is for as much good Lithuanian literature to be translated into English as possible. English is spoken throughout the world, and if Kristina’s novels were translated into English, they would be read everywhere! Lithuanian history is part of European history, and we forget that, especially with Britain leaving the EU. I hope that by reading Silva Rerum in English, readers here will recognise our shared history.

A BOOK BY UNDINĖ RADZEVIČIŪTĖ Laimantas Jonušys Undinė Radzevičiūtė (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

The writer Undinė Radzevičiūtė (born 1967) belongs to a new generation of Lithuanian prose writers. She writes in an economical and concentrated way: her novels and short stories are immediately recognisable by their distinctive style and subtle irony and humour, laced with a generous dose of the absurd. The novel Žuvys ir drakonai (Fishes and Dragons) appeared in 2013, embracing themes of great weight and breadth. The narrative concerns the relationship between East and West, comprising two

separate stories. The first is about a Jesuit artist, Fr Castiglione, who seeks to propagate Christianity in 18th-century China, then ruled by the Qing Dynasty. The second is about the daily lives of three generations of women in the 21st century. These two narratives intersect and diverge, but the author’s skill brings them together in a single whole, showing how two different systems of culture and thought impact on each other. The author was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature for this novel.

Cornelius Hell, Radzevičiūtė’s Austrian translator into the German language, once rhetorically asked: ‘Why should it be a prerogative of authors from large nations to determine the narrative about the wider world?’ All of Radzevičiūtė’s works (six books to date) are distinguished by her signature lapidary style, notable for its short, clipped sentences, and quite often segments consisting of only one sentence. This is not just a method of moving the narrative forward; it also serves as a means to create a playful effect of points and counterpoints, paradoxes, insights, and wit. Fishes and Dragons

The novel Žuvys ir drakonai (Fishes and Dragons), which interweaves two very ostensibly different narrative strands, depicting 18th-century China and a modern-day European city, was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2015. Writers and critics ranked it second on a list of the best fiction from the decade 2005 to 2014, in a poll conducted by the Lithuanian PEN Centre. The novel was published in Germany in 2017, and is currently being translated into English. Plans are also under way to translate the book into Polish, Bulgarian, Italian, Latvian, Estonian, Hungarian and Spanish by 2019. Undinė Radzevičiūtė graduated from Vilnius Academy of Art, and later worked mostly with international advertising agencies. She debuted as an author with her short playful novel Strekaza in 2003, which was well received for its minimalist and fragmentary style, partly reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, and partly evoking the spirit of the haiku. After a short interval, she published a novel and a book of short stories in 2010 and 2011, written in the same vein, and it soon became evident that she was distancing herself from depictions of contemporary Lithuania. ‘One lives where one’s head is,’ she once said in an interview. ‘When my head is in China or in the Middle Ages, then I’m there.’ In another interview, given to the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, Radzevičiūtė left little doubt about her independent stance. ‘The worst that can happen to a writer is to have a teacher or to belong to a tradition. If you ask our literary critics about me, they’ll tell you that my books have nothing in common with Lithuanian literature.’

In her fourth novel Fishes and Dragons, generally considered her best, East meets West on an easel and on a plane of cultural mentality. In a certain sense, the novel is an imaginative and entertaining study of a clash between two cultures: Christian European (the fishes) and Imperial Chinese (the dragons). The encounter is fraught with curious misunderstandings, absurdities, and the dismal failure of 18th-century European missionaries in their early attempts to convert the Chinese court to Christianity. ‘You can’t transfer Europe to China, and you can’t show the true power of the Church. The Emperor will always only see emissaries dressed in Chinese garb. Emperors weren’t afraid of receiving these messengers, because they knew they would never be able to overcome the final, invisible wall of China.’ The initial impetus for Radzevičiūtė was the story of a real Italian Jesuit and painter, Giuseppe Castiglione, who accompanied several Portuguese missionaries to China. And indeed, it would be fair to say that she has displayed a deep knowledge of the Chinese mentality and traditional Chinese culture. But that is only one strand of the novel. Another unfolds in an unidentified, modern-day European city, in a rather limited milieu, where echoes of Chinese culture, Confucianism and Buddhism play out against European sensibilities, in ironic, playful and often absurd situations, in a family of four women. The grandmother Amigorena was born in Argentina, but left the country early in life with her parents. Her daughter Mama Nora is a writer of erotic novels. And her adult daughters are Miki and Shasha (who, as it later transpires, is writing the story of Castiglione in China). The four women, living in a modern flat in the old part of a large city, engage in lively, snappy dialogues and conversations, curiously resembling a Zen ping-

Undinė Radzevičiūtė Žuvys ir drakonai (Fishes and Dragons), Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2013.

pong match, and sometimes verging slightly on the tradition of theatre of the absurd. The author has repeatedly said that her aim was to write a kind of Western dialogue based on the principles of Zen dialogue. ‘In a Western dialogue, one’s partner is defeated by arguments; and in a Zen dialogue, by one’s swiftness of reaction.’ An important aspect of Fishes and Dragons is the strange encounters between different cultures, quite often depicted with playfulness and gentle humour, as in this passage where members of an Imperial Chinese Commission scrutinise Castiglione’s paintings:

Some members of the commission close one eye, and then the other. Some, meanwhile, stick out their pointed tongue, as if trying to lick the horses. From a distance. Some furl their bottom lip, some squint, narrowing their eyes, some puff out their cheeks. Like eunuchs on the stage of an Imperial theatre. The members of the commission think that the horses’ heads are too small, and that their hocks are too thin. The explanation that these are Iberian horses, and that they should look like this, does not help. It seems that the commission doubts not only the Iberian horses, but Iberia itself. (translated by Ada Valaitis)

Against the background of the Chinese narrative, removed in space and time, the four women from a modern European family sense a Chinese presence on their doorstep. From their windows overlooking a courtyard, they can sometimes observe people from a Chinese restaurant. But this is more a feature of contemporary European life, and has little to do with traditional Chinese culture. The lives of the four women eventually evolve along their own unique trajectories. In a later part of the novel, the household, which had appeared rather settled and static, starts to unravel. Towards the end of her days, the recalcitrant grandmother, Amigorena, flees her home, and, when she is found, she sinks into lethargy for two months. Mama Nora moves to Australia with her boyfriend photographer, after which we hear about her only through letters. Miki, meanwhile, meets a tragic end in the Middle East as an aspiring war photographer. The novel provides not only literary playfulness and wit, but also incisive observations, like this one by Shasha:

WRITING VILNIUS

‘In fairy tales, problems are complicated, but are overcome easily;’ whereas ‘In real life, problems are invisible, unclear, soft and sticky, and torment people for months on end.’ After reading Fishes and Dragons, the prominent Lithuanian poet and essayist Giedrė Kazlauskaitė spoke of her feeling of jealousy: ‘I envied her well-formed sentences, her cultivated imagination, and her interest in the world, which I have not seen for a long time […] In Radzevičiūtė’s book, there are none of the banal quips that appear in our everyday polemical writing. You read the dialogue, which is written skilfully and without emptiness, and smile.’ The author displays a deep knowledge of traditional Chinese culture, but she wears her learning lightly. She presents a perceptive juxtaposition of European and Far Eastern sensibilities, full of incompatibilities, without a hint of cumbersome philosophising or moralising, relying instead on narrative drive, smooth dialogue, amusing situations and humour. The characters in the novel find much to be bewildered at or astonished by, both in each other and in the world. In a similar way, the readers of Fishes and Dragons can find many surprises to marvel at.

Laimonas Briedis

Vilnius in many languages. A detail of “Lithuania”, prepared by M. V. Coronelli, Venice, 1696 (Vilnius University Library)

The enigma of Vilnius, its attraction and its unique nature are also described by the poet, essayist and translator Tomas Venclova (born 1937). His book Vilnius. Asmeninė istorija (Vilnius: A Personal History) looks at the town through its people. Writing freely, critically, but as objectively as possible, Venclova recounts the complete cultural history of the town. The book reveals the diversity of the town’s peoples and cultures, its most fateful events, and the creative individuals who produced their works there. Vilnius: A Personal History is illustrated with excellent photographs of the town taken by famous Lithuanian and foreign photographers in the second half of the 20th century.

Tomas Venclova (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Laimonas Briedis (Photograph: author’s private collection)

Vilnius: City of Strangers is an inspiring achievement, propelling readers on a highly original and deeply researched literary journey through the history of Vilnius. By combining different accounts by foreign travellers with a powerful voice and lucid vision of his own, the Lithuanian-Canadian scholar and writer Laimonas Briedis puts the Lithuanian capital at the centre of the political, ideological and cultural battlegrounds of Europe. Sweeping in scope, the book connects multi-ethnic stories of Vilnius with an imaginary geography of Europe, creating a moving narrative where everyone, native and stranger alike, encounters a marvel to behold. First published to international acclaim in the English language, the book has also become hugely popular in Lithuanian, thus successfully bridging the gap between local memory and global readership. If history is a novel that happened and a novel is history that might have happened, then Vilnius: City of Strangers is naked truth told as legend.

Laimonas Briedis Vilnius: City of Strangers 2018 (6th edition)

Czesław Miłosz once remarked on the Sisyphean fate of a storyteller who seeks to bare the soul of his native city of Wilno. ‘I see an injustice:’ the poet remarks, conceding defeat, ‘a Parisian does not have to bring his city out of nothingness every time he wants to describe it.’ The narrative, imaginary, force of Paris depends on a great wealth of allusions, and since the city ‘exists in works of word, brush, and chisel; even if it were to vanish from the face of the earth, one would still be able to recreate it in the imagination.’ By contrast, each time Wilno enters a conversation, its image dwindles to bare bones. Hence, returning in thought to the cityscape where the most crucial part of his life unfolded, the writer is ‘forced to condense’ imagination by inventing ‘the most utilitarian sort of symbols’, as is expected ‘when everything, from geography and architecture to the colour of the air, has to be squeezed into a few sentences’. Writing in response to this dew of the image is first and foremost finding your way back to the city, introducing yourself to it as if you were a stranger. There is also the possibility of venturing in the opposite direction, narrating your own hometown as if it were an unknown, distant land. Miłosz writes both ways, underscoring the feeling of distance by reimagining Wilno as being ‘the city without a name’, while at the same time coming to it from the narrative shores of an uncharted continent with the language of the ‘unexpressed, untold’. Still, while cancelling one negative with another works in multiplication, in storytelling doubling the degree of estrangement can occasionally backfire. Everything would be fine, concludes Miłosz, and illusions could

Tomas Venclova Vilnius: asmeninė istorija (Vilnius: A Personal History) Vilnius: R. Paknys publishing house 2011

defy reality, if only ‘language did not deceive us by finding different names for the same thing in different times and places’. The name Vilnius is of Lithuanian and pagan origin, but it resounds in various annals of history as Wilno (in Polish), Wilna or Wilda (German), Vilna (French), Vilno (Russian), Vilnya (Belorussian), and Vilne but also Vilna (Yiddish). On that account, in English-language sources, the city can be found under a variety of orthographical denominations. This proliferation of names can easily send the city’s narratives to the four corners of the earth; at the same time, it opens the realm of possibilities for writing the place against its fixed, Cartesian location. A map of Lithuania, for example, published in Venice at the end of the 17th century, bestows the city with no less than six different appellations. Since all other place names on the chart are entered univocally, the mapmakers’ decision to reiterate Vilnius in several idioms is a reminder to travellers and storytellers alike to be aware of the city’s shifting, protean nature. The crowded cartographical figure of Vilnius, nonetheless, follows the compositional rationale of a Baroque cantata, where divergent tunes (in this case, names) are set to harmonise. There is more to it than meets the eye, for by and large Vilnius is a Baroque town. In its constant search for the fleeting moment of truth, Baroque maps the world as the interplay between light and darkness, visible and invisible, life and death. In order to shed light on the friction between known and unknown, seen and unseen, past and future, Baroque depends heavily on an expositional device borrowed from the cartographical principle of the spiegamento, or the unfurling of earthly creases by outspreading the space of narration. In placing the factual and material within the folds of dreams, a Baroque cityscape impels the mind to wander. Since Vilnius has belonged to many nations, and hence has never spoken in a monophonic tone, narrating its past almost always involves travelling into a foreign country. As a result, the creasing, and then unravelling, of the city’s imaginary façade is less a matter of aesthetics than an allegorical necessity imposed by the trials of history. Modern Vilnius is a chameleon, constantly changing its colours according to the standards of the day. Beset by a long and perplexing history of shifting political borders and variable linguistic loyalties, the city has the ability to turn every narrative into counter-memory. This makes writing (and even more so, reading) Vilnius an exercise in the Baroque grammar of allegories, trying, often in vain, to find an answer to forgotten meanings. The poet Moshe Kulbak, a native of the city, compared Vilna to the ‘dream of a cabbalist’ with ‘a thousand narrow doors into the universe’. For Kulbak, who wrote his poem in 1926 as a personal farewell song to the city, Yiddish was the master key that opened ‘the gates, sacred and profane, into the

city’. The divergent, conflicting narratives, however, always ‘wander, stray’, unfurling the cityscape back to its fabled beginnings. In capturing the soul of Vilnius, one should strive for the same, letting readers find their way back home after travelling the world. In Baroque, the corporeal follows the imaginary, not the other way around, provoking the notion of memory as the voice of the invisible. Vilnius asks for the same: the tempering of the visible by listening to the unseen. Exploring the narrative landscape of the city is a counting of losses. Over the last hundred years, Vilnius has changed hands a dozen times, leading to irreversible linguistic breaks within the main storyline of the place. In 1897, for instance, 40 per cent of the city’s 155,000 residents declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue, while 30 per cent reported Polish, 20 per cent Russian, four per cent Belarussian, and only two per cent Lithuanian. More than a century later, the demographic tally could not be more different: out of the city’s half a million inhabitants, close to twothirds declare themselves Lithuanian, with Russians and Poles counting roughly 15 per cent each. Less than half of one per cent of its residents are Jewish, and among them, very few speak or even know Yiddish. Raw data obscure the horrific nature of this linguistic transformation: in the decade during and after the Second World War, due to mass murder and population displacement, transfer and exile, the city lost close to nine-tenths of its prewar population. Increasingly, postwar Vilnius became an immigrant town, initially settled by mostly Russian-speaking workers, but steadily becoming more and more Lithuanian. As it stands now, Vilnius is a Lithuanian city, albeit its soul, upon hearing such news, just hems and haws. Hence, one way of rewriting (Lithuanian) Vilnius is to play the city’s Baroque-era polyphonic score, allowing each name of the place to reach its own narrative crescendo. A more modern take on the same idea would be treating the city as if it were a novel. Written in the image of its own polyglossia (a dialogical coexistence of different languages within a single narrative), with each name representing a distinct character (voice) of the place, Vilnius defies the odds of turning into a soulless place. Still, writing in tongues is a risky proposition: fail to recall one of the names, and the entire plot falters. Vilnius is built in a valley at the confluence of two rivers in the hilliest part of Lithuania, where, according to pagan cosmology, the netherworld opens up to the heavens. Since the name of the city also shares a root with the Lithuanian words vėlė and velnias, meaning the soul of a departed and/ or a demon, it hints of passage into the otherworld. The image of a journey helps to paint Vilnius as an allegory for translation, while the presence of departed souls gives shape to the losses. Put the two together, and you get the figure of a place-ofno-return. In the Renaissance, Vilnius chose as its

symbol St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers and ferrymen, but also, curiously, bookbinders. It could easily have opted for Orpheus, the ancient Greek father of songs, who, according to Strabo, was a trickster capable of leaving the netherworld alive, only to return lost deep in grief. I see every writer of Vilnius as a bit of both, Orpheus and St Christopher, journeying into the unknown, while at the same time carrying silhouettes of the past to the invisible shores of the future. Translation often serves as insurance against memory loss. All the same, the writer in the role of translator (following the dictum of the Italian pun of traduttore, traditore) is always a traitor. As Alfred Döblin observed after witnessing the narrative discontinuity of a city (in his case, postwar Berlin), when everything familiar had been reduced to absence and silence, the spirit of the place pulls away from what the writer had once been. After such a disjuncture, no translation can point to reality, unless it arrives in the shape of a phantasm, as if the narrative of the place ‘has been struck and marked by a divine light’. Illuminated by the glare of the loss, writing turns into an open book, releasing dreamscapes into the void. Still, the illusion of the real only sharpens the distance between make-believe and remembered, for ‘it is easier for a human being to change than for a city. A human can transform himself. A city falls apart.’ The writer as Orpheus is a memoirist, or, to paraphrase the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, a stranger walking among tombstones. In postwar Vilnius, writes Grade, who returned to the city (his birthplace) in the summer of 1944, just days after it was taken back by the Red Army from the occupying Wehrmacht forces, the narratives of Vilna ‘lied buried – so they scream, in silence – here lie buried all the prayers that Jews have uttered for hundreds of years’. Indeed, ‘all of Vilna is a gravestone for its last Jews and the Gentiles now sit in the Jews’ stead, like owls amid the ruins.’ With the foresight of an Orphic poet, Grade shines a light on the future of Vilnius, where Vilna will be assigned ‘a space even smaller than some poor peasant’s plot. Any small city park, a children’s playground, will seem larger than the cleared space’ of the Jewish memory of the place. After the war, Grade went to Paris, where he met other survivors from Vilna. In retrospect, the recent past had already ‘seemed to have taken on a ghostly extra-terrestrial character’, recalls one of Grade’s associates, and even if every piece of remembrance that has been taken from it were ‘to be assembled in one place, they would still be only fragments, from which no one could ever put Vilna together again’. Grade dealt with the remnants of Vilna by carrying them into the narrative fields that stretched more ‘than that half of the world across which I wandered. Your emptiness says more to me than all the cities and countries I have seen.’ From Paris, the writer

went to New York, settling in a small apartment in the Bronx, where he continued to compose Vilna as if it had never been clouded over by Vilnius. Grade died in 1982. Most of his novels have been translated into English, but none, so far, has resonated in Vilnius in Lithuanian translation. Returning to Vilnius half a century after leaving Wilno, Miłosz found it already a fully recomposed ‘corpse of a city’, a memory patch with no familiar face to greet. After a few more journeys back, just before his death, the poet detected in this voiceless Vilnius the contours of the unknown magnified by the illusion of reality, an unfamiliar territory inhabited by familiar souls whose ‘geography, says Swedenborg, cannot be transferred to maps. / For there, as one has been, so one sees. / And it is possible even there to make mistakes; for instance, / to wander about / Without realizing you are already on the other side.’ Baroque strives for perfection, yet it coils around incomplete and factional, and thus, as I see it, writing Vilnius is seeking straight lines by allowing your illusions to meander away. In my book Vilnius: City of Strangers, I travel through the history of my native city with the eyes of an outsider. The book ended up as a search for Vilnius’ place within discordant narratives of Europe. By contrast, in Vilnius: A Personal History, Tomas Venclova charts the city by letting his reminiscences be his guide. His book strives to reconcile the city’s current Lithuanian identity with its contrapuntal past. In both cases, though, we fold up our maps, take a few wrong turns, and wander off in hope of landing at the invisible shore of the familiar.

HISTORY RECREATED FROM THE CLOUDS, FROM LITHUANIA

Mindaugas Nastaravičius Marius Ivaškevičius (Photograph: Dmitrij Matvejev)

Many of the works (novels, short stories and plays) by the writer and dramatist Marius Ivaškevičius (born 1973) recreate and rethink the most important events and myths of Lithuanian history, giving a fresh and modern take on interesting and striking historical personalities. In the play Išvarymas, (Expulsion) written in 2011, Ivaškevičius returns to the present. The play discusses one of the most painful problems in Lithuania, emigration. It is a work about cultural differences between Eastern and Western Europe, and the journey by an East European to the West. The play is controversial, disturbing and shocking. Critics have even called it a modern Lithuanian epic.

There is a Lithuanian tale about three brothers: two of them are wise, and the third (the youngest) is a fool. Another story, a rather unfunny joke, recounts the fortunes of three brothers who lived a long time ago: two of them were rich, and the third was a writer. And there is also a story about what usually happens in reality: there were once three brothers, but their lives never came to much. They died, one after the other, until there were no more brothers, and nothing very clever left to say about any of them. Aleksas, Albertas and Andrius were three brothers. And they remain so. The word ‘were’ just inserted itself naturally, a reference to a past in which I knew those brothers, especially Andrius, the youngest. We were almost the same age, and we lived close to each other in a small village a few kilometres from Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. The only thing separating our homes was a row of redcurrant and blackcurrant bushes, a hedge that sprang up in our teenage years, where we would meet to talk about life’s most important questions: how to act at the school dance in order to catch a girl’s eye, or how many days (or years) we would have to skip buying lunch at school in order to save up enough for a motorbike. Andrius’ older brothers had already found the answers to these questions. After somehow managing to finish school, they spent a few years kicking around the village, before finally flying off to Ireland, probably in the year 2000, before most of us had even heard of the word ‘emigration’. Aleksas and Albertas, line workers in a meat factory, would return to Lithuania once a year. Not

Marius Ivaškevičius Išvarymas (Expulsion), Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2012 – 1st ed.; 2017 – 2nd ed.

in the winter, for Christmas, but at the height of the summer. They would both help their parents and Andrius pick beetroot and cabbage, and harvest potatoes, and, in the evenings, after all the work was done, they would transport a group of village kids back to Ireland. We would all sit on the steps of the school, and listen to stories about the brothers’ new life. ‘We sort, pack and lift, sometimes at night and at weekends. Of course, it gets old, but the money is good, so fuck ‘em,’ they would say. And we, the young ones, were captivated. Especially Andrius. A true story: Vilnius-London July 2011. Clouds. A plane flying from Vilnius to London. My wife Simona and I are going to a wedding, a Lithuanian friend is getting married to a British man. We are a little nervous, since we do not know the local wedding customs. But in a few days, we will both learn that weddings in Lithuania and Great Britain are not very different, especially when it comes to what happens after midnight. Marius Ivaškevičius, a writer flying on that same plane, has already put together three acts for his latest play, to be called Išvarymas (Expulsion). The play is set to première at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre that very December, directed by Oskaras Koršunovas from Lithuania, one of Europe’s most famous contemporary

A true and not so true story: ‘What did I need this for?’ Ivaškevičius was born in 1973 in Molėtai, a town amid lakes in eastern Lithuania, not far from the Museum of Ethnocosmology. At night, the telescope in the museum’s observatory looks up at the stars, and by day at clouds. But, despite his celestial neighbourhood, Ivaškevičius chose to study Lithuanian philology over astronomy at Vilnius University. He debuted in literature in 1996, with a book of short stories called Kam vaikų? (Children, Why Have Them?), transporting readers to a primeval Lithuania through his own unique recreations of legends, fables and stories. After his second novel Istorija nuo debesies (Story from a Cloud, 1998), an interpretation of Lithuania’s mythological origins (we fell from the sky on raindrops), critics began to notice that the young prose writer was drawn mostly to history that he could reimagine anew.

And they were basically right. In 2002, Ivaškevičius published his novel Žali (The Forest Brothers), which was soon met with words like ‘blasphemous’, ‘treacherous’ and ‘we demand that Ivaškevičius be expelled from the Writers’ Union!’ The book about the post-Second World War anti-Soviet resistance and the partisan war, waged by 30,000 Lithuanians from 1944 to 1953, was the subject of debate by readers and critics. Discussing history (and literature) is important for politicians, legal scholars, teachers, and, in particular, surviving participants in the fight for freedom, as well as their loved ones. This is understandable, given that Ivaškevičius wrote his novel about partisans parenthesising the usual (and justified) heroism with which they are depicted in Lithuania. It is a novel that does not shy away from revealing real surnames and true stories, but it is also a novel that refrains from calling for glory and monuments. ‘What did I need all that for?’ Ivaškevičius commented. ‘Surely not to pay my dues to my homeland or give a meaning to the memory of the dead. I liked that war. I understood that it contained an equal amount of heroism and disgrace, courage and cowardice. Love for one’s country didn’t kill one’s love for a woman. Perhaps there was a bit more death than life. To me, a terrified solider seemed more alive than a fearless one, and a confused man more real than one ready to sacrifice everything.’ Most people accused him of showing disrespect to the tens of thousands who died in the forests, and the hundreds of thousands who were deported to concentration camps or to exile in the far reaches of the Soviet Union. But some Lithuanian writers and historians, while questioning the appropriateness of the novel’s use of actual names (or life stories that did not always correspond with reality), nevertheless expressed support for the author of ‘The Green’. First of all, artistic reality (Ivaškevičius wrote a good, surprising and provocative work) is not the same as historical truth. Secondly, the ranks of the partisans did include traitors, rapists, thieves, and simply broken or lost fighters, who worried less about the nation’s freedom than about their own personal survival. There were people who were driven less by patriotism and more by their own instinct to survive and procreate. Because war is war, especially when it is a real one.

A scene from Expulsion (Photograph: Dmitrij Matvejev)

directors. The playwright will eventually receive Lithuania’s most prestigious drama award, the Golden Cross of the Stage, for the play. By late 2017, Expulsion will have been performed 89 times, and seen by more than 50,000 people, who endure the five-and-ahalf-hour-long production to see it end long after midnight. The Lithuanian’s play will have been staged to great acclaim in Latvia, Estonia and Russia, where critics will write, after seeing Expulsion, that ‘Lithuania has a European-class playwright.’ For the moment, though, Ivaškevičius is still in-flight, not to a wedding, but to a residency at the Royal Court Theatre in London, en route to that great temple of playwriting, where Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp once saw premières of their work. Ivaškevičius will soon unveil his own three acts there, after a month in London spent among Lithuanian immigrants, and writing Expulsion. Neither of us know the playwright personally. I read the news about the first Lithuanian to be invited by the Royal Court in our local press before the flight. For me, just starting out on my first play, and doubting whether I would ever finish it (because it is hard), looking across every now and then at Lithuania’s most popular contemporary playwright was intriguing. But that embarrasses my wife, who thinks I am being rude. So, I turn and look out at the clouds again.

A true and not so true story: the theatre Ivaškevičius has written more than ten plays. His works have been translated into English, French, Italian, German, Finnish, Polish, Latvian, Estonian, Russian. His plays have appeared on stages in Europe, Russia and the United States. He is also a screenwriter and film director, and has produced several documentary and short feature films. In 2014, he released his first full-length film Santa, filmed in Lithuania, Finland and Great Britain. At home, Ivaškevičius is considered to be Lithuania’s leading playwright. In the past decade, Lithuanian theatre was primarily revered for the directors Eimuntas Nekrošius and Oskaras Koršunovas. Now, it is also known for its playwriting, and mostly thanks to Marius Ivaškevičius. In 2004, the director Rimas Tuminas presented a production based on Ivaškevičius’ Madagaskaras (Madagascar) at the Vilnius

Small Theatre. Once again, it is a story about an actual figure from 20th-century history, the interwar traveller and geographer Kazimieras Pakštas, who had a unique idea: to establish communities of Lithuanians in different places around the world, such as Africa or Brazil, in order to create a ‘reserve Lithuania’, safe from any alarming geopolitical changes taking place in Europe. Audiences waited in long queues to buy tickets. As they watched the play, they recognised Pakštas and other historical figures, and they recognised Lithuania (‘this play is about us!’) and its comic and dramatic myths and unique mindset. Still performed today, this intellectual and ironic play has become a phenomenon. Scholars from the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore named the production the most creative work of the year. After reading the play or seeing it on stage, critics may have forgiven Ivaškevičius for The Forest Brothers. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. He’s talented.’ For a time, it seemed as if he had come into his own, hav-

ing found his own unique way to talk about true history, by deconstructing, rethinking and rewriting it. For a time, we thought this was his most successful play. But then, in 2011, he wrote Expulsion. The Lithuanian National Drama Theatre has probably never seen so much laughter. But the play is a story about one of the greatest dilemmas of our time, mass emigration. There have probably never been so many expletives coming from actors’ mouths on the stage before, but the play is also a subtle, multifaceted work about the journey of an East European to the West, and about cultural differences between the East and the West. We already knew about our grandparents, deported in Soviet cattle wagons to Siberia; now we can recognise our brothers, relatives, neighbours and others, ‘expelled’ and ‘bolting’ to build (and destroy) London. Some theatre critics have called Expulsion a contemporary Lithuanian epic, but the play can be equally appreciated by all East Europeans. It is also an opportunity for Western Europe to learn what exactly the millions of newcomers (Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Bulgarians, and others) are doing in the West, what they fear and what they are ashamed of, what they will not submit to, why they wear tracksuits, what they experience, and how they die. A true story: The ‘Third Brother’ café Andrius, the youngest brother, began studying construction engineering after finishing school. He dropped out after less than six months of studies, and went off to work in construction. Between 2003 and 2007, there was hardly a single family in Lithuania that had not sent at least one person off to lay bricks or build walls. As the economy grew, so did new apartment buildings. Then came the global financial crisis. Society sunk below the poverty level, and once again there was hardly a family in Lithuania that did not have to see off one of its own at the airport, to emigrate. In 1990, the country had 3.7 million inhabitants. By 2018, it had 2.8 million. Over this period of time, the negative ratio of births to deaths has meant that Lithuania has lost 166,000 inhabitants, and a further 679,000 to emigration. Various statistical sources report that about 200,000 Lithuanians have put down roots in the United Kingdom, 50,000 in Ireland, and 40,000 each in

Germany and Norway. Smaller numbers have settled in Spain, Sweden and Denmark. Andrius flew off to London in 2008. Lithuanian acquaintances helped him find a job washing cars, and later in construction, given his unfinished field of study. He would have flown to be with his brothers in Ireland, but ‘the money wasn’t right.’ Andrius would visit Lithuania several times a year, in winter for Christmas, and in summer to swim. He did not come back in the autumn any more, since his parents no longer planted potatoes or beetroot. It was not worth it. They had grown tired. Their children helped them to make ends meet, sending home sterling and euros. If you rode a motorbike to school dances, you would be noticed by girls, young ladies, and young female teachers. At home for a few weeks in the summer of 2012, Andrius bought himself a powerful Suzuki. A serious bike. He didn’t ride over to the school dance, though, since our old school does not hold dances any more. Andrius tore through the village without a helmet, crashed, and wrecked more than just the Suzuki. He survived, but he did not return to London, because ‘the money wasn’t right.’ In truth, Andrius suffered such bad concussion that he could no longer work. Autumn, 2014. I have returned for a few days to visit my childhood home. Through the currant bushes, I can see Andrius sitting on a swing. Yes, it is very sentimental and sad, but he, a thirty-year-old man, is just sitting there swinging. I do not even know what to say, so I ask him what he is doing now. Just in general. ‘Nothing. Looking at the clouds,’ says my friend from the past. Between 1997 and 2007, there used to be a café at the Lithuanian Writers’ Union: a bohemian realm, a temple of artists. Several Lithuanian writers and intellectuals ended their days there, falling down the stairs, their hearts gave out, or something similar. Gintaras Beresnevičius (1961-2006), a renowned religious scholar, essayist and avid student of mythology, legends and the heavens, spent his last day (or night) there. The café was called ‘The Third Brother’.

SOUTHSIDE RUGBY, LITHUANIAN STYLE

Rimants K. Rimantas Kmita (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

The writer, literary expert and critic Rimantas Kmita (born 1977) has written the novel that everyone was waiting for. Pietinia kronikas (Southside Chronicle) is a story about the last decade of the 20th century, about the ‘wild capitalism’ which came to Lithuania, and about the maturing of the young independent state and the young people growing up in it. It is a witty, almost picaresque novel, written in the dialect of the town of Šiauliai, full of slang and colloquial language. Southside Chronicle pushed

back the boundaries of Lithuanian prose style, legitimising the use of provincial urban vernacular in literature, and convincingly portraying the life and mindset of the present generation of 40-year-olds, who grew up in times of change and upheaval. The novel deservedly became a bestseller, a cult phenomenon in Lithuanian culture, and was subsequently made into shows and musicals, with day trips organised to the places featured in it.

Rimantas Kmita Pietinia kronikas (Southside Chronicle) Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2016

Rimantas Kmita’s participant badge from the Lithuanian rugby championship, 1993. (Photograph: author’s private collection)

Rimantas Kmita’s Pietinia kronikas (Southside Chronicle) is about a young man who plays rugby in Šiauliai in the early 1990s, while looking for love and a role in life. But, one thing at a time. It was the early 1990s. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, Lithuania became independent, and everything was turned upside down. A new country emerged, flooded with Western fashions, music, films, computer games, cars and other pleasures. Governments, currencies, fashions and other superficial attributes came and went. Mindsets were slower to change. Šiauliai, a city in northern Lithuania, used to depend on industry, making bicycles, television sets, shoes, underwear, military equipment, and other items. The crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union affected all the large factories in the city. It became a beehive of small businesses, with the rules of the game set by organised crime. But the city did not decline during the crisis: on the contrary, once they caught the whiff of private enterprise, the people in Šiauliai started buying, selling, sewing, knitting and shipping everything off to Russia. Entire new neighbourhoods sprang up, and, in line with popular expectations, the houses were large, and unburdened by the cost of heating. Rugby in Lithuania is a sport that people initially conjured up in their own imaginations as something

akin to Medieval legends or Hollywood films about American football. It came to Šiauliai via Feliksas Paskevičius, who also taught Lithuanians how to play field hockey, its Lithuanian version ritinys, and American football, setting up clubs for all of them. Then he began writing books, with words that all began with the same letter. Eventually, he wrote a haiku novel about rugby. Otherwise, he is a doctor. But the man who rekindled the love for rugby has a distinct aura, which inevitably begs more than a few questions. Rugby has been played in Lithuania since 1961, and the first club opened in Šiauliai in 1973. It was set up in a bicycle factory, from which it took its name, Vairas. Nine years afterwards, the Vairas Rugby Club won the Lithuanian championship, and it has rarely lost the title since then. From 1985 to 1989, the club played in the Soviet Union’s first league, and in 1990 it broke into the premier league. But the Soviet championship competition eventually went the way of the entire Soviet Union. So, everyone returned home to Pietinis, a suburb on the south side of Šiauliai, built in the Soviet years. Pietinis, or ‘Southside’, is massive. About half the population of the city live there, and in those days, Šiauliai had about 140,000 inhabitants. Pietinis did not have the best reputation: you were lucky if you made it out intact, so to speak. But since it had half the city in it, it was obviously also full of all kinds of

characters: artists, musicians, everything. But for most people, Pietinis was known and associated with skinheads in tracksuits and with brass knuckles (at least), who knew nothing about Pietinis, or rugby. Rugby was an inseparable part of Pietinis. Everyone there played it. You could see packs of children scrambling around a rugby ball in places around the city on any day. And the bond between Pietinis and rugby was not just an accident. Pietinis was a rough place, and so rugby was just right for it. ‘They just fight all the time,’ people would say, about rugby, and about Pietinis. But we all know perfectly well that rugby, like Pietinis, is not just a battle without rules. Rugby in Šiauliai, and Lithuania, survives on the shoulders of the regular folks. The city still does not have a proper rugby stadium, and all those years players had nowhere to change their clothes, and much less take a shower or other bourgeois habits. To this day, basketball gets more than 30 times the money from the city than rugby: so it is next to impossible to explain why rugby still survives in Šiauliai. At the very beginning, when it all first started, they did not even have normal rugby balls. All right, maybe they had three, but those were yellow and made in Poland. They would get wet and expand, and you had to use the same balls for training as for matches. Then they got white balls from India, but those were no better. They tried to make rugby balls in Leningrad, but they came

A scene from the Vairas rugby championship, circa 1995. (Photograph: Vairas Rugby Club archives)

out so pointed that if you missed a pass you risked losing an eye. And let us not even talk about the rugby boots, made with nails protruding from a plain old pair of shoes; it is better just to go straight on to the uniforms, which were patched together from socks, jeans and old sacks. In 1993, the Lithuanian national team (then and now mostly made up of players from Šiauliai) played the first official match against Germany, and the Germans gave the Lithuanians their first normal uniforms as a gift. Yes, the first normal uniforms appeared only in 1993. But nobody complained. Everyone was just happy to play. But in 2002, the team had to go to Europe to play in the Sevens. Only two companies made sports clothing in Lithuania, so the team went to one of them. Of course, they did not make anything like a rugby uniform, but they said: ‘Hey. We’ve got this great new material from Italy. It’s usually for footballers, but maybe it’ll work for you, too.’ The shirts were synthetic, tight and stretchy. There was not much you could do, though. There was not much time left before the tournament, so they decided to have the uniforms made from that material. Rugby players are used to grabbing each other by the shirt. Everyone was chasing the Lithuanians, but the shirts kept snapping out of their hands, and the Lithuanians just kept running. Lithuania took fifth place in the European Sevens,

their best showing yet. The next year, there were more teams wearing the shirts, and a year after that, they became something of a rugby standard. From 2006 to 2010, the Lithuanian rugby team won 18 official tournaments in a row, breaking the records held by New Zealand and South Africa. At the European Men’s Sevens in France in 2015, Lithuania destroyed Wales in the Grand Prix leg semi-finals. Destroyed, because the final score was 31 to 5. And that was when the Brits began to hear the buzz of the little Lithuanian mosquito. Players from Šiauliai are the core of the Lithuanian team. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the chance to climb higher vanished, so other clubs started to form in Šiauliai. Now these teams in the same city fight it out for the gold. So, the whole story started in Šiauliai, in Pietinis, in the basement of an old Soviet barracks, where the Vairas club first met. It is a game for regular folk, for the working man, just as the suburbs were home to regular folk. Even now, the whole sport rests on the shoulders of a handful of people who trained, raised money, and took their children’s uniforms to the cleaners. They had to be trainers, psychologists, fathers and mothers for their children, as well as managers of an army of men. And those men had their own lives, too: jobs, children, and things they had to do before finding time to train and compete, all without getting on their wives’ nerves, and keeping their children from whingeing about going to the films, out to the woods, or to some water park. And when they did get away, they had to win, because they were playing for Vairas, which has won nearly every Lithuanian championship. They had to win. Southside Chronicle takes place in the dreariest of times. The new country was drawing up new rules, but there was still chaos everywhere. Mafias basically ran the place. Crime went unpunished, and criminals ruled. For the novel’s main character, rugby was the way to find his roots at a frantic time, helping him to understand the complexities of love, and even how to interpret classic works of literature. It was rugby that taught him how to labour with patience and endurance, since no one else would do it for him. Rugby taught him how to understand others, respect his opponents, fight by the rules, and, most importantly, how not to spin shit, play games, and how to own his own truth. Everything was plain and simple. Rugby taught him how to play fairly, which in those days might have seemed rather pointless. And it taught him how to respect his opponent, which seemed even more pointless, since it was usually the case in life that enemies were considered lower than shit. Šiauliai is Lithuania’s fourth-largest city, but for many people it is a hole in a wall, or just a heap of stereotypes: marketplaces, blokes in tracksuits, dingy suburbs. For many, Šiauliai does not even exist. Southside Chronicle is essentially a documentary about something that does not exist. Few people in

Lithuania have heard about rugby, and much fewer about Pietinis. Everyone is just a little ashamed of the Soviet suburbs, so it would be better they were not there at all. What is more, the book is written in Šiauliai slang, which many find funny (no one writes literature that way). And probably precisely because all this had been unimaginable in literature before, readers identified with the real portrayal of life, and the novel not only became a surprising bestseller, it caught the eye of literary critics. The book was read by people who said they never read books, much less ever picked up anything by a Lithuanian author since finishing school. The city of Šiauliai organised a two-night festival around the book, inviting the entire city to plunge back into the 1990s. Buses brought people out to tour Pietinis, which was jokingly declared an independent republic, and all of Lithuania started talking about Šiauliai. Suddenly, coming from Šiauliai became a kind of badge of honour. It was all a bit absurd. And it all started with Feliksas, the pioneer of rugby in Šiauliai. And the grimy gyms and basements of Pietinis, with its grotty, rundown stadiums. So, do not knock Pietinis. Because Pietinis is everywhere.

The first Lithuanian rugby championship in 1993. First and second place winners. Rimantas Kmita is kneeling in the first row, second from right. (Photograph: Vairas Rugby Club archives)

DEADLY GAME

The writer and screenwriter Icchokas Meras (1934-2014) is one of Lithuania’s most widely translated authors, and at the same time one of the greatest exceptions to its general literary tradition. His prose is laconic and minimalist, written in crisp, plain language. Lygiosios trunka akimirką (Stalemate) is his most famous work, and was the first Lithuanian novel to present such an evocative narrative about the Holocaust. The novel is structured around a game of chess, which Schoger, the supervisor of the ghetto, invites Isaac Lipman, a talented young Jew, to play. It is game of life and death. Meras raises this story of love and responsibility in inhumane conditions to a level of universal philosophical and ethical significance.

Icchokas Meras (b. 1934), a Lithuanian writer of Jewish descent, has a unique life story. He survived the Second World War by a miracle. Pulled out of a gravel pit where he was about to be shot with other Jews in 1941 right at the start of the war, he was brought up with six other children in the Dainauskas family of poor farm workers in the town of Kelmė, without suspecting that he was not their son. After receiving a technical education in Kaunas, he followed the call of his talent, and quickly established himself as a writer. He was one of the first to deal with the theme of the Holocaust (his first book was The Yellow Patch, 1960).

Eugenijus Žmuida Vilnius Ghetto jail on Lydos Street (Photograph: Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum)

Stalemate is Meras’ most powerful novel, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. The French newspaper Le Figaro described it as ‘one of the best books written about the Holocaust’. Building on the most painful event in 20th-century Jewish history (the Shoah), the writer creates a plot of full of tension, recounted in a distinctive laconic style. He goes against the stereotypes in story-telling, and lifts all Lithuanian prose, which was restricted at the time by the clichés of Socialist Realism, and subject to harsh censorship, to a higher level of Modernism. The novel is set in the Vilnius ghetto, and takes place within a single day. It is a special day, when Isaac, a talented Jewish teenager, plays a game of chess with the German officer Adolf Schoger, the supervisor of the ghetto. It is not their first time: the boy taught the Nazi officer how to play. It is

Icchokas Meras Stalemate New York: Other Press, 2005

important for the German to win: it would be his first victory over his teacher. If he wins, he will spare the life of his opponent. Isaac is not a person in the German’s eyes. He is only a function. However, Schoger gives himself an additional guarantee of victory by setting prior conditions: if the boy wins, he will be shot dead on the spot; but, if he loses, his life will be spared. The reader only learns about this bargain at the end of the novel. The secret of what is at stake heightens the tension. The pact with his opponent has been drawn up by the boy’s father, Abraham Lipman, a resident of the ghetto, and a father of seven children, of whom he has already lost six, and is now offering up the seventh. His plan is that the boy should play the game and save the ghetto, to stop babies being torn from their mothers, or at least to postpone that day. (It is interesting that in the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, the plot is similarly framed by a game of chess between the main character and Death, and by a pact and the postponement of a universal tragedy.) Throughout Meras’ novel, the moves in the game shape and frame the structure of everything that happens. The game takes place in the present, but the story of each move is interspersed with episodes from the recent past, drawn mostly from the lives of Abraham Lipman’s children in the ghetto. Thus, the novel has a dual structure: the game is played out both on the chess board

Esther, the love of his life, will be shot. As the game draws to a close (in the last chapter), the Nazi wants to leave only one outcome, victory for himself, and so he says: ‘It makes no difference, you will not save the children, you can only save yourself.’ However, it soon becomes clear to the teenager, and to all the condemned Jews sitting together in a tight circle around the players, what the last decisive move must be. Isaac chooses victory. The Jews choose victory. David overcomes Goliath. In physical terms, the stalemate between two peoples lasts only for a moment. But in metaphysical terms, the victory of human dignity over darkness and absurdity lasts for ever.

This atmosphere has a destructive effect on the human psyche. Abraham Lipman’s son Kasriel hangs himself, following advice from his father, fearing in advance that he will not be able to resist temptation, that he will not withstand torture, and that he will give away the secrets of the ghetto. The Lithuanian Jankauskas shoots Jews in Paneriai, while his brother Antanas saves Abraham’s daughter Riva. The Jew Feleris, ‘the master of whipping’, collaborates with the Germans, beating his fellow nationals, for his own greatest fear is pain. However, the same extreme circumstances create conditions for the most noble of decisions, and for the discovery of the essence of humanity. The fair-haired Pole Janek sews a yellow star on his clothing and lives in the ghetto, since he wants to take the place of Esther’s dead brother Micah. A Czech watchman allows the world-famous soloist Isaiah Lipman in and out of the ghetto, thus risking his life.

(Photograph: Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum)

Meras’ novel Stalemate broke new ground in many ways. It was the first time in Soviet Lithuanian literature that there were such bold references to the great text of humanity, the Bible. Religious writings were not tolerated in atheist Soviet society, but Meras was able to take advantage of a short ‘thaw’ to overcome this prohibition, weaving two narratives together into an indissoluble unity, and imparting to his novel a fabric of universal breadth and meaning. The Jewish names are particularly striking: the father is Abraham, the son who is to be sacrificed is called Isaac. However, the biblical story is turned upside down. It is not God who makes the demands, but ‘the devil’, the Nazi representative of the ‘Brown Plague’. In the grotesque reality of the ghetto, it cannot be otherwise: everything is distorted and confused. All the conditions combine, so that people’s most basic feelings, fear, distrust, despair, treachery and villainy, are on display.

Mėsinių Street, part of the Vilnius Ghetto which existed from 6 September 1941 to 23 September 1943, circa 1946.

and in real life. It is played with chess pieces and with human lives. Isaac has to think deeply about each move, which is a step into the unknown, and a step towards the inexorable end of the game, and of the existence of the ghetto. Isaac therefore also thinks deeply about life, nature, love and hate. All people love life, and they hate those who try to take it away. By living alongside Jews, the Germans understand this very well. Yet they treat the anti-Semitic order passed by the Nazi regime as sacred and inviolable. They are committed to their duty. They are machines. They are powerless against the order, and omnipotent with it. Any hesitation would disturb this harmony, that is, the smoothly functioning machine. They do not feel any guilt at having to drive the Jews into the ghetto and keeping them there hungry and in rags. In the same way, the Jews are not guilty for the fact that the Germans have driven them there on account of their origin. That is simply how it is, it could not be otherwise. Schoger and Isaac could not conceivably change places. These are the rules of the game. Life is a game, and the game is life. The whole ghetto finds itself on the chess board. It is just that some are condemned to lose, while others do not take the risk. Seeing himself as a member of the superior Aryan race, Schoger tries to suggest to others that there is no difference between life and a game of chess: success and chance decide everything, everything is a lottery. At this moment in time, he is the executioner, and they are the victims; for that is simply what they are, those are the rules, so to change anything would make no sense. For some people, life has a purpose, and that gives it meaning. For others, existence has no purpose, and is even absurd. That is how the Nazis see it. The Jews cannot and do not want to accept this, as all people would in their position. But what can they do? Every day, as they are led out of the ghetto to work, they are secretly arming themselves, preparing for an uprising in the ghetto. Isaac knows this. He also knows that he has to decide how to finish the game: to win, to lose, or to reach a draw. Most of the time, he thinks he should reach a draw, although that would be more difficult than to win or to lose. Above all, he has to keep control of the game, so that he always has room for manoeuvre. However, during the course of the game, the German begins to ratchet up the conditions: right at the start, he declares that in the event of the boy winning, not only he but

Lipman dreams of performing an aria from Halévy’s opera La Juive in the ghetto. Even a German driver secretly drives Isaac and Esther out of the ghetto, to search for Janek who has disappeared. But the greatest responsibility, of course, falls on Isaac Lipman, the main character in the novel, who is mature beyond his years, and who becomes like a father to the whole ghetto, responsible for each prisoner. His moves on the board are of such significance. Isaac does not want this responsibility. He dreams of scattering the chess pieces and running out into a flowering meadow, to rejoice in life, and to love Esther. Isaac gives himself and Esther the names of characters from the Song of Songs in his mind: he wants to adore her, to love, and be loved. Their dream of happiness seems so real, as if it is only one step away. Both want to choose life over death. However, the black shadow of death looms increasingly darkly over their romance alongside the joy of first love,

showing a contrast with the fateful tragedy of this generation of Jews. In his mind, Isaac works out that the sum of his and Esther’s combined ages is 33. We know from another biblical story that this is the number of the victim: the number of years that Christ lived on earth. The novel consists of 16 chapters (the same number as pieces on the chess board), which are structured symmetrically, each with two or three parts. The first short part comprises a description of a move on the board, the response of the players, and a glimpse of Isaac’s thoughts. The second part is often a single sentence, where Abraham utters the name of one of his children. And the third (the longest) tells a story which links this name with something happening in the ghetto or nearby. The long part of the chapter is broken up further into separate miniatures, often stories which themselves take our breath away.

The demolished Jewish synagogue in the Schulhof (part of the synagogue courtyard), circa 1946. (Photograph: Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum)

Vilnius Ghetto gate, 1942 m. (Reproduced photograph: Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum)

Meras subtly combines mathematical precision with emotional sensitivity, enhanced by the form of the miniature, and the use of short sentences, the sudden pauses between them, and repetition. By using repetition (for example, ‘I mustn’t get worked up’), rhetorical questions, graphic composition and pauses, the author gives the narrative a distinct rhythm, and infuses it with emotional tension, concentrating the mind on the thought which is most important at that moment, thereby creating a subtext. The fresh, laconic language paradoxically enables the author to articulate precisely the horror of the situation, the depth and the drama of what the characters are going through, and their longing for life and freedom. The people in the novel do not have particularly distinctive individual features. They are ordinary people, all equally capable of facing a similar fate, for whom, when the day of reckoning comes, only the question of their choice will matter, when their characters, their natural traits, their past and their previous experience are collectively brought to bear on one single action. Avoiding verbosity, the author refines the essentials of existence, and reveals the heroism or the nihilism of the people of the ghetto, encapsulated in this acute situation by an existential binary choice. In this way, the story of the Vilnius ghetto rises above time and space, and turns into a universal clash between the human consciousness and a totalitarian system of evil. This clash is seen in the light of universal philosophical and ethical questions. The restrained yet suggestive austerity of the language, as if disciplined by the absurd logic of war, sits unexpectedly alongside the poetic and sometimes even elevated reflection of the human longing to live and to love, and the belief that a human being is able to defend his or her dignity and essential values. This beautiful and profound novel by Meras is simply a must-read for people from all racial and national backgrounds, and should be considered part of European Modernist literature due to its special content and original form. With good reason, Icchokas Meras was awarded the State of Israel’s President Zalman Shazar Prize for Literature in 1973, the US Lithuanian Writers Union Prize in 1976, the Rafael Prize for Literature in 1976, the Literary Prize of the Zionist Federation in 1981, the US Lithuanian Writers Union Prize in 1996, and the President of the State of Israel’s Literary Prize in 1998. In 1995, Meras received the Order of Grand Duke Gediminas of Lithuania, and in 2010 the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Art. Stalemate is ranked alongside the works of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway. It is infused with modern forms characteristic of Western literature: stream of consciousness, internal monologue and literary collage, woven together organically with minimally short sentences and everyday fluent language.

Map of the Vilnius Ghetto, 1942. (Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum)

Neringa Markevičienė

The distinguished poet, dramatist and literary critic Balys Sruoga (1886-1947) spent two years as a prisoner in the Stutthof concentration camp. He survived and returned to Lithuania, where he wrote Dievų miškas (Forest of the Gods), a unique book about one of the most terrible 20th-century phenomena, the Nazi concentration camps. In this ironic yet painful novel, the camp becomes a model for the absurd that prevails in the world. Forest of the Gods is a true encyclopaedia of contempt, baseness, repression, totalitarianism and means of dehumanisation, but also of heroism, resistance and the light of the human spirit. Not surprisingly, the novel did not find favour with the Soviet system, and was censored many times, appearing in only 1957, ten years after the author’s death. Balys Sruoga Dievų miškas (Forest of the Gods) Chicago: Terra, 1957– 1st ed.; Kaunas: Šviesa, 1989 – 2nd ed.; Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjunga, 2015 – 3rd ed.

Typed manuscript of Balys Sruoga’s Forest of the Gods, Parts I and II, 1945 (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore archives)

THE STERILISATION OF THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY

Balys Sruoga (1896-1947) was a classic of Lithuanian literature, a poet, playwright, prose writer, publicist, literary and theatre critic, scholar and translator. His novel Forest of the Gods was one of the first works anywhere in the world to be based on a prison camp theme. It remains influential and compelling to this day, and furthermore was written by a person with enormous charisma. The writer studied at the universities of Petrograd and Moscow. He became familiar with the Russian Symbolist poets, and sought to stand out from his surroundings by adopting an eccentric, unsophisticated appearance and pose, which were designed

to shock. Tall, slim and long-haired, he went about wrapped in a tailor-made black cape. He wore Greek sandals on his bare feet, a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and a white open-neck shirt; he tied a large black cravat around the collar, and later wore a necklace of amber beads. He strutted around, paying no attention to the mocking looks which followed him. He was called ‘the Futurist’, or ‘the young Schiller’. Sruoga liked to defy convention, to be different, to be the opposite of boring. From 1921 to 1923, while he was studying at the University of Munich, he liked to make trips to the Alps. In this way, he exchanged his previous avant-garde appearance for that of a 19th-century Alpine dweller. He took to wearing plus-fours, and a small frayed jacket with sleeves that were a little too short. This stylised manner was his way of setting himself apart from ordinary culture. Both as a student and later as a professor, Sruoga was always an individualist, a rebel, a breaker of stereotypes. An artist with a restless and hot-headed disposition, Sruoga was fated to live in an especially complicated period of history. When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940, the country’s culture began to be sovietised. Artists were required to produce ideological works, glorifying the occupying regime. Sruoga felt compelled by circumstances to write the cantata ‘By the Lithuanian Road’,1 in which he indirectly mentions Stalin (‘the wise man on duty in the Kremlin’). When war broke out between the USSR and Germany, and the Nazis occupied Lithuania, this cantata and his resistance (his publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the occupying regime, his encouragement of students not to support it, and his public condemnation of the creation of a Lithuanian SS legion) were used as the basis for accusations against him, as a result of which he was dismissed from his position at Vilnius University. On 16 March 1943, together with other intellectuals taking part in the anti-Nazi resistance, he was arrested and deported to the Stutthof concentration camp. With the permission of the camp’s administration, Sruoga wrote allegorical letters to his family, to his wife and daughter left behind in Lithuania, raising their spirits, encouraging them not to lose hope, to be strong, and to endure all the trials sent by fate. His letters from Stutthof, with 1 The first words of the cantata are ‘Iš rytų šalelės’ (From a Small Eastern Country), taken from a Lithuanian folk song.

their affirmation of the meaning of life, can be compared with the book Man’s Search for Meaning by the Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl, a former concentration camp prisoner, which was published in 1946. Apart from these letters, trying to forget about his own situation, and without the knowledge of the camp’s administration, Sruoga wrote various works whose style testifies to the light of the writer’s inner world and his belief in the future: a poetic drama, some lectures on Romantic theatre, and some comedies. In 1945, when he returned to Lithuania, which was by then reoccupied and under Soviet rule, he wrote Forest of the Gods, one of the most unusual books about concentration camps in Europe in the 20th century. Forest of the Gods is a book of fictionalised memoirs covering the two years (1943-1945) that the narrator experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. Departing from the norm for this genre, Sruoga does not describe his own life in the camp, nor does he vent his own personal grievances about the sufferings he himself experienced. Abandoning the traditional storyline, and expressing his own personal feelings with great restraint, he writes a series of short stories, almost like film clips, about those living in the camp and events within it. He combines comic portraits of those in charge of the camp with descriptions of its structure, system and philosophy. Depicting tragic matters in a comic style, he offers a testimony to the crimes of Nazi Germany, and the dehumanisation of the human being. As has previously been stated, many masterpieces of prison camp literature were written or published later than Sruoga’s work was written: Tadeusz Borowski’s Bylismy w Oswięcimiu (We were in Auschwitz, 1946), Požegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1948), Kamienny swiat (1948), Martin Nielsen’s Rapport fra Stutthof (1947), Anne Frank’s Het Achterhuis (The Diary of a Young Girl, 1947), Elie Wiesel’s Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (1954), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1961), and Varlam Shalamov’s Коллымские рассказы (Kolyma Tales, 1954–1973). Unfortunately, due to Soviet censorship, which initially prevented publication, Sruoga’s book was published belatedly, only in 1957, a full 12 years after it had been written. It came out in English only in 1996. By that time, there was already a fair number of works of prison camp literature worldwide.

‘You know, near to Stutthof concentration camp, there is a large forest called the Forest of the Gods. I want to write sketches and portraits of the camp and this Forest of the Gods, with corpses of people tortured to death...’

So, in its choice of theme, Sruoga’s Forest of the Gods was no longer seen as an intriguing new genre; which undoubtedly it would have been if circumstances had been otherwise. Leaving aside the indisputable literary merits of the novel, the story of how it was created and edited is especially interesting. Seven decades since the death of the writer, 14 Lithuanian-language editions of Forest of the Gods have been published. Three of these are important in the context of the history of the work: those of 1957, 1997 and 2005 (other editions were only reprintings). These editions show how the editors tried to respond to the changing historical circumstances and opportunities, and their efforts to recreate an authentic version of the text. The three editions represent three different texts of Forest of the Gods. In each one, we can see the new editors revealing small areas of change to the original text, which had not appeared in preceding editions. The variations in the texts are connected with the issue of the authenticity of the work. None of the editions represents the text of the work which Sruoga actually wrote. So, whose text of Forest of the Gods are we reading? What role did the censors and editors play? Why, to this day, is it so difficult to recreate a complete authentic version of Sruoga’s work? How should we decide which version is closest to the creative intentions of the author? The idea for the book came to Sruoga on 24 March 1943, when the writer, along with a whole group of intellectuals taken hostage in Lithuania, was transported to the Stutthof concentration camp, set up by the Germans in Poland not far from Gdansk. On the very first evening, he saw how, while older members of the block played their instruments, one of the prisoners, a young Russian, nimbly

danced the Kazachka in order to get his promised piece of bread, surrounded by bodies of rattling bones covered with wounds and crawling with lice. He was shaken by this sight, and, sharing his impressions the following day, he announced that he would write a tragedy of a kind no one had ever written before. With the group of Lithuanian hostages designated ‘prisoners of honour’, Sruoga worked in the camp office of his own accord. Risking his life, he rummaged through the camp archives, took an interest in secret documents, and copied lists of prisoners. He collected information about the organisation of the camp and the fates of the prisoners. He studied the characters of the prisoners who came to the office, secretly wrote down news and stories which he heard from them, and tried to memorise the most striking episodes. He began to write the work in 1945 in a temporary camp at Torun, where he spent five weeks. While he was there, he read the first parts of the work to other prisoners, and said that he was preparing a book with the name Forest of the Gods. In May 1945, just after he had returned from Stutthof, Sruoga said: ‘You know, near to Stutthof concentration camp, there is a large forest called the Forest of the Gods. I want to write sketches and portraits of the camp and this Forest of the Gods, with corpses of people tortured to death...’ (L. Oginskaitė, ‘Prof. B. Sruoga pasakoja’, in: Tiesa, 17.05.1945, No 113, p. 2). The length of the work is huge (360 pages), but it was written and completed in an exceptionally short space of time, in the summer of 1945. Sruoga wrote very intensely, working ten to 12 hours a day. The first draft has not survived: perhaps Sruoga, who on the whole did not manage without drafts, destroyed them himself, as he had with the first versions of other works he had previously written. A clean manuscript copy survives (LLTI BR, f. 53, b. 578). When improvising and refining this, and further developing the work, he used a small typewriter to make a composite version of the text. Interestingly, when you compare the manuscript and typewritten versions of Forest of the Gods, it becomes easier to make out the original draft of the work. A comparison of these two versions shows how he stylistically perfected the text. In the autumn of 1945, sections of the text were read out at Vilnius University, in the Writers’ Union, and in a radio studio.

Friends of Sruoga, literary colleagues and university lecturers, all received the work favourably. They felt that, compared with other Lithuanian works of literary realism, it was of a different kind, an exceptional and emotionally powerful piece. Its characteristic laughter-through-tears and painful irony were shocking, and made a lasting impression. As a result of this favourable reception, the author felt valued and understood. When the writing was completed, it was sent to the State Publishing House for Fiction. Artistically mature and written in a modern style, it was prepared for publication. But the communist officials who had to give permission for it to be printed read through the work and were shocked. It did not live up to their expectations. We will explain why. When the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania in the second half of 1944, writers clashed with the Soviet authorities. They could no longer write freely, or choose for themselves their themes or their means of expression. They were advised that literature and art had to be true to the Party, and follow its political direction. This meant that the regime dictated the choice of theme, style and method. The underlying themes were to be the ‘building of socialism’, the ‘bright future’, and the ‘life of the Soviet people’. The main character had to be brave, energetic and invincible, fighting resolutely for the new ideals. Such literature had to help to form the Soviet person. When writers composed their work, they had to uphold the style of Socialist Realism, and portray a beautified, utopian socialism. Authors had to be exaggeratedly positive, portraying the world as better than in real life. Thus, there could not be any real conflicts, for the ideology claimed that they had now disappeared, and that in the new society all people were equal, homogeneous and happy. There was no room for tragedy, humour or lyricism. With the choice of theme limited to the portrayal of ordinary life, and with modern forms of expression prohibited, literature turned into propaganda. Members of the Soviet regime had hoped that Sruoga, who was clearly a talented writer, liberated from Nazi captivity by Red Army tanks and repatriated to Lithuania through the efforts of the Soviet regime, would write his first Lithuanian novel in accordance with socialist principles. But the communist authorities considered Forest of the Gods to be unacceptable. Sruoga was not writing about the heroic

struggle between a Soviet hero and the Germans as he was supposed to, or about the creation of the Soviet order and its well-being. He had chosen an ordinary, humiliated, scorned, suffering person, a prisoner with no rights. Not understanding the irony of the story, the ideologues drew the literal conclusion that he was ‘slandering prisoners of war’ and ‘making a mockery of them’. Sruoga explained that Forest of the Gods was not a politicised work. A person in a prison camp, going through enormous physical and mental suffering, did not think about politics. He had to promise the authorities to produce a new work, in which he was told to depict ‘the efforts of the Soviet people and the struggle to create a socialist life’. It is possible to see an edited version of Forest of the Gods in the surviving typescript held in the Manuscript Collection of the Library of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (LLTI BR, f. 53, b. 8). This typescript is marked by several layers of crossings-out in pens of various colours, ordinary pencils, blue pencils, and in green and red ink. In removing passages which were inappropriate in their view, the censors and editors of Forest of the Gods corrected the text more than once. Sruoga argued with them, adding to the episodes which were taken out some extra pages written in red ink. In these, he expressed his opinion about the corrections imposed on him, which he thought were absurd. Wishing to preserve the more important passages of text excised by the censors, and looking for compromise, he crossed out smaller extracts in red ink himself. Here are a few examples of episodes excised in the typescript of Forest of the Gods. In the chapter entitled ‘The Political Department’, passages were rejected in which educated prisoners light-heartedly engaged in a debate about the following theoretical choice: whether to gain liberty by signing an untruthful document, stating that they had experienced nothing bad in the camp and that they promised to inform on anyone who spoke out against the national socialists; or whether, seeking to be truthful, to remain in the camp for a longer period. Also rejected was an ironic comment criticising the Political Department, in which officially 30 members of the SS worked, who had, however, by their own written authority, delegated dossiers to ordinary young prison workers, while keeping for themselves the services of young women. In the chapter ‘Deathly Pale Fate’, the edi-

tors rejected an expanded, repeated episode about two Lithuanian prisoners and a talking living corpse brought to the hospital, which exposes the horror and absurdity of the situation. In the chapter ‘The Peoples’ Union of the Prison Camp’, they rejected an authentic piece about Latvian fascists who pinned on to their German uniforms a national badge, and made fun of Poles as ‘whores with a garland of rue’. It fell to the editor to evaluate the critique of life in the prison camp, the absurdities and the paradoxes described, the open mockery of the SS, and issues concerning the nationality of the members of the SS and their assistants. For the most part, the nationalities of the SS and the prisoners was made abstract, or omitted: ‘the little Ukrainian orphans’ was changed to ‘the foreigners who keep watch’; ‘the little Russian’ who kills Ziechma with a hammer is changed to ‘the boy’; ‘the little Russian’ who rummages in a rubbish bin becomes ‘the prisoner’; ‘the Polish bastard’ becomes ‘a disgusting-looking bastard’; ‘the little Pole’ becomes ‹a dirty little convict’; ‘the little Latvians on the run’ becomes ‘the fugitives’; ‘the Polish and Russian’ workers becomes ‘the foreigners’; ‘the Zacharai who were mostly Poles’ becomes ‹the assistants of the SS’; and Belarussians are referred to as ‘they’, or ‘the methodists›, or ‹the sectarians›. Swearwords, vulgarities and obscenities which Sruoga had written were also changed: in the place of words like kurvy syn, kurvų or kurvamac are found Lithuanian versions, the equivalent of rotten scoundrel, mangy spawn, born rascal, son of a bitch, whore, dirty scum, little worm, dirty beggar, shitbag, and so on. In the world of Socialist Realism, people were not subjected to insults, so when popular phraseology was invoked, substitutes had to be found. When the editor cut out larger episodes from the text, Sruoga often did not fully express his opinion, since he considered the whole exercise idiotic. He was outraged most by the fact that his language was converted into simple everyday usage. The metaphorical chapter titles lost their colour. For example: ‘A Flood of Jews’ was changed by the editor to ‘Jewish Women and their Children’; and ‘Only Gold Controls Us’ became ‘The Jews are Robbed’. Vivid and figurative words were standardised. For example, the editor corrected the phrase ‘release in smoke’ to ‘exterminate’, ‘flay the

skin’ and ‘pummel into the ground’ became ‘beat’, ‘perched’ became ‘seated’, ‘rattled in’ became ‘brought in’, ‘with a fist in his mug’ became ‘in his face’, ‘a hunk of bread’ became ‘a crust’, ‘mum and dad’ became ‘mother and father’, ‘the intelligentsia of a dog’s arse’ became ‘the intelligentsia of a dog’s tail’, and so on. In 1983, Sruoga’s granddaughter Aušrinė Byla translated Forest of the Gods into English, and in the following years there was a search for publishers in America. In an effort to adapt Forest of the Gods for the American market, there was a proposal to censor it in a similar way to the censorship in Soviet Lithuania: to edit passages where there was too sharp a reference to the issue of nationality, to shorten the text, to change paragraphs around, and to reprocess the author’s thoughts. In America, Forest of the Gods was viewed through the prism of normal documentary literature, although the work bore hardly any resemblance to traditional memoirs. American publishers looking for an original and unusual work with a Holocaust theme could not recognise Sruoga’s writing as something which offered that, and talked only in the clichés of the Lithuanian ideologues of the Soviet period. Sruoga never authorised the last edited version of Forest of the Gods, the LLTI BR typescript, nor did he confirm, either in writing or with his signature, that the text of the work as corrected by the editor could be published, or that it agreed with his intentions. Before his death, he indicated clearly in a ‘verbal will’ to a colleague, a lawyer, that the content and style of the work were inviolable. In editing the text of Forest of the Gods, the editors never had before them all the authentic original versions of the work which are now known to have survived, and on the basis of which it would have been possible to check doubtful or unclear passages. Faced with many layers of crossings-out in the typescript, the editors made guesses, or improvised, but did not make a comparison with the autographed version. For this reason, in all the published versions of Sruoga’s work, there is still an interweaving of the author’s intentions, the still-audible voices of the previous editors motivated by censorship, and the individual decisions made by later editors of the work and contemporary publishers. So a version of Forest of the Gods based on a comprehensive comparison of the source texts, the manuscipt and typescript,

has still not been published. A comparison is very important since, only when it is done will it become clear which passages Sruoga himself changed, or corrected, or completely rejected. All other corrections were forced on him, provoked by circumstances. Now that all extant autographed copies of Forest of the Gods have been found and compared, it is possible to contemplate an edition which would constitute a new, critically determined, maximally restored, authentic text of Sruoga›s work.

KING JURGIS: FROM ARIOGALA TO ARCADIA

Loreta Mačianskaitė

Interwar Lithuanian diplomat and writer Jurgis Savickis at Ariogala, his villa in southern France, 1945. (Photographer unknown, Lithuanian Central State Archives)

Jurgis Savickis (1890-1952) was an innovator in prose, who embodied an especially rare type of person in Lithuanian culture: a cosmopolitan, a dandy and a spiritual aristocrat. His three collections of novellas, Šventadienio sonetai (Sonnets of Holy Day), Ties aukštu sostu (By the High Throne) and Raudoni batukai (Little Red Shoes), expanded the field of Lithuanian prose. His work is Impressionistic and aesthetic; the protagonists of his short stories are like characters from the opera or theatre; while

the narrator himself is like a researcher, observing them from a distance. The action in Savickis’ novellas is set in Europe, in cities, hotels, resorts, or a wealthy person’s villa, while the characters are an assortment of town dwellers and members of different social classes. The author was probably the first to portray, in a grotesque and tragi-comic way, a complete cross-section of Lithuanian and European society at the time, and exposed Lithuanian prose to urban culture and a global context.

Lithuania has had no kings other than Grand Duke Mindaugas, who, when crowned in 1253, became its first and only king. However, the writer and diplomat Jurgis Savickis (1890-1952), a key figure in 20th-century Lithuanian culture, was given the name ‘King Jurgis’. Between 1928 and 1930, he worked as director of the State Theatre, and firmly but unobtrusively brought the chaos prevailing there under control, adopting the precept of monarchs ‘to reign but not to govern’. The epithet ‘King Jurgis’ was invented by theatregoers, and suited this unusual individual so much that even his obituaries announced: ‘King Jurgis Dies’. The royal nickname is also warranted by the title of one of his collections of short stories By the High Throne (1928). The author was not, of course, born in a royal palace or a top aristocrat’s castle, but on a small farm in the middle of Lithuania, in an area called Ariogala. His parents’ marriage certificate does not record any noble lineage. His grandmother, who came from a family of landowners, had married a man from a peasant family, whose name the writer also inherited. Jurgis Savickis himself understood full well the dual nature of his family origins, and reflected: ‘My character is quick-tempered, like a dog’s. I myself am a woodsman of the forests, like a shoemaker from the wild, although in the depths of my soul, I believe that somewhere in a church or a state archive, or in some other place, there are documents which would show my indisputable noble origin. I can feel this in my blood.’ The future writer did not live in Lithuania after the age of 12. He studied at a secondary school in Moscow, and with encouragement from his parents, went to study at the Higher School of Agriculture in St Petersburg. However, he was captivated by art,

so he changed to study painting at the St Petersburg Art Academy. He later tried to continue his art studies in Krakow. However, he never became a professional artist. His parents refused to finance his art studies as a matter of principle, although the issue was effectively resolved by the outbreak of the First World War. In the autumn of 1915, he returned to St Petersburg, and worked for the Committee for the Support of War Refugees. At the end of the war, he was sent to Denmark as a delegate to look after war refugees in Germany. When Lithuania proclaimed its independence, Savickis became a diplomat in Denmark, later serving in Norway, and then in Finland. He had to return as a result of a change in government in Lithuania, and for a few years he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and directed a theatre. But from 1930, he returned to work as a diplomat, in Scandinavia and at the League of Nations in Geneva. From 1940, he lived in his own villa in the south of France, which he called Ariogala, after his birthplace, where he took up gardening and wrote fiction and memoirs. The story of Savickis’ life merits a film or a novel, which would be quite unique. He was married three times, to a Jewish woman, a Danish woman, and unofficially a Dutch woman. He had two sons by his first wife Ida Trakiner, with whom he continued his relationship after their divorce. During the war, unable to endure the stress of hiding as a refugee from the ghetto, Ida committed suicide. His son Algirdas, out of solidarity with his own Jewish wife, went to live in the Kaunas ghetto, where he also died. Savickis’ daughter-in-law Julija survived together with her little daughter. They later reached the Stutthof concentration camp, where Balys Sruoga, also featured in this publication,

From left to right: Interwar Lithuanian diplomat and artist Antanas Liutkus, his friend Kazaokas, and writer and diplomat Jurgis Savickis in Sweden, 1937. (Photographer unknown, Lithuanian Central State Archives)

helped them. Sruoga was one of the first to recognise Savickis’ literary talent. Another of his sons, Augustinas Savickis, spent the war years in Russia. He later became a famous artist, and published a book of memoirs. Savickis’ second wife, his former secretary Inge Geisler, left him in 1948, taking their son Serge, whom they had adopted, with her to Denmark. Savickis then lived for a year with his Dutch partner Mary Albine Koh. After his death, Mary destroyed some of his creative work, in accordance with his wishes. He was a rare psychological type and embodied a lifestyle which was very rare, if not exceptional, in Lithuanian culture. He was often referred to as a dandy, an aristocrat, a cosmopolitan, a stoic and a cynic. He could get on with people from a wide range of backgrounds. He had the gift of inspiring others with his own cultural projects, and of winning over waverers. However, he lacked business sense and an ability to manage money. Due to his penchant for luxury and his liking for art, he was always deep in debt. Despite his undoubted services to Lithuanian diplomacy, many of his actions were not what would be considered appropriate for a diplomat. As he wrote himself, ‘I have in fact done everything the wrong way round: I go and marry a “foreigner”, I spend my holidays in the country which receives me, and not in the land of my ancestors, and when I draw my pension, I want to embed myself in my own abroad.’ Several amusing stories circulate about Savickis. He once hung his suit on a garden fence, went to hide, and observed how people behaved when they found it. Or he would argue intensely with a workman over pay, only later to pay him ten times as much as what was agreed. It seems that this behaviour was partly an artistic expression of homo ludens, but it was also his own special laboratory of research into human nature. Savickis was impressed by the theory of the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, of the ‘born criminal’, from which he took the idea of the uncontrollable nature of will: a foolish and immoral instinct, which, waiting for its time, would overrule the mind. The themes of human irrationality and imperfection interested Savickis from the very beginning of his creative work. Between the wars, he published two collections of short stories, Sonnets of Holy Days (1922) and By the High Throne (1928), to a lukewarm reception. Above all, the public were surprised at how the narrator distanced himself from the events portrayed, the difference between the standpoints of the narrator and the characters, the volatility of the narrative, and the lack of a stable system of values. The ‘coldness’ of Savickis’ prose, its playful tone, and its irony (often directed at romantic clichés, sentimentality and hackneyed tropes) were considered

‘I have in fact done everything the wrong way round: I go and marry a “foreigner”, I spend my holidays in the country which receives me, and not in the land of my ancestors, and when I draw my pension, I want to embed myself in my own abroad.’

to be signs of affectation, decadence and small-talk emptiness. The most banal events were often the central focus of the short stories (a farmer respected by everyone decides to drown his dog, a theatre musician retires and returns to the country), or situations where people’s weaknesses stand out: a longing for wealth or physical pleasure. Savickis creates his own literary world like a painter, but also like a theatre director: theatricality is particularly evident. He often uses metaphorical expressions drawn from the theatre, for example, in the observation of scenery, or with a character incapable of distinguishing stage art from reality: ‘Like scene-painters full of ephemera, having only yesterday so wonderfully refashioned nature, today they have harvested nature’s colours…’ ‘The flautist looked around him, comparing reality with the operetta’s winter scenery, and was amazed. Everything here looked different: as if it was colder […] There was really no sun.’ ‘The projector’s not working. It’s the technician’s fault…’ The theatricality of life, that is to say, the disjunction between how things appear and how they really are, is the starting point of Savickis’ artistic principles and his philosophical precepts. The dark impulses of human nature are sometimes externalised; and then an unseen force determining people’s lives is manifested by some figure: a theatre director, the mastermind of the world, or a person playing chess. Sometimes an image of the devil turns up, brushing his tail along the road and sticking his tongue out at

a small town. However, he is not identified with metaphysical evil. Neither God, who surveys the earth from on high, nor the devil, who continually registers all people’s sins, interferes in practice with people’s fates. People take every decision themselves, even if they are often governed by unpredictable impulses. Despite the fact that Savickis did not have any illusions about human nature, his work should not be classified as dark. There has been controversy among critics on this subject. Many consider that the grotesque deformity of his world and his sense of the absurd make his writing close to the prose style of Kafka, a formless existentialism. Others, disregarding his demystifying perspective, point to the humanism in his short stories, and to the belief that truth will prevail. According to his style of representation, Savickis’ prose is closer to Expressionism. However, this should be distinguished from Western postwar Expressionism, which was permeated by the total destruction of values, and feelings of the ruin of the world. The period between the two world wars was for Lithuania a time of formation of the state, rapid cultural growth, and great hope. It was a time when Modernist tendencies took root, but were somewhat transformed, and pessimism never outweighed optimism. Lithuanian Modernism only acquired its catastrophic content in the émigré literature after the Second World War, after thousands of people had experienced the tragedy of occupation, exile, emigration or hopeless struggles. Savickis’ irony is quite mild, his humour is not malicious. His world is more reminiscent of an operetta than a tragic farce. His artist’s eye and his laconic style, diplomatically restrained and frequently oblique, give it a special pungency. He was perhaps the first Lithuanian writer whom one could unreservedly call Western. He is often compared with various classic writers of European literature of the time, such as Kafka, Hamsun, Pirandello or Wilde, but he is not alone in this, and it does not explain his uniqueness. He was able to surprise readers by combining Lithuanian realism with Western cultural allusions (for example, he could compare the soul of a Lithuanian farmer with the ever-restless Tosca of Giacomo Puccini, or visualise the mud and slush of Lithuania as if it was Alaska). He paradoxically blends low style with high style. Where possible, he produces a strong artistic effect by suppressing images or using telegraphic syntax with a contemporary rhythm. As the writer Balys Sruoga once said: ‘In his use of descriptive resources, Savickis is as miserly as a finance minister in a time of crisis. He has, but he doesn’t give.’ In the postwar years, Savickis returned once more to short story writing, and published the collection Little Red Shoes (1951). Here, a lighter erotic theme prevails. However, the same contrast between appearance and reality that is characteristic of his earlier work persists, together with the concept of the mystery of human nature; although carni-

valesque humour glorifying the origin of life is substituted for tragi-comic demystification. In his postwar prose, irony comes out the opposite way. While in his earlier writing, reality was reflected through irony, which revealed its deep disharmony, a light carefree mood and elements of comedy were adopted to contrast with the disintegrated postwar reality. Another important part of his output is his travel writing and memoirs. He travelled a lot: he drove around southern and Western Europe, and flew to South Africa. His diary of the war years The Earth is on Fire, written between 1939 and 1946, is close in some ways to his travel literature. In his diary, the theatre of war is localised in the south of France, on the Mediterranean coast, where control passes from one country to another (France-Italy-Germany-America). To put it metaphorically, the main character is Europe itself, sliding into the fire of war, in which it goes up in flames. The narrator is characterised by his stoical aloofness and sarcastic critique of a world turned upside-down, by an overwhelming sense of its temporary nature, and by an attempt to show events from many sides. The particular trade of the narrator is that of a gardener. The diplomat has now become a person with a spade, and discovers the earth as an everlasting source of life, whose vitality compensates for the end of civilisation, and permits trust in the harmony of the Universe to be maintained. Even after he had lost everything, Savickis preserved his philosophical independence in his French villa Ariogala, where until his death he remained the king of the small Arcadia he had created.

A PHILOSOPHICAL TALE FOR ADULTS ABOUT PASSION AND THE NATURE OF MORALITY

Virginija Cibarauskė

Saulius Tomas Kondrotas (Author’s personal collection)

The writer and screenwriter Saulius Tomas Kondrotas (born 1953) is considered a virtuoso of prose writing, and is often called the only representative of magical realism in Lithuanian literature. His novel Žalčio žvilgsnis (The Serpent’s Gaze), set in Lithuania in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is multifaceted and Baroque in style. Lithuania is portrayed as an exotic country, in which mythology, old beliefs and superstitions are closely interwoven with Christian culture, and with extracts from the Bible and other ancient texts. The novel weaves the plot of a crime mystery, which holds the tension to the very end, playing with the reliability of the story itself (events are presented from the points of view of different characters), and with style (through the liberal use of archaic words and stylised insertions). The Serpent’s Gaze tells of the collapse of the traditional structure of society, and yet lets it be understood that progressive people who consider morality an obstacle do not necessarily offer a better alternative.

Saulius Tomas Kondrotas Žalčio žvilgsnis (The Serpent‘s Gaze), Vilnius: Vaga. 1981 – 1st ed.; Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996 – 2nd ed.; Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2006 – 3rd ed.

The 1981 novel Žalčio žvilgsnis (The Serpent’s Gaze) by Saulius Tomas Kondrotas (b. 1953), which has been translated into German, French, Italian and other languages, might best be described by the term ‘double coding’, a concept developed by Umberto Eco, the Italian postmodern novelist, semiotician and author of The Name of the Rose.

Critics often claim that Kondrotas’ prose reads as though it was written by a Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez residing in Lithuania. I believe that The Serpent’s Gaze could also be compared to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children, because it interlaces archaic local myths and fatalistic passions with existential and religious questions, all conveyed through splendidly Baroque, enthralling and undulating sentences. Virginija Cibarauskė

The novel’s story, immersed in layers of code, intertwines several (and sometimes more) planes, contexts and ranges of genre and style. For this reason, the same piece can be read both as a detective story and as an existential novel, or as a narrative that explores Western metaphysical concepts. Within its multiple layers of code The Serpent’s Gaze simultaneously tells a story of passion and crime, revealing the exotic customs of late 19th-century Lithuania, and delving into the philosophical and ethical issues that arise when intrinsic human vitality confronts the critical inclination of the rational mind. The Serpent’s Gaze engages the reader’s senses with a distinctly beautiful and precise artistic language, and captivates the mind through a narrative recounted by multiple voices. The novel is at once existential and historical, saturated with facets of Baltic mythology and Western cultural symbols, from Greek mythology and biblical intertextuality to Nitzschean and Marxist philosophy. It explores questions of ethics, morality, the existence of God, and the nature of evil, from the different perspectives of its characters, but this in no way prevents readers from enjoying its fanciful stories, reminiscent of distressing ballads, about fatalistic passions and unredeemable guilt, all interlaced with humorous exploits verging on the logic of the absurd. And only the reader can decide for himself or herself which dimension, mythical or rational, fanciful or philosophical, is the most important.

It begins in 1886, when Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire, and the echoes of the 1863-1864 uprising were still resonating. The grandfather of Kristupas Meižis, the main character in the first part of the book, awaits the rebels with a celebratory meal on the table, but is visited instead by a group of loathsome Imperial Russian soldiers on horseback, who decide to stay and enjoy the feast. The Meižis family are well-off peasants, with an ancestry plagued by a strange virus of fatalistic fortune. All the men are described as silent, taciturn and dispassionate, an attitude determined by the fact that once their feelings (whether love or anger) emerge, they become uncontrollable, destroying everything in their wake. The older generation of men are able to control the temperament that dwells within them. Kristupas’ grandfather could do so, as could his father. They are people who live by unwritten rules, passed down from one generation to another, who believe that their experience is inextricably linked to the experience of all the generations that have gone before them. It is a belief that is playfully, but in its own way also tragically, revealed at the grandfather’s funeral. Twelve-year-old Kristupas takes part in the phantasmagorical, six-month-long funeral vigil: its process, meals, drinks and ceremonial rituals are all described in great detail. During the course of the funeral ritual, the guests eat and drink sitting next to the deceased, who is dressed in a suit, and whose plate and glass are painstakingly filled with food and drink. Kristupas, meanwhile, preserves within himself the memory of his ancestors, and understands and is not afraid, when, as the guests go to bed, the spirits of his forefathers gather at the ritual table. Everything changes after his grandfather’s death. The memory of the extended family seems to have been buried with the old man. Kristupas feels alone, but what he misses most is not his grandfather, but the lost knowledge that he was not alone. When the time comes for him to enter the adult world, he understands that, while he is not a member of the older generation, he is also not a man of the new times. His fate, unlike that of his father or grandfather, takes on a tragic undertone: he is forced to make choices, without knowing or possessing a sense of any criteria, and thus constantly makes mistakes. His downfall is his love for Pimė, while his father’s fate is repeated and cruelly experienced by Gaurusis, who becomes a ruthless thief and arsonist.

In contrast to the wild and mythical vitality of the Meižis family are the so-called reasonable people, capable of employing their reason to change their fates and those of others. There is Count Pipiras and his drive to bring the Ubermensch ideal to life, and the man-machine Captain Uozolas, always seeking to improve himself. Their actions, driven by rational logic, cause even greater harm, and are marred by an extraordinary degree of heartlessness: not from them, but from those around them. An intermediary character of sorts is Uozolas’ son Anusas, who contains within himself both a mythical-vivacious and rationalist disposition. At the end of the novel, Anusas, paraphrasing the Christian drama of Father and Son, asks his own father about his intentions deciding the fate of the young Meižis: was he prepared to save him or let him die? For Anusas, his father’s response will determine ‘the meaning of being in this world, or perhaps the meaning of the world itself ’. But his father is a dispassionate rationalist, and no longer understands the existential subtext of his son’s question, and therefore obtaining an unambiguous reply is no longer possible. All of this leads to the idea of intrinsic evil encrypted in the novel’s title: what is evil, and where does the mythical serpent hide which once seduced the first men? Does it reside in every heart, or perhaps in every mind? Or perhaps it is the gaze of God himself, watching from behind everything in this world, wishing us ill, inviting us to believe in the world, and then always deceiving and disappointing us? Not incidentally, as he is taken off to be hanged, Gaurusis Meižis sees the serpent’s gaze in the gallows, and in the light of the setting sun.

The novel is intriguing, because it never provides a final answer to any of these questions. In that sense, it is an open-ended work, an approach that is also determined by its structure, which some critics have called Faulkneresque or Dostoyevskian for its use of multiple voices, while others compare it to Julio Cortazar’s Final de Juego. Kondrotas’ novel is fragmented, and each character’s story can be read both chronologically and non-chronologically. Although it begins by telling the story from Kristupas’ point of view, in other chapters Kristupas is replaced by an omniscient narrator, later joined by the voices and the stories of other characters. Thus, the same events are described by participants with a limited range of information, demonstrating that one and the same event can be seen and judged completely differently. Whose point of view is the ‘real’ one? Whose measure of worth, whose ideology or life philosophy is correct? The novel has been called a book about passion and a work of relativism and negation, in which all human values, such as morality and religion, become material for a refined mind, always questioning and searching for meaning. It not only continuously changes perspectives, it also alters stylistic registers: lyricism and visual poetry intertwine with the philosophical and existential speculation entertained by its characters. The most beautiful and poetic instances come when an idea (in this case, the idea of passion incarnate) is conveyed through metaphor. This is how Gaurusis speaks about the blaze he himself has started: The fire was like a red rose or an orange nasturtium, if you tried to imagine it suspended and motionless. But it moved, Papa. And, as it moved up the walls of the building, it was like a glowing vine, shooting its tendrils like arrows into a rotting tree trunk. And when it all turned into one big ball of flame, it was as bright as day, as far as the eye could see. The fire wailed, moaned and quivered, like a woman. The fire was living passion, old man. But no man will ever feel such passion. You’d have to be completely mad to surrender to it. It destroyed, Papa. Everything died within it. The passion destroyed lifeless things. It consumed wood, iron and fabric. Human passion cannot destroy things on its own, only the passion of fire can do that. But it was a human creation, that’s what was so glorious. It was my creation. The author has mastered a specific way of speaking that is akin to magical realism: individual details are conveyed with precise accuracy, but in that precision the narrative itself becomes magical. What is more, although it is based on historical material and set in specific Lithuanian cities, he transforms the historical and factual material, making it appear strange, and combining it in unexpected ways, or

‘This work was not even initially conceived as a novel. I’m not sure if it should even be called a novel now. The Serpent’s Gaze was like a doorway to freedom, a liberation from all sorts of tyranny.’

rewriting it in such a way that his imagined world takes on a unique and universal dimension. Critics often claim that Kondrotas’ prose reads as though it was written by a Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez residing in Lithuania. I believe that The Serpent’s Gaze could also be compared to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children, because it interlaces archaic local myths and fatalistic passions with existential and religious questions, all conveyed through splendidly Baroque, enthralling and undulating sentences. Kondrotas himself once said: ‘This work was not even initially conceived as a novel. I’m not sure if it should even be called a novel now. The Serpent’s Gaze was like a doorway to freedom, a liberation from all sorts of tyranny.’ His own personal story and the context within which the novel was written are also interesting. He lived and wrote in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, where contemplating the ambiguous nature of morality, the cruelty of the rational mind, and in particular questions relating to religion and the obliteration of memory, was suicidal, even if done within a work of literary fiction. To evade censorship, novels were often set in mythical or emphatically abstract eras. Kondrotas himself has said on numerous occasions that if he could rewrite The Serpent’s Gaze he would set it in the present, not in the 19th century, because it poses universal questions. He graduated from Vilnius University in 1976 with a degree in psychology and philosophy, and taught

Marxist philosophy at Vilnius Institute of Art from 1977 to 1980, during the dreary years of Brezhnev’s rule. Despite his literary success, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1986, when the right to travel freely abroad was non-existent. As was customary when any artist left the country permanently, the Soviet government ordered the removal of all his books from bookshops and libraries, and prohibited the public mention of his work. As a writer enamoured of philosophers such as Seneca and Friedrich Nietzsche, Kondrotas was extremely well versed in topics such as the distortion of memory, the subjugation and manipulation of human thought, and questions pertaining to personal guilt and responsibility, all subjects he wished to analyse through his work. And while emigrating from the Soviet Union was a rarely chosen path (artists usually opted to reconcile themselves with censorship and the restrictions imposed on creative freedom), Kondrotas found his situation unbearable.

During the course of the Second World War, a number of writers and artists left Lithuania, fleeing from the threat of war and the enemy armies, both Soviet and German. This vivid experience of escape, of life in Displaced Persons camps, and of attempts to resettle in Western Europe and North America, has been described more than once in Lithuanian literature, but most vividly and spontaneously through the medium of diaries. The diaries entitled Žmogus be vietos (I Had Nowhere to Go) by Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker, artist and avant-gardist of world renown, cover almost an entire decade (1944-1954), and speak of the conflict between a person who has left his home-

land and a world which has lost its senses. These diaries are written in fragments; fact is deliberately mixed with fiction; and they are interspersed with poems and short essays. The diaries of Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (1919-2015), one of the best poets of the diaspora, cover a somewhat broader period, almost all of his active life (1938-2012). The diaries of both Mekas and Niliūnas comprise personal human histories of an intellectual and existential character. They have universal meaning, in that they not only reveal the actual destinies of the people concerned, but also expose the historical and cultural global context, and our relationship with it.

HOMECOMING Antanas A. Terleckas

The year is 1918. Germany is beginning its last offensive against Russia. A month later, its artillery bombards Paris. Gazing at the ruins of the Church of St Gervais and St Protais, Romain Rolland is starting to write Pierre et Luce. In April, Gavrilo Princip, the person who indirectly triggered all this turbulence and yet is quickly forgotten by everyone, dies quietly in prison. Soon afterwards, the Bolsheviks exterminate one more symbol of the old world, the family of Tsar Nicholas II, thus ending the Romanov dynasty. Finally, the Armistice is signed at Compiègne, and it is the end of the war. The heroes of Remarque’s novels All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back return to their German towns, where they are greeted not so much as victims of the war, but as loyalists of the old world of the Kaiser, as enemies of the new system. Stefan Zweig sees the Austro-Hungarian empire collapse before his eyes, and probably has no inkling that this

Lithuanian refugees in Germany sorting through donated clothing, 1948. (Photographer unknown, Lithuanian Central State Archives)

will form the first chapter of his book The World of Yesterday. The disintegrating economy gives rise to unprecedented inflation. Europe counts its victims, and says once more ‘never again’. But Lithuania, like other Central and East European states, not so mindful of the pains of war, is celebrating. After 123 years of occupation, it has regained the right to take its own decisions. Lithuania proclaims independence, and this means that Lithuanian writers now have a historic chance, which essentially they have never had, to become part of world culture. Not part of a modest province of Imperial Russia, but part of the Western world. The Lithuanians exploit this opportunity. A large number of the cultural and political elite go and study in the West, in France, Belgium and Germany, and try to draw culturally close to a world which has been moving steadily away from them, a world which

‘If you want to reproach me for lack of patriotism or courage, then go to hell. You have created this civilisation, and these borders, and I neither understand nor desire your civilisation, or your wars, so do me a favour and leave me alone... I am free, even in your wars.’

was unknown in the Russian Empire. Over time, a few Lithuanians succeed in becoming figures of world renown: Algirdas Julius Greimas, a famous expert in semiotics, Jurgis Mačiūnas, a founding member of the Fluxus movement, and Jonas Mekas, a star of avant-garde cinema. There are various possible reasons why only a few Lithuanians achieve global recognition at this time. However, two reasons probably stand out: strict adherence to the language, and the short lifespan of the Republic of Lithuania (1918 to 1940). The Lithuanian state failed not through its own fault, but because of the plan of two dictators to divide the world between them. Like other states, Lithuania became a hostage to circumstances. Just as Great Britain and France were effectively forced into going to war with Germany, so Lithuania was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union.

The year is 1939. Lithuania is counting its last hours of statehood, while an awful feeling of déjà vu comes over the whole of Europe. Hemingway understands that a farewell to arms is not in fact farewell, characters from Remarque return to their abandoned posts in the field of senseless war, and the world once more crumbles before Stefan Zweig’s eyes, and finally becomes The World of Yesterday. Anne Frank will soon start writing her diary, it will fall to Primo Levi to raise the question whether a human being is still human, and to Viktor Frankl to ask whether meaning still exists in the world. All these authors wrote astonishing works, in which they speak a universal language, a language of pain and tragedy. They looked searchingly at a civilisation destroying itself, and understood that it was absurd. The Lithuanians too felt this. They too spoke a universal language, and wrote it all down, as Jonas Mekas and Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (real name Čipkus) did in their diaries. Before becoming a modern cinema artist, Mekas was just a small boy from the Biržai region. He was interested in poetry, he learned foreign languages, and he worked as an editor on small local newspapers. He completed his secondary schooling under the Nazi occupation, and became involved in the anti-Nazi resistance; but, sensing the danger from the Gestapo, and with the Red Army advancing, he decided to flee to Germany. His diary begins with this episode, and covers his life from 1944 to 1953. The main theme of Mekas’ diary is his conflict with a world that has lost its senses. By the time he escaped to Germany, a lot of his contemporaries had organised themselves piecemeal into small armed companies, and were preparing for battle with the imminent Soviet reoccupation. Others adopted the position of passive observers. A third group escaped. Mekas and his brother Adolfas chose the last. He wrote in his diary: ‘If you want to reproach me for lack of patriotism or courage, then go to hell. You have created this civilisation, and these borders, and I neither understand nor desire your civilisation, or your wars, so do me a favour and leave me alone... I am free, even in your wars.’ Mekas looks at the failure of civilisation, and tries to detach himself from this process, to rise above the whole mad world, which had ruined millions. It seems that only by repudiating everything which has gone before is it possible to escape from this mess. Mekas ends up in a prisoner of war camp in Germany, and is forced to work in a car factory, where he again tries to cut himself off from civilisation. ‘The newspapers are crying: English bombs will destroy European culture! Yes, because this European culture cannot be found in the human being, but in brick walls and museums. It’s your European culture which has shut me up in these barracks! It’s your European culture which has shut my friends up in these barracks! That is why I don’t feel sorry for this

Jonas Mekas with new friends after arriving at the Wiesbaden Displaced Persons Camp, 1945. (Photograph: Jonas Mekas)

‘They open one up: books. They open up another: books. They look in the rucksack: books. They shake their heads. They’re at a complete loss. And where are your things? they ask. We don’t have any, we say. Nichts things. We point to the books. We say, here are our things.’

‘The Russians do not understand why Adolfas and I are not running a firewood business with the Germans. The French, the Italians, they are all in this business. I said I wouldn’t stoop to this behaviour. Perhaps they have been here longer, and they are more broken. I cannot yet boast of my own self-respect.’

Jonas Mekas in Lost Lost Lost (1976). (Photograph: Jonas Mekas)

The Kassel/Mattenberg Displaced Persons Camp. (Photograph: Jonas Mekas)

Jonas Mekas (Photograph: Jonas Mekas)

culture. Destroy it with bombs, I beg you!’ It might appear that Mekas was turning into an idiosyncratic successor to Oswald Spengler, announcing that the end of the West had come again. He continually complains about the world, the war, the Nazis, the Soviets, the French, the English, hunger, work, leisure, newspapers, and everything which serves to reinforce the sense of absolute hopelessness. However, Mekas is not capable of becoming Spengler. He is not capable of cutting himself off from what he apparently genuinely cannot endure, because it seems that culture is the only way to retain humanity amid this insanity. This is best illustrated by the arrival of Mekas and his brother in a Displaced Persons Camp, where for a few years their long period of wandering through Germany came

‘The newspapers are crying: English bombs will destroy European culture! Yes, because this European culture cannot be found in the human being, but in brick walls and museums. It’s your European culture which has shut me up in these barracks! It’s your European culture which has shut my friends up in these barracks! That is why I don’t feel sorry for this culture. Destroy it with bombs, I beg you!’

to an end. ‘When we arrived in Wiesbaden, we were detained at the gates of the camp. The MP came up, and called over a pair of attendants. Take a look, they say, see what’s in their cases and their rucksacks. They open one up: books. They open up another: books. They look in the rucksack: books. They shake their heads. They’re at a complete loss. And where are your things? they ask. We don’t have any, we say. Nichts things. We point to the books. We say, here are our things. One waves his arm, as if to say we’re crazy, and says: proceed.’ The whole essence of human existence stands exposed in this: under wartime conditions, Mekas devotes all his free time to the study of languages, and he buys books with the money he has saved. Over time, these same books become an intolerable burden: at the station, he has to leave behind a col-

lection of Goethe’s works, which has simply become too heavy to carry. However, in the next town, other classics, Hugo, Dumas and others, quickly replace Goethe. Then he finally loses his battle with pessimism, and decides to study philosophy (!) at the University of Mainz. Burying himself in culture allows him, even while enduring hunger, to feel that he is above the completely disintegrating world and its citizens, although some hesitancy remains: ‘The Russians do not understand why Adolfas and I are not running a firewood business with the Germans. The French, the Italians, they are all in this business. I said I wouldn’t stoop to this behaviour. Perhaps they have been here longer, and they are more broken. I cannot yet boast of my own self-respect.’

Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (Photograph: Maironis Museum of Lithuanian Literature).

Jonas Mekas (left) with his brother Adolfas at the Film-Makers‘ Cooperative, 1962. (Photograph: Jonas Mekas)

Stasys Janavičius, Matas Melėnas, Juozas Zimblys, Alfonsas Čipkus (Nyka-Niliūnas) and Vilius Pėteraitis at Vilnius University, 1941. (Photograph: Maironis Museum of Lithuanian Literature).

‘The war has ended. There are winners and losers. But who are the winners, and who are the losers? Who is the enemy? Whom should one love, whom should one hate?’

The diary of Nyka-Niliūnas is similar, although admittedly covering a much broader period of time (1938 to 2012). One of the most promising poets of his generation, and a talented linguist, he too was forced to flee to Germany during the war, where he had to shelter from the Allied bombardments, and each day struggle for food and a place to sleep. Even when the war ended, everything was still infused with the macabre. ‘The war has ended. There are winners and losers. But who are the winners, and who are the losers? Who is the enemy? Whom should one love, whom should one hate? […] A friend I met in the street, a Russian prisoner of war, Semionas […] wisely observed: “War is war, stuff is stuff.”’ For Niliūnas, the end of the war fundamentally meant nothing, and it could not mean anything: he was not able to return home, for his home was occupied by the Soviet Union. So he was forced to continue travelling around Germany, to complain that there was nothing to read, to end up in a Displaced Persons Camp, to wait for five years until the door to the United States opened, and he finally had the chance to try to establish a home there. But he did not really succeed in that. It is no coincidence that Mekas› diaries are called The Man from Nowhere. And not for nothing that in 2010, Nyka-Niliūnas sums up his impressions of a seaside holiday like this: ‘Back home? Home? For the last sixty-six years, I have never been or felt at home anywhere.’

‘Everything I have on me, my clothes and my shoes, everything I am wearing, comes from people who are dead. That’s sometimes a slightly strange feeling.’

The writings of neither men are dry chronicles of life. The pages of their diaries contain passages reflecting on the world and on themselves, and analysing the books they have read and the authors’ ideas. Both diaries have a characteristically individual way of philosophising. If ‘philosophy’ can be translated as ‘the love of the mind’, for Nyka-Niliūnas, that means ‘the love of the beauty of the mind’. The all-encompassing world, just like the entries in his diary, is based on aesthetic logic. The diaries are not just self-centred documents. They are existential, intellectual stories of two people, which today are not relevant only to a narrow circle of Lithuanian readers. They are universal. They tell the world the story not only of the authors, but of all of Lithuania. They are writings by people who were fortunate to become part of the Western world during the short existence of the Lithuanian state, and who prolonged the idea of Lithuania by surviving to live free, in the free world. These are stories in which there is room for everything, from the food rations on which Mekas has to live in the prisoner-of-war camp (a kilogram of bread for seven people, with a spoonful of beetroot or cabbage soup, and a lump of margarine) to letters, poems and personal observations written in the context of the daily routine of the Displaced Persons Camp: ‘Everything I have on me, my clothes and my shoes, everything I am wearing, comes from people who are dead. That’s sometimes a slightly strange feeling.’ They also range from a short, youthful and passionate romance, which ends with a drop too much wine, to the wonderful story of Nyka-Niliūnas’ love. In the Displaced Persons Camp, he meets the love of his life, who becomes the lynchpin of his life, a love who is present through all his diaries, and who dies at the end of the story, a few years before Niliūnas himself. When you read the last entries in the diary, which are steeped in anguish and loneliness, you are only left thinking that, if ever in your life you love someone as he loved her, that would be enough. These writings, which are still known only to a few, are a Lithuanian interpretation of the history of the world. With Lithuania once again becoming part of the Western world, it wants to share its history with others.

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In 1944, as the second Soviet occupation was drawing near, an anti-Soviet resistance began to form. This turned into a partisan war, which was most intense in terms of both scale and duration (1944-1953) in the Baltic countries. Partisan literature emerged from this struggle: songs, romantic and patriotic poetry, personal writings, recollections, diaries, and similar works. Of the partisan poets, first and foremost is Bronius Krivickas (1919-1952). His skilfully written poems in Classical form speak predominantly of confrontation with death,

and of the fragile beauty of the world. The diary of the partisan Lionginas Baliukevičius-Dzūkas, discovered in the archives of the state security apparatus after Lithuania’s independence, is also considered a unique testimony. It was not written for others to read: it contains sensitive personal revelations, doubts, disappointments, and general discussions about Lithuania and the fate of the world. This literature helps us to understand, or at least to try to understand, what a person feels when caught up in a struggle which he cannot win.

LITERATURE THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED Antanas A. Terleckas

Živilė Mykolaitytė, Alfonsas Čipkus (Nyka-Niliūnas) and Dalia Sruogaitė in Vilnius, 1943. (Photograph: Maironis Museum of Lithuanian Literature).

‘Back home? Home? For the last sixty-six years, I have never been or felt at home anywhere.’

The Second World War dragged on in Lithuania. The ensuing campaign by the partisans against the USSR, and the partisans’ attempts to reestablish the country’s independence, should be seen as an integral part of the events which occurred between 1939 and 1945. The landscape and terrain were not intrinsically favourable to a partisan war: Lithuania does not have any high mountains or large rivers. The first snow can fall in the autumn, and sometimes stays on the ground until May. Footprints in the snow frequently spell death. The only ‘safe space’ was provided by forests, in bunkers hurriedly dug underground, sometimes so small that you could not stand up or lie down in them if there were several men together. A dark, damp, oversize matchbox, in which you were permanently short of air: that was ‘home’ for the postwar period. But partisans did appear in Lithuania, and by the scale and the length of their resistance, they formed the most powerful resistance movement in the Baltic countries. It is estimated that during the period of active organised resistance between 1944 and 1953, about 20,000 partisans lost their lives. Thousands ended up in prison camps in the depths of the USSR. In total, about 50,000 fighters passed through the forests.

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Bronius Krivickas (centre) with Pilėnai District leader Stepas Giedrikas-Girietis (right) and Alfonsas Valentėlis-Bankininkas Vailokaitis. Biržai Forest, autumn, 1951. (Photograph: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre)

‘We will know how to die.’

The partisans are known by various names: freedom fighters, warriors, men in green, the forest brothers. These people renounced the illusion of a ‘quiet’ life (insofar as that was possible under the Soviet regime) and chose resistance as a path of action. The average length of service of a partisan was two years. The statistics, which show no mercy, suggest that over those two years, you either lost your life or you ended up in Siberia. That was the reality for the partisans. You would spend most of that time underground. Sometimes you could not even converse openly with your comrades-in-arms. You were afraid that talking could result in harm to your nearest and dearest. If you were captured, the Soviets would use all possible means of persuasion to get information from you. If a person could not stand up to torture, he might spill the beans. So each partisan had his own codename, by which they addressed each other, avoiding the use of forenames or surnames. Often the partisans would choose codenames related to nature: Vanagas (hawk), Ąžuolas (oak), Klevas (maple), and so on. There were, however, other possibilities. For example, in one detachment there were partisans with names such as Jonas Putna-Stalinas, Juozas Putna-Leninas and Jonas Guobys-Molotovas. Irony is a tried and tested way of fighting the world. When they had nobody to talk to, nobody to whom they could express their deepest doubts or their brightest dreams, they would begin a conversation with themselves. That is one of the reasons why

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we have such an enormous body of partisan literary works today. The partisans’ artistic legacy can be divided into two broad groups: poetry, journalism and songs, either written for themselves or for publication in the partisan press; and documents of a personal nature, such as diaries, letters and memoirs written during the campaign. From a literary perspective, the poetry is not especially mature. Perhaps it is even arguable whether it really is poetry. Out of the thousands who died, only a handful had marked themselves out as poets before the campaign, and all of them had only just started out on their artistic path: Bronius-Krivickas-Vilnius, Diana Glemžaitė, Benediktas Labėnas-Kariūnas, Mamertas Indriliūnas. Others were usually the children of farmers, who frequently had not even managed to finish school. On the other hand, one of the most famous leaders of the resistance, Petras Bartkus-Žadgaila, responding to this allegation of lack of artistic merit, wrote in the partisan press in 1948: ‘Do not look for art here / What you will hear / is the partisan’s heart / walking with death ever near.’ This is perhaps the most accurate description of all partisan poetry. For the most part, these are not conceptual poems, but everyday inner thoughts, expressed against the backdrop of war. The poems should not be read as art of high quality, as true poetry, but rather as documents, which shed a light on the environment in which these people lived. If they had not become partisans, it is most likely that none of them would ever have written poetry. The partisans’ poems cover very specific themes: usually a poem imagines a conversation with death, an ever-present threat, or addresses friends who have lost their lives, or simply addresses the enemy, although eternal themes, such as love, also retain their importance. It is true that the postwar reality gives them a particular tinge: they are all equally intoxicating, although some are marked by fragility, others by tragedy. Diana Glemžaitė wrote: ‘I love you, I love you, for you are the one who passes by / Who today will visit, yet tomorrow will be here no longer.’ Krivickas echoed: ‘Wounded and exhausted, I fell on the snow / A deep wound sprayed me with blood / And when too much blood had flowed / I fainted weak and sick in a swoon / / I woke up. You, bending down beside me / Bound my wound in a scarf / Leave me, I said. All around / The enemy is circling. The drops of blood / / Will show my path to those in pursuit / Go! Leave me, or else you will die... / But you said: I know, in our veins / The same blood flows. We will die together.’ Although a partisan war is the cruellest type of war, we can see from these poems that the will to live, and the will to find happiness, were never extinguished. One fundamental factor, the temporariness of life, is ever present. Often Glemžaitė’s poems repeat the line: ‘We will know how to die.’ To

‘Wounded and exhausted, I fell on the snow / A deep wound sprayed me with blood / And when too much blood had flowed / I fainted weak and sick in a swoon / I woke up. You, bending down beside me / Bound my wound in a scarf / Leave me, I said. All around / The enemy is circling. The drops of blood / / Will show my path to those in pursuit / Go! Leave me, or else you will die... / But you said: I know, in our veins / The same blood flows. We will die together.’

‘Do not look for art here / What you will hear / is the partisan’s heart / walking with death ever near.’

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Dainava District leader Lionginas Baliukevičius-Dzūkas, summer, 1948. (Photograph: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre)

‘Under no circumstances is this diary for public use. I wrote it just for myself. In the event that I am killed, please pass this diary on to my dear brother Kostas. For all others who are fated to live and find this diary, I ask you not to read it, but to destroy it. That is my last wish.’

know how to die. To make the right choice, not to betray one’s friends, to die fighting the enemy for freedom: that is how to die. And that is how she died, in November 1949. When we read these poems, the statistics become something real. The story of each of the 50,000 partisans turns into a story about a specific person, and a specific feeling of anguish. The partisans chose to remain free, and so the ordinary process of events in Lithuania did not generally impinge upon them: they belonged to the free world. In 1949, for example, the whole world marked the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. Living in the bunkers, Bronius Krivickas also celebrated this, probably in the most impressive manner anywhere in the world: by translating more than 70 of Goethe’s poems, by the light of an oil lamp, and with his automatic rifle close by. We often know nothing much about the authors. If the poem was printed in the partisan press, it was at best signed with a codename. Even when we can establish the real identity of an author, we often cannot find out more than the basic facts of their life: the date of birth and the date of death, perhaps where they studied, and what they did afterwards. Sometimes not even that much is possible. We often cannot understand who the poem relates to: the information contained in it had to be encoded; not only were the names and surnames of individuals turned into codenames, but also the names of dates and places.

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Our appreciation of the poems improves if we understand how they reached us physically. Most poems that were not published in the partisan press were written by hand in a notebook, usually in pencil, although more often on scraps of paper. Every partisan knew that he could die at any moment, and wished to preserve his thoughts, either for posterity or as some sort of legacy, or simply to immortalise himself. For that reason, once the partisans had written down their poems, they passed them on to others, whom they trusted, to keep. But in the Soviet period, the mere possession of photographs of partisans, or of their letters or documents, constituted a crime, for which in Stalin’s time you could end up in Siberia at the very least. Therefore, an enormous part of the partisans’ legacy was destroyed, simply out of fear for one’s safety. Others decided to conceal the papers entrusted to them: they would hide them underground, in boxes or in tins, or slip them under the foundations of their house, or hide them among other writings. Because of this, however, a significant number of works have not reached us. After lying underground for 50 years, paper disintegrated, and, if it was dug up, even professional restorers often could not reconstitute it. However macabre it sounds, you have to thank the Soviet security structures, who would take deceased freedom fighters’ belongings after successful operations, for their more straightforward way of preserving documents. In this way, one of the most valuable and unique postwar works was preserved for the public, the diary of Lionginas Baliukevičius-Dzūkas. After his betrayal, the diary he had written ended up in the hands of the security structures. It was meticulously studied, but then later left to gather dust in a file. Only after Lithuania’s restoration of independence did historians discover it and decide to publish it. Admittedly, in publishing it, they went against the wishes of the partisan himself. The diary states in its introduction that it is addressed to an imaginary reader. ‘Under no circumstances is this diary for public use. I wrote it just for myself. In the event that I am killed, please pass this diary on to my dear brother Kostas. For all others who are fated to live and find this diary, I ask you not to read it, but to destroy it. That is my last wish.’ If you read these personal documents of the partisans, you will feel the discomfort which a reader should feel when crossing the boundaries of the personal space of the deceased. However, you are left with no option but to turn the next page: the historical and literary value of the diary is colossal. It is only by reading these works that you begin to understand what the partisan war really was like, what a person involved in the struggle really felt, a struggle which he could never win by himself. Baliukevičius describes the news that he has become the leader of the Dainava region, one of the largest partisan units: ‘The leader

Kęstutis District partisan fighter Ona Lešinskaitė-Akacija, 1949. (Photograph: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre)

‘The leader of two hundred and fifty living partisans, and about a thousand who are dead, the “ruler” of the living and the dead.’

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Dainava District, Kazimieraitis Squad, Vanagas Group leader Feliksas Daugirdas-Šarūnas wraps a bandage around the foot of fellow partisan Vincas Kalanta-Nemunas (circa 1949). (Photograph: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre)

Commendation ceremony for distinguished partisans, Kazimieraitis Squad, Dainava District, 1948. Dainava District Press and Information Unit leader Lionginas Baliukevičius-Dzūkas stands at right in the foreground, by a table draped in the Lithuanian tricolour flag, reading the official commendation decree. Dainava District leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas is shown pinning a medal on partisan fighter Sofija BudėnaitėRamunė. Other members of the squad are shown in formation at left. First from left is Jonas Budėnas-Klebonas (brother of Sofija Budėnaitė), second from left is Teofilis Valickas-Balys. (Photograph: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre)

‘People look to the West, they look for the smallest ray of light, rejoice in the smallest trifle, distort and magnify any kind of small fact several times... But the West is cold.’

of two hundred and fifty living partisans, and about a thousand who are dead, the “ruler” of the living and the dead.’ There is room for everything in the diary, from hesitation, disappointment and pain, to general debates about the future of the country. ‘People look to the West, they look for the smallest ray of light, rejoice in the smallest trifle, distort and magnify any kind of small fact several times... But the West is cold. They have turned white, as if they did not exist. If you are big and powerful, right is on your side. Then they see you and talk about you. The Chinese communists bombed an English ship, killing forty-four sailors, and what an awful scandal! As for us, each day we move nearer towards defeat, and there isn’t a word.’ They were still hoping that the West would come and help, although that was not realistic: the memory of the war which had just ended was too painful. However, when you are left absolutely alone, you try to somehow rationalise the situation you are faced with, and look anywhere for hope. The end of the diary is poetic. The last entry reads: ‘Today I finished reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection and his short story In the Caucasus. What a great writer he is and his books are a pleasure to read! He’s been dead for a long time now, but his books will live forever...’ This reads almost like an autobiographical thought. Such diaries, written while balanced on the edge of life and death, never end. They simply break off, and we can only guess or find out from other sources the fates of the authors. Just as in the diary

of Anne Frank, you read the last entry, turn the next page, expecting it to continue, but then you find only the endnote from the publishers. The reader collides with cruel historical reality: the person whose everyday observations you have been exploring simply no longer exists. He has been destroyed. Yet, thanks to Providence, coincidence, or whatever you want to call it, his work has nevertheless survived amidst all this hell, and is accessible today. The enormous legacy of the Lithuanian partisans has been discussed in this article only in the broadest outline. The list of partisan writers does not end here. Juozas Lukša-Daumantas, a legendary partisan, was assigned the task of forcing his way through the Iron Curtain. He stayed in Paris, where he met Nijolė Braženaitė, the love of his life, and married her. However, he decided to return to Lithuania. He was dropped into Lithuania at the very end of the partisan war, when no hope remained, and when having made contact with Western intelligence services he knew that there would not be another war. Within a short time, he was killed. The story of his life is described in his work Forest Brothers: The Account of an Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Freedom Fighter, and in his love letters to Nijolė, in which he used to joke that he had two wives, Lithuania first, and her second. Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, one of the most distinguished Lithuanian partisan leaders, did not fall into the hands of the enemy until 1956. As the most distinguished living figure in the resistance,

and an individual personification of the whole movement, after a year of torture, when we know from history that the ‘thaw’ had already set in, he was executed. ‘Destalinisation’ was in process, and people were being released from the prison camps. He too described his life in memoirs, entitled ‘Many Sons have Fallen’. Balys-Vaičėnas-Lordas also left a diary and a will, in which he wrote: ‘You, the girl whose name I do not write here [...] might remember that there was once a partisan who used to dream a lot about you in difficult times in life, as he would about a woman with whom he hoped to create a home. I did not love you because we expected to be more beautiful or more wealthy than others, but because you did not forget me even in hard times, when misfortunes were pressing down, and you constantly showed a sisterly heart. That sisterly love ought to be repaid with brotherly love, but there has been more than that in my soul,

‘I love you, I love you, for you are the one who passes by / Who today will visit, yet tomorrow will be here no longer.’

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Tauras District, Vytautas Squad headquarters official Stasys Ališauskas-Kalinys and squad leader Vytautas Gavėnas-Vampyras, Granitas conduct reconnaissance. 15 August 1948. (Photograph: Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre)

and for that I am to blame. You are not angry, are you? My wish is that if my grave is known, we should sometimes visit it, adorn it with flowers, and should not forget our promise. I ask for nothing more.’ And so on, and so on. These are people whose very existence you sometimes even want to doubt: they appear like eccentric characters from adventure novels, almost superheroes. However, they did exist, and they still exist, real people, falling in love and being loved, living in one of the most tragic periods of Lithuania’s history. These works are only part of their legacy, which would never have existed if there had been no Soviet occupation. Their tragedy has become a huge source of inspiration, and one of the greatest memorials to freedom which could ever be built. Far greater than the Statue of Liberty in New York.

This piece written by the well-known poet, prose-writer and essayist Kęstutis Navakas, one of the most famous, inventive and lively authors in contemporary Lithuania, presents an unusual and witty account of the history of Lithuanian essay-writing, and of the essay-writing school at the cultural weekly The Athens of the North (by Sigitas Parulskis, Sigitas Geda, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, Gintaras Beresnevičius, and others). These essayists changed the way Lithuanians perceived the genre, and developed their own distinctive essay style: personal experiences, literary narrative, and even impudent humour, combined with intellect, puns and clever phrasing. Potted biographies of the five essayists, and descriptions of their works, are provided at the end of the article.

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I WRITE WHAT I BREATHE Kęstutis Navakas

‘My wish is that if my grave is known, we should sometimes visit it, adorn it with flowers, and should not forget our promise. I ask for nothing more.’

Autumn is here, and there are fewer birds around. I received a letter this morning from a childhood friend whom I haven’t seen in thirty years. There are countries reachable only by airplane, populated by strange people with their own intimate worlds, listening to different kinds of music. I sit by the window and look out at the rain, and I think to myself: the rain was completely different in my childhood. I have nothing to do.

Giedra Radvilavičiūtė (b. 1960), essayist, recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Art, and the European Union Prize for Literature. Lithuania’s leading essayist, whose writings have helped make the highest-calibre essays into a popular and prestigious genre, her writings combine the cultural dimensions of life’s higher and lower planes. Radvilavičiūtė is also noteworthy for her organic incorporation of fragments of literary (con)text, and the use of unconventional humour. Book: Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos (Tonight, I’ll Sleep Facing the Wall), Baltos lankos, 2010.

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tion survived after the second restoration of independence in 1990, also making inroads into essay writing. Free of the bonds of the Soviet empire, essay writing blossomed like a lilac bush, explored by all but the idlest of writers. A particularly important role in this process was played by the cultural weekly Šiaurės Atėnai (The Athens of the North), named, as it happens, after an idea or hope expressed in an essay by the Lithuanian-born French poet Oscar Milosz that Lithuania might one day become the Athens of the North. All of Lithuania’s most prominent essayists were published in it, and the weekly became its own kind of school for essay writing. In truth, the birth of the Lithuanian essay is most frequently associated with the appearance of a regular column in the daily Lietuvos rytas written by the poet Rolandas Rastauskas. Columns are regular or periodical things, appearing weekly and creating their own context; but individual essays also appeared in other publications, and, to tell the truth, they began appearing in greater numbers, until they reached nearly epidemic proportions. Some authors probably thought to themselves: I’ve written something, a few memories and a bit of word play, all of it balancing somewhere between deep thought (à la Marcus Aurelius or Paulo Coelho, it makes no difference) and nonsense, so I’ll call it an essay, and everyone will agree that it should be so. Returning briefly to the Soviet era: there were interjections of essays in the novels written at the time, particularly in ‘stream of consciousness’ novels penned by Lithuanian writers of Jewish descent, such as Mykolas Sluckis and Icchokas Meras. Linear, plot-driven narratives were not the prevailing element in them, a choice that in and of itself was a form of rebellion against the official doctrine of Socialist Realism. Indeed, everyone had grown so tired of Socialist Realism (the essence of which was using language that everyone could understand, to tell the story of the Soviet hero, how it developed, and how it ended) that the freedom of the essay, in which one could write however one wished, about any particular topic, induced a considerable euphoria. Then, in 2002, came a watershed work, essentially a literary manifesto, called Siužetą siūlau nušauti (I Suggest Shooting the Plot), which included five leading pieces from the Šiaurės Atėnai school of essay writing. It should be noted that, for genre purposes, the book was referred to as a novel, and there were other attempts

Rolandas Rastauskas. (Photograph: Remigijus Treigys)

Giedra Radvilavičiūtė. (Photograph: Vladas Braziūnas)

Giedra Radvilavičiūtė

A Lithuanian writer could craft a separate essay out of each of these sentences, transforming five or nine words into twelve hundred. The essays would have it all: experiences, memories, drama, humour, metaphor, paradox, and subtleties of style, but the subject would always first and foremost be oneself. Essay writing is an egocentric genre, where one always writes about oneself, even if the subject is a neighbour’s burnt-down house or the chance to see Proxima Centauri in the night sky. Of course, the audience is important too, since essayists aren’t speaking to a river: an essayist needs a reader to persuade. There have been efforts to trace the origins of Lithuanian essay writing as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries, a time that did, in fact, produce several truly memorable works. The authors of these essays were intellectuals and politically active citizens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, such as Augustinas Rotundas (Augustyn Rotundus) and Konstantinas Sirvydas. The only thing is, such nobly departed authors have very little to say to today’s reader, unlike someone like Seneca or Montaigne. Nearly all of our earliest essayists were Catholics, much like today’s Lithuanians are nearly all Catholics, and Catholicism is the most ceremonial of faiths. Catholicism’s ritualism, which is deeply ingrained in our subconscious, may indeed have influenced today’s essayists, who don’t always prefer to write ‘to the point’, opting instead for florid and decorative language. After Lithuania restored its independence in 1918, essay writing developed rather slowly, balancing between fueilleton and reportage, although there were a few exceptions, including authors such as Juozapas Albinas Herbačiauskas and Jonas Kossu-Aleksandravičius. During the Soviet occupation, essay writing was essentially an impossible undertaking, since essays are a free genre and an expression of literary liberty, and freedom under the Soviets was suppressed by all and any means possible. The Kantian Imperative was replaced by another: Soviet stars on epaulettes and a Communist Party membership card held close to one’s heart. What did emerge during the Soviet period, however, was what became known as Aesopian speech, a way of expressing oneself about the most varied subjects without addressing them directly, a manner of ‘talking around something’ through metaphors, symbols, and a rather complex system of signs, which Soviet censors simply could not comprehend. Some elements of this tradi-

Rolandas Rastauskas Rolandas Rastauskas (b. 1954), poet, playwright, essayist, recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Art. An aesthete, stylistic virtuoso, and pioneer of the rebirth of essay writing in Lithuania, Rastauskas sets himself apart from other essayists with his Baroque sentences, full of associations, playfulness, and word play. Although his writings are often travel essays (including journeys of a spiritual nature), he is not interested in describing the ‘what and where’, as much as in finding in every detail the most intense, ingenious, ‘nonconformist’ and rebellious piece of writing possible. Book: Trečias tomas (Volume Three), Apostrofa, 2015.

Sigitas Parulskis (b. 1965), poet, novelist, essayist, recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Art. Parulskis enjoys dismantling established norms and entrenched clichés, through irony, sarcasm and the grotesque. He differs from a true enfant terrible by virtue of his own ethical stance, and by creating pieces that are not inherently anarchic. In addition to adhering to a certain value system, he is extremely adept at structuring his texts. Book: Nuogi drabužiai (Naked Clothes), Baltos lankos, 2002.

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uškevičius’ inimitable style is helpful in this regard, because, while the factual part of a piece of writing provides information, its style infuses it with energy, and in the world of Lithuanian essays, energy and the subtle resonance conveyed through style are particularly important. Giedra Radvilavičiūtė is without doubt Lithuania’s most prominent and popular essayist, and has contributed a great deal to the genre’s development and prestige. Her essays are also syntheses, absorbing everything that takes place around her, in books, in the world, and in her personal life. Radvilavičiūtė once said that: ‘In order to write, I have to live the text,’ which is why she does not shy away from including seedier aspects of daily life that happen to her, or to some drunken neighbour. She succeeds in creating a highly organic, synthesised and aesthetic work, also incorporating a multitude of cultural symbols, and a particularly subtle and intellectual humour. Once a writer has reached such skilfulness, he or she can truly write about anything, even about a flowering vine on a window-sill, because the subject of the piece will inevitably still be oneself. The writing style of Sigitas Parulskis might best be called iconoclastic essay writing; in other words, he is an author for whom ‘nothing is sacred.’ A true artist should, after all, question established norms and dogmas, and be in constant opposition to the system, which is why Plato suggested driving all poets out of the republic. Indeed, Parulskis easily tackles conventional political and religious norms and moral standards. And while he recognises no authority, his negation is not destructive par excellence; he employs it to affirm that there are, in fact, values that transcend the usual conventions that have been uniquely assimilated. In essence, his is a campaign against conventional thought, behaviour and world-views. However inconvenient they are, iconoclasts are essential to any society. They create a vision and a potential for that society (its culture, literature, etc), and prevent it from simply resting on its laurels. Another phenomenon born out of Šiaurės Atėnai is notable in this regard. A decade ago, a pair of young men explored various books in it under the joint pseudonym Castor and Pollux. They were not book reviews, but the truest examples of iconoclastic critical essays, which often resorted to blunt rudeness and crude vocabulary. Although the essays sparked numerous scandals in literary

Eugenijus Ališanka. (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Sigitas Parulskis (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Sigitas Parulskis

in later years to call essays ‘novels’. This decision was most likely driven by marketing considerations, since the book has very little in common with a novel, and its plot was decisively ‘finished off ’ with a precise shot. The significance of the publication was its inclusion of several subtypes of essays, represented by different authors, and the fact that all of the authors had finally been assembled in one book from different publications. Sigitas Geda, the most prominent Lithuanian poet of the time, represented the narrative essay (a style continued in recent years by Aidas Marčėnas, another poet): the recording of daily life (from an event experienced to a nascent thought), observations of one’s surroundings, and stories about the people one encounters, or what one might have read that day. The narrative essay differs from a journal entry in its generous use of lyrical or philosophical digressions, which bring the writing closer to what we are used to calling an essay. The writings of the cultural and religious historian Gintaras Beresnevičius spanned a broad spectrum of topics, and his essays ranged from the exploration of the most varied personal experiences (from daily life to existential contemplation) to humorous literary mystifications on Lithuanian classics. These latter writings, with their fresh humour and aesthetics of the absurd, are reminiscent of the literary anecdotes about Pushkin, Gogol and others by the Russian author Daniil Kharms. Indeed, the theses espoused by the platform of Oberiu (Association for Real Art), to which Kharms also belonged, embracing postulates such as ‘With our work, we expand and reinforce the significance of objects and words and by no means do we destroy it. A specific object, cleansed of any literary or domestic impurity, becomes the domain of art,’ are also especially pertinent to Lithuanian essay writing. A particularly intriguing figure in Lithuanian essay writing is Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, an art historian, poet, essayist, aesthete and introvert, whose essays are a synthesis of journal entries and literary and philosophical (often Buddhist) texts. Andriuškevičius has referred to himself as the ‘intersection of texts’, and perceives life and its experiences (whether encountered directly or via cultural symbols) as a multitude of different types of writing calling out to be joined into one. An appropriate image here might be a glass prism, which, instead of breaking a ray of light up into a rainbow, condenses the rainbow into one strong beam. Andri-

Eugenijus Ališanka Eugenijus Ališanka (b. 1960), poet, essayist, translator. Ališanka is another travel writer who explores journeys of a spiritual nature. He is extremely attentive to detail, including aspects of various kinds of journey that are often relegated to the margins. His work is noteworthy for his ability to summon up a multitude of ethnographic, geographical, existential and cultural memories and associations, and retell them in an ingenious way. Book: Empedoklio batas (Empedocles’ Shoe), Tyto alba, 2016.

Dalia Staponkutė. (Photograph: Vilmantas Dambrauskas)

Dalia Staponkutė Dalia Staponkutė (b. 1964), essayist. A long-time resident of Cyprus, Staponkutė’s detachment from her homeland and her association with two cultures and two narratives introduces a tension which affects profoundly the themes explored in her essays. She once said: ‘We live in an era of personal myths, and we are the heroes of our own narratives. We behave as we speak.’ This is also one of the basic premises of essay writing. The personal mythology explored in her work encompasses the recording of daily life, as well as deep philosophical reflections. Book: Iš dviejų renkuosi trečią ( The Third Country: My Little Odyssey), Apostrofa, 2014.

circles, the undertaking was bold, and necessary: like a knife that cuts a loaf of bread into more easily edible slices. Lithuanian essays are extremely varied, but this has been the case in other bodies of literature as well. Indeed, we would find little in common between the essays written by Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf, a fact that illustrates the genre’s variability, and its potential to express an author’s inner strength. Poetry and essays have become the most developed and noteworthy genres in Lithuanian literature. While poetry requires a specific set of skills, essays are written by so many authors in Lithuania (from established names to newcomers) that transporting them to any book fair would require at least seven airplanes.

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The up-and-coming young literary critic Neringa Butnoriūtė presents five of the most interesting poets of the younger and middle generations. Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, Vytautas Stankus, Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, Gytis Norvilas and Mantas Balakauskas are all authors who launched their writing careers when Lithuania was already independent. They are expressive, open to the context of the world, quite critical of themselves and others, ironic, and

closely observant of the problems and pains of the contemporary world, and of their own country. Their poetic style is varied, ranging from Surrealist and social texts (Aušra Kaziliūnaitė) to Expressionist and avant-garde verse (Gytis Norvilas), and from existential introspection and the decline of contemporary civilisation (Vytautas Stankus and Mantas Balakauskas) to the skilful blending of culture, history and personal experience (Giedrė Kazlauskaitė).

PENSIVE, RESTLESS, FREE. FIVE CONTEMPORARY LITHUANIAN POETS Neringa Butnoriūtė

The words in the title of this essay (pensive, restless, free) were not chosen accidentally. They define traits that have sustained Lithuanian poetry from its earliest forms to today. We might all agree that the magic of poetry begins where the personal desire to express oneself encounters the limitations of language and experience. This would apply to all five of the poets discussed here: Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, Vytautas Stankus, Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, Gytis Norvilas and Mantas Balakauskas. These five poets, all of whom debuted in independent Lithuania, are all recipients of various honours, and are active participants in their country’s

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Aušra Kaziliūnaitė (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

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Aušra Kaziliūnaitė everyday philosophy LGBTQ performance art social messaging scandal

Drawings: Giedrė Kazlauskaitė

cultural life: translating, editing cultural publications, and organising literary events. Their poetry testifies to the fact that recognition has neither produced a uniformity of artistic approach nor imposed any one particular style of writing or point of view. These contemporary poets have destroyed the myth that ‘spiritual encounters’, ‘meditative experiences’ or ‘cultural preservation’ are the most appropriate terms to describe contemporary Lithuanian poetry. They readily engage in critical dialogue, displaying an openness to and an interest in cultural contexts, and they affirm the viewpoint that a poet’s voice is capable of changing narrow mindsets (Kaziliūnaitė), and that expressive language is more effective than silence (Norvilas), or that a complex life experience can reveal more than simply admiring the world (Stankus). At the same time, a simply critical or ironic view of oneself or others can be equally capacious (Kazlauskaitė, Balakauskas). The work of these poets, then, reveals an individual relationship between the inner world and one’s part in the world in the broadest sense. They also remind us of the important stimulating role played by doubt and the unknown, for which poetry unquestionably remains a perfect means of discovery and knowledge. We hope that this brief look into the pensive, restless and free world of contemporary Lithuanian poetry will also be accessible to readers of good poetry in other languages.

Literary kindred spirits: Allen Ginsberg, José Saramago. Books: Pirmoji lietuviška knyga (The First Lithuanian Book, 2007), 20% koncentracijos stovykla (20% Concentration Camp, 2009), Mėnulis yra tabletė (The Moon is a Pill, 2014), Aš esu aptrupėjusios sienos (I am a Crumbling Wall, 2016).

‘the moon is a tablet / scored down the middle’

‘give us our rainbow back’

Aušra Kaziliūnaitė (b. 1987) debuted with her own unique voice in her teenage years. She chose a rather drastic title for her debut work, Pirmoji lietuvška knyga (The First Lithuanian Book). Kaziliūnaitė is a human rights activist and a doctoral student in film studies. She reacts with great sensitivity to falsehood, and travels extensively around the world. She is one of a handful of Lithuanian poets publishing their latest work via social networks. Kaziliūnaitė is open to artistic interrelationships, and organises poetry performances. She admits she is also learning to write bad poetry. Her writings have no parallel in Lithuanian poetry, and they have captivated the younger generation of readers born after the restoration of Lithuanian independence, a philosophical generation that embraces punk and uncomplicated forms, but which is also restless, resistant to Lithuanian literary influences, and open to global contexts. She views a free, authentic existence in society as her greatest personal challenge. Kaziliūnaitė creates active works, conjuring up vivid imagery and unconventional associations from her imagination. They cry out, without resorting to shouting, because she is a sensitive, socially engaged author, who resists an overarching structure of thought or ideology, while simultaneously maintaining the illusion of future change. If we were to remove the capacity of her poetry to speak to the future, it would remain barren. Reality courses through it, to the point of Surrealism, constituting a minefield of concocted and injected myths that is just a reflection of the life lived by individuals. It emerges like an undeclared state of emergency, electrified, provocative, and ready to transform itself. A child of the ‘freedom generation’, she questions the normalised coexistence which we are all accustomed to viewing as a foregone conclusion (and for which the famous and nationally vaunted Baltic Way protest in 1989 is but one path). But she is not afraid of asserting the inconvenient, so that we might once again entertain doubt. If she fails in this endeavour in real life (as a human rights activist, her actions often provoke outcry), her poetic voice undergoes a metamorphosis. This is why the central role in her writings is assumed by an ‘I’, who splits the sleeping tablet down the middle, and the ‘we’, with our complete lack of attachments, especially to any individual sexual, social or cultural identity. In her poetry, Kaziliūnaitė rejects spiritual incantation, overbearing morality and wounding experiences, putting forth her own aesthetic instead. And she succeeds with a poetry that pummels in metaphors, imagination and unpredictability, always producing an effect and building a bridge between several ways of thinking. She has that ability.

no interviews Surrealism sexy performer reads dead poets

Literary kindred spirits: Lev Rubenstein, César Vallejo, Edgar Allan Poe.

Memorable moments: endgame, death.

Books: Vaikščiojimas kita ledo puse (Walking on the Other Side of the Ice, 2009), Iš veidrodžio, už (From the Mirror, Behind, 2014), Skruzdžių skandinimas (Drowning the Ants, 2016).

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Giedrė Kazlauskaitė (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Vytautas Stankus (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Vytautas Stankus

If one had to name a Lithuanian poet who rose to sudden prominence, Vytautas Stankus (b. 1984) would certainly be among the candidates. This poet, with his expressive voice, not only writes and translates, but also presents his poetry in performance-like readings. His poetry is akin to a Surrealist ribbon that ensnares and envelopes its readers, but which requires us to accept the belief that the fourth wall between ourselves and poetic reality is non-existent. If we had to choose a form for Stankus’ poetry, we might simply liken it to a handful of sand in our pocket, or ashes in the dark. Indeterminate metaphorical categories might be best suited to describe its nature: the austere richness of non-existence, a personal apocalypse. His poetry is effective, because it is both full and silent, symbolic and hyper-realistic, and from its first lines it is undeniably risk-taking. The starting point in his writing is constant: life is undoubtedly damned, and its aesthetic is founded on a horrible surrender to the fact that ‘everything we do is a rehearsal for death’. Thus, life and its many aspects depicted in these writings are both dangerous and punishing, conveying us to another dimension. The eternal dust that clouds our field of vision is only a testimony to this statement. Not surprisingly, the guiding voice speaking in this poetry is most familiar with the drama of the metaphysical intricacies found within it. He knows secrets. He is a conductor, who experiences everything. He studies the essence of life, contemplating what lies beyond it, until he himself no longer exists, although his voice still resonates. Stankus’ writings resemble snapshots of consciousness, where life is illuminated into a translucent non-existence, only to return from it back to life. Once put down on paper, they become translated messages and letters from the dark, and from the epicentre of experiences lived on the margins. They populate an unpleasant unknown, and draw us into an endgame state. One part of Stankus’ creative work generates drama, while the other, more minimalist, like beats of silence, preserves the reader’s privacy, allowing him to take part in the process in a more personal way. Intonation and nuance are needed to bring them to life, much as the subject of his poetry is healed from his inner darkness by his relationship with his beloved. Such is the subject of Stankus’ poetic twilight performance, which trusts in our ability to engage our imagination’s capacity, and to immerse ourselves to create our own version of non-existence.

Giedrė Kazlauskaitė confession Christianity and LGBT depression motherhood handicrafts Notable imagery: infante, singerstraum.

Literary kindred spirits: Sylvia Plath. Books: Heterų dainos (Hetero Songs, 2008), Meninos (Las Meninas, 2014), Singerstraum (2016).

Giedrė Kazlauskaitė (b. 1980) is unmistakably an observer of the literary world, a principled and sharp critic, an outsider. She is also the editor of the cultural weekly Šiaurės Atėnai (The Athens of the North), a mother, a sketch artist, a participant in literary festivals and forums, a former doctoral student in literary studies, and a lover of kitsch. All of this and more is encompassed in her confessional poetry published several years ago. Kazlauskaitė has an innovative way of posing the question: what is openness in a work

of poetry? This is not an unusual question, since the practice of sensitive, revelatory disclosure has thrived in Lithuanian poetry for some time now, almost to the point of exhibitionism. To those who enjoy scrutinising different versions of a life story, or to lovers of consoling and healing poetry, or those who believe that a narrator is a real person, Kazlauskaitė has a pre-emptive response: ‘I am not a traditional woman. I suffer from depression that accompanies my identity crisis. I have no version of ethical motherhood inside me.’ Crinoline and stitching might indeed suit Kazlauskaitė’s aesthetically published books and their intellectual poems, not as simple trimmings, but as artistic artefacts viewed through the eye of a stranger, calling to mind the controlled chaos of a piece of knitting. No one necessarily said who is most suited for dabbling in handicrafts (knitting and writing are not just for outsiders or intentional loners), or for whom such crafts should be made (Kazlauskaitė wove Meninos [Las Meninas] for her daughter, her guide out of the darkness, and Singerstraum for herself, to try on her outfits for social occasions). Knitting is a quiet, peaceful, personal act of creation, which, like any other craft, requires the mastery of certain rules, techniques and skills. Poetry is very similar: several narrative lines, and different, seemingly unrelated contexts are imperceptibly woven into a whole. Each incorporated detail, whether a piece of a memory or information, impressions from a journey, conversations with one’s daughter, reactions from literary participants, or social critique, is one stitch in the woven creation, without which the entire interlaced text would fall apart. Even when it seems that the weaving is being undertaken solely as an end in itself, and for its meditative effect, and not to produce anything beautiful (poetry is rarely ever agreeable and pleasant), Kazlauskaitė delves deeper. What at first glance appear to be routine and real situations from daily life unexpectedly transform into convincing reflections on oneself, the world, ethics and aesthetics. Her confessional poetry is a deliberate participant in the carnival of literature. She writes in the first person, like a bildungsroman, but the personal aspect in her poetry is just an assumed role. Her poetry also embraces what she portrays ironically: exhibitionist demonstration, a restrained point of view, and anything that could later be called ‘the hand of fate’. Other moments in her life might appear decisive: adolescent years at an art school, or her motherhood and her undefended thesis about a priest and a symbolist writer, all of which make ghostly appearances in her poetry as potential details in a personal mythology, but not as full-blooded stories. Her works are intellectual paradoxes. Kazlauskaitė chose the title Las Meninas for her book after coming across an anonymously posted comment on the Internet in which she was branded an ‘infante’. In Singerstraum, an unconventional female narrator reveals herself to be a very conventional seamstress.

village/land tradition chthonic thuggery

Literary kindred spirits: Allen Ginsberg, Sigitas Geda, Carl Grosknaller.

Most famous hero: Nakhas the Dwarf (a creation of the author, with a not-so-subtle hint at a cruder Russian expletive).

Books: Akmen-skeltės (Stoneshards, 2002), Skėrių pusryčiai (Breakfast of Locusts, 2006), Išlydžių zonos (Discharge Zones, 2012), Grimzdimas (Sinking, 2017).

‘I traversed the desert of your body.’

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Mantas Balakauskas (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Gytis Norvilas (Photograph: Monika Požerskytė)

Gytis Norvilas

Gytis Norvilas (b. 1976) is the author of four books, three of which, Skėrių pusryčiai (Breakfast of Locusts), Išlydžio zonos (Discharge Zones) and Grimzdimas (Sinking), he views as a trilogy. In 2012, he attended a ceremony honouring him with the award for the Most Creative Book of the Year bearing gifts of radish seeds for the literary scholars in attendance. Norvilas sometimes publishes works from future books as translations from German under an assumed name. He manages the cultural and arts publication Literatūra ir menas (Literature and Art), draws poetry, and publishes it, incorporating it neatly alongside his written work. With each book, he tries to be a little different. He gladly tells stories about time spent busying around his house in the country. He once said: ‘I don’t think the man hunting for airline tickets at the last minute is any more modern than I am, letting California snails loose to breed in the compost heap behind my barn in the spring.’ Gytis Norvilas presents himself as an irreverent voice in Lithuanian poetry, but adheres to the nature-loving tradition with the greatest deference. He returns to the land, believes in myths, and seethes at the consumer society. But, given his dislike of consolation and gentleness, readers may also find it difficult to take solace in his poetry. His works are like zones, like pieces of territory, but always more than just that. They are places where extraordinary events take place: borderlands, erogenous zones, penal institutions. To arrive there is to take part in the purest act of weaving together one’s most basic instincts and the wildest coexistence with oneself with an intense relationship with one’s surroundings. Hence, the voice speaking in his poetry is part-realist, part participant in a ritual, part-madman. Every event in his work has its own rhythm and reaction; even a passing cloud scrapes and grazes the sky. Like a geologist, Norvilas is always searching for the bedrock to grapple with. But what a paradox: the deeper we go, the less tangible it becomes. The more abundance, the greater the loneliness. The more silent it becomes, the clearer the sounds of the slaughtered. The brighter the light, the more difficult it is to see, and the more painful to look at. Norvilas’ writing makes us want to discard everything that has become ensnared in overabundance, in order to experience what is real. Perhaps this is why he deconstructs the most sacred elements, liberating crosses and nature, while seeing free men as prisoners. Such is the confrontation between the man living in his modern world, and the eternal, archaic dimension. A critical arrow is loosed at consumer culture, and a more profound knowledge of reality is reserved for those who affirm their faith in the land, and their instinctive passion.

Mantas Balakauskas bohemian anti-consumerism city civilisation

Literary kindred spirits: Tadeusz Rożewicz, Steven Bernstein-Jesse. Books: Roma (Rome, 2016).

‘minima media maxima’ ‘our communal nights / fit inside a matchbox’

Mantas Balakauskas (b. 1989) can be considered one of Lithuania’s most promising young poets. He is known as an organiser of Literatūrinės slinktys (Literary Shifts), a festival showcasing the work of young writers, and as an author who frequently appears in cultural circles. But he might be more easily defined by his isolated, bohemian existence. Messianism is an alien concept for Balakauskas, and he abstains from any public pronouncements on the meaning of poetry, and chafes under the conservative rituals of official recognition. A historian by training, he writes and creates his own personal story quietly. Restrained in his public persona, Balakauskas’ more expressive self emerges through his poetry. Having chosen the imagery of Rome (suitably offset by inverted commas in this case), and speaking in a young man’s voice, he reassesses the symptoms of the 21st century. He doesn’t construct a new city, but instead examines the firmness of the foundational legacy entrusted to him. To do so apparently requires being neither conqueror nor destroyer. For a poet, it is enough to have the requisite sense of language, reflection, and one’s own playful outlook on reality. He understands well that, while a knowledge of world history can help him interpret the world today, without grasping the present and by communing solely in an archaic tongue and looking at reality with an outdated point of view, one might fail to find a common language. He tunes his vocal chords accordingly, fully understanding this ambiguity. There is also nothing strange about the fact that he appropriates consumer labels and the anaemic concept of things being ‘eternal’. He simply plays around them, and uses them to engage in critical discourse. What is there left to do? The great cities have been built, and ideologies have been defined: a poet can now feel free to make use of the meanings they have provoked, resorting to measures that are not always polite. Balakauskas might even be the author of the poetry with the most mentions of supermarket chains, a true vehicle for stoking a sense of irony, since in Lithuania many retail chains use Classical references to brand themselves (Akropolis, Maxima, etc). To read Rome is to come to know modern man as a complicated, schizophrenically wandering loner, and to understand his transformation and passions. At the same time, it is akin to the ‘civilisation’ of the unknown, from primitive existence to today’s high-rise flats, confusing mazes of shopping centres, and strangely altered façades and meanings. Civilisation is a long process, and it is also one that, as eras come and go, does not necessarily lead to an improved world or a life within it that is easier or more understandable.

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101 p. 105106 p.

Ališanka, Eugenijus, Empedoklio batas (Empedocles’ Shoe). Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2016 Andriuškevičius, Alfonsas; Beresnevičius, Gintaras; Geda, Sigitas; Parulskis, Sigitas; Radvilavičiūtė, Giedra, Siužetą siūlau nušauti (I Suggest Shooting the Plot). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002 – 1st ed.; 2006 – 2nd ed. Balakauskas, Mantas, Roma (Rome). Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016 Baliukevičius, Lionginas, Liongino Baliukevičiaus – partizano Dzūko dienoraštis: 1948 m. birželio 23 d. – 1949 m. birželio 6 d. (The Diary of Lionginas Baliukevičius-Dzūkas, a Forest Brother: 23 June 1948 to 6 June 1949). Vilnius: Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras, 2002 – 1st ed.; 2006 – 2nd ed.; 2008 – 3rd ed.

48 p. 49-51 p.

Briedis, Laimonas, Vilnius: City of Strangers. 2018 (6th edition)

25 p. 27-29 p.

Gavelis, Ričardas, Jauno žmogaus memuarai: keturiolikos laiškų romanas (Memoirs of a Life Cut Short). Vilnius: Vaga, 1991 – 1st ed.; Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2007 – 2nd ed.

1 p. 3 p. 26-30 p.

Gavelis, Ričardas, Vilniaus pokeris (Vilnius Poker). Vilnius: Vaga, 1989 – 1st ed.; 1990 – 2nd ed.; Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2000 – 3rd ed.

27 p. 29 p.

Gavelis Ričardas, Vilniaus džiazas (Vilnius Jazz). Vilnius: Vaga, 1993 – 1st ed.; Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2007 – 2nd ed.; 2015 – 3rd ed.

2 p. 5 p. 7 p. 9 p.

Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia, Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Shadows on the Tundra). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1997, 2005 - 1st ed.; 2015 – 2nd ed.

54 p.

Ivaškevičius, Marius, Žali (The Forest Brothers). Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2002

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113 p.

Index

2 p. 53-54 p. 56 p.

Ivaškevičius, Marius, Išvarymas (Expulsion). Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2012 – 1st ed.; 2017 – 2nd ed.

117 p.

Kaziliūnaitė, Aušra, Pirmoji lietuviška knyga (The First Lithuanian Book). Kaunas: Nemunas weekly, 2007

117 p.

Kaziliūnaitė, Aušra, 20% koncentracijos stovykla (20% Concentration Camp), Kaunas: Kitos knygos, 2009

117 p.

Kaziliūnaitė, Aušra, Mėnulis yra tabletė (The Moon is a Pill). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2014

117 p.

Kaziliūnaitė, Aušra, Esu aptrupėjusios sienos (I am a Crumbled Wall). Vilnius: Kitos knygos, 2016

119 p.

Kazlauskaitė, Giedrė, Heterų dainos (Hetero Songs). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008

119 p.

Kazlauskaitė, Giedrė, Meninos (Las Meninas). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2014

119 p.

Kazlauskaitė, Giedrė, Singerstraum (Singerstraum). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2016

2 p. 55 p. 58-60 p.

Kmita, Rimantas, Pietinia kronikas (Southside Chronicle). Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2016

2 p. 89-92 p.

Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas, Žalčio žvilgsnis (The Serpent‘s Gaze). Vilnius: Vaga. 1981 – 1st ed.; Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996 – 2nd ed.; Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2006 – 3rd ed.

103 p.

Krivickas, Bronius; Glemžaitė, Diana, Pasipriešinimo poezija (Poems of Resistance). Vilnius: Žaltvykslė, 2004

107 p.

Lukša, Daumantas Juozas, Partizanai: už geležinės uždangos (Forest Brothers: Behind the Iron Curtain). Chicago: Lietuvių katalikų spaudos draugija, 1950 – 1st ed.; Kaunas: Lietuvos politinių kalinių ir tremtinių sąjunga; Vilnius: Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras, 2005 – 5th ed.; Kaunas: Obuolys, 2015 – 6th ed.

107 p.

Lukša, Daumantas Juozas, Laiškai mylimosioms (Letters to My Loved Ones). Chicago: Į Laisvę fondas lietuviškai kultūrai ugdyti, 1993 – 1st ed.; Kaunas: Į Laisvę fondo Lietuvos filialas, 1994 – 2nd ed.; Kaunas: LPKTS, 2004 – 3rd ed.

93-99 p.

Mekas, Jonas, Dienoraščiai, 1970–1982 (Diaries, 1970–1982). New York: Žvilgsniai, 1985

93-99 p.

Mekas Jonas, Laiškai iš Niekur (Letters from Nowhere). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1997

2 p. 63-64 p. 68 p.

Meras, Icchokas, Lygiosios trunka akimirką; Ant ko laikosi pasaulis (Stalemate; What the World Rests On): 2 novels. Vilnius: Vaga, 1968

2 p. 63-64 p. 68 p.

Meras, Icchokas, Lygiosios trunka akimirką; Ant ko laikosi pasaulis; Ties gatvės žibintu (Stalemate; What the World Rests On; At the Street Light): three novels. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1998

2 p. 63-64 p. 68 p.

Meras, Icchokas, Lygiosios trunka akimirką (Stalemate). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2006

63-64 p.

Meras Icchokas, Geltonas lopas (The Yellow Patch). Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1960 – 1st ed.; Vilnius: Vaga, 2005 – 2nd ed.

120 p.

Norvilas, Gytis, Akmen-skeltės (Stoneshards). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2002

120 p.

Norvilas, Gytis, Skėrių pusryčiai (Breakfast of Locusts). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2006

120 p.

Norvilas, Gytis, Išlydžių zonos (Discharge Zones). Kaunas: Kitos knygos, 2012

120 p.

Norvilas, Gytis, Grimzdimas (Sinking). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2017

Published in English

95 p. 99-100 p.

Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas, Dienoraščio fragmentai (Fragments of a Diary). Chicago: Algimanto Mackaus knygų leidimo fondas, 1998–1999, 2 vol.; Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002–2012, 4 vol.

2 p. 31 p. 33-36 p.

Parulskis, Sigitas, Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness and Company). Vilnius: Alma littera, 2013

31-36 p.

Parulskis, Sigitas, Mano tikėjimo iltys (The Fangs of My Convictions) essays. Vilnius: Alma littera, 2013

31-36 p.

Parulskis, Sigitas, Nuogi drabužiai (Naked Clothes). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002 – 1st ed.; 2015 – 2nd ed.

110 p.

Radvilavičiūtė, Giedra, Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos (Tonight I‘ll Sleep Facing the Wall). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2010

37-39 p.

Sabaliauskaitė, Kristina, Silva rerum III (Silva Rerum III). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2014, 8 ed.

A Baltic anthology, ed. Inara Cedrins. New Orlean: Uno Press, 2013. - 3 vol. Vol. 2: Contemporary Lithuanian poetry, 2013. 298 p.

Donskis, Leonidas, Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World: A PhilosophicalPolitical Diary, 2009-2012. Nordhausen: Verlag T. Bautz, 2013. - 199 p.

37-39 p.

Sabaliauskaitė, Kristina, Silva rerum IV (Silva Rerum IV). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2016, 5 ed.

Algminienė, Ona, The Crimson Blight. translated with commentary by Leo Algminas. Charleston, 2014. - 298 p.

Donskis, Leonidas, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2003. - 281 p.

2 p. 71-81 p.

Savickis, Jurgis, Šventadienio sonetai (Holy Day Sonnets). Berlynas, 1922 Savickis, Jurgis, Ties aukštu sostu (By the High Throne). Kaunas, 1928

84 p. 87 p.

Savickis Jurgis, Raudoni batukai (Little Red Shoes). Brooklyn, N.Y.: Gabija, 1951

Radzevičiūtė, Undinė, Žuvys ir drakonai (Fishes and Dragons). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2013 118 p.

43-46 p.

Radzevičiūtė, Undinė, Kraujas mėlynas (Blue Blood). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2017

102 p. 106107 p.

Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Adolfas, Daugel krito sūnų: prisiminimai (Many Sons Have Fallen: A Memoir). Vilnius: Mintis, 1992 –2nd ed.

118 p.

102 p. 106107 p.

Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Adolfas, Daugel krito sūnų: partizanų gretose (Many Sons Have Fallen: Among the Partisans). Vilnius: Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras, 1999 – 1st ed.; 2007 – 2nd ed.

118 p.

111 p.

37-39 p.

Rastauskas, Rolandas, Trečias tomas (Volume Three). Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2015

114 p.

2 p. 13-16 p.

Sabaliauskaitė, Kristina, Silva rerum (Silva Rerum). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2008, 18 ed. Sabaliauskaitė, Kristina, Silva rerum II (Silva Rerum II). Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2011, 13 ed.

Sruoga, Balys, Dievų miškas (Forest of the Gods). Chicago: Terra, 1957 – 1st ed.; Kaunas: Šviesa, 1989 – 2nd ed.; Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjunga, 2015 – 3rd ed.

84 p. 86 p.

84-87 p. 2 p. 43-46 p.

Selected Lithuanian Works Available in English

17 p. 19 p. 21 p.

Savickis, Jurgis, Žemė dega: karo metų dienoraštis (The Earth Is Burning: A Wartime Diary). Chicago: Terra, 1956 Stankus, Vytautas, Vaikščiojimas kita ledo puse (Walking on the Other Side of the Ice). Kaunas: Nemunas weekly, 2009 Stankus, Vytautas, Iš veidrodžio, už (From the Mirror, Behind). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2014 Stankus, Vytautas, Skruzdžių skandinimas (Drowning the Ants). Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016 Staponkutė, Dalia, Iš dviejų renkuosi trečią: mano mažoji odisėja (The Third Country: My Little Odyssey). Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2014 Škėma, Antanas, Balta drobulė (White Shroud). London: Nida, 1958 – 1st ed.; Vilnius: Alma littera, 2001 – 2nd ed.; 2003 – 3rd ed. Šlepikas Alvydas, Mano vardas – Marytė (In the Shadow of Wolves). Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla. 2012 – 1st ed.; 7 editions

Ališanka, Eugenijus, City of Ash. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. - 62 p. Ališanka, Eugenijus, From Unwritten Histories. translated and with an introduction by H.L. Hix. Austin: Host Publications, 2011. 173 p. Armonas, Barbara; Nasvytis, Leave Your Tears in Moscow. A.L. Meridia Publishers, 2011. - 194 p. Aškinytė, Rasa, The Easiest. Translated by Jūra Avižienis. Nottingham: Noir Press, 2017. - 170 p. Bak, Samuel, Painted in Words. Indiana University Press, 1st ed. 2002. - 536 p. Boruta, Kazys, Whitehorn’s Windmill, or The Unusual Events Once Upon a Time in the Land of Paudruvė. Translated and with an afterword by Elizabeth Novickas. Budapest; NewYork: CEU Press, 2010. - 278 p. Briedis, Laimonas, Vilnius: City of Strangers. Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2009, - 295 p. Butkutė, Ilzė, Caravan Lullabies. Translated by Rimas Uzgiris, New York: A Midsummer Night‘s Press, 2016. - 77 p. Cassedy Ellen, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust. University of Nebraska Press, 2012. - 273 p. Come into my time: Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970-1990, selected and edited by Violeta Kelertas, Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Cvirka, Petras, Frank Kruk. Translated by Elizabeth Novickas. Flossmoor: Pica Pica Press, 2016. - 231 p. Černiauskaitė, Laura Sintija, Breathing into Marble. Translated by Marija Marcinkute. Nottingham: Noir Press, 2016. - 192 p. Daciūtė, Evelina; Kiudulaitė, Aušra, The Fox on the Swing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. – 48 p. Davoliūtė, Violeta, The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. - 211 p. Donskis, Leonidas, A Small Map of Experience: Reflections & Aphorisms. Translated by Karla Gruodis. Toronto: Guernica, 2013. - 114 p.

Donskis, Leonidas, Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania. London: Routledge, 2002. - 178 p. Donskis, Leonidas; Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Evil: Living with Tina. Cambridge; Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2016. - 170 p. A Litmus Test Case of Modernity: Examining Modern Sensibilities and the Public Domain in the Baltic States at the Turn of the Century, ed. Leonidas Donskis. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. - 314 p. Donskis, Leonidas, Loyalty, Dissent and Betrayal: Modern Lithuania and East-Central European Moral Imagination; preface by Zygmunt Bauman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. - 164 p. Donskis, Leonidas, Modernity In Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging. Introduction by Sigurd Skirbekk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. - 205 p. Donskis, Leonidas; Bauman, Zygmunt, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge; Malden, Md.: Polity, 2013. - 218 p. Donskis, Leonidas, Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, 2008. - 170 p. Donskis, Leonidas, The End of Ideology & Utopia?: Moral Imagination and cultural criticism in the twentieth century. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang, 2000. - 211 p. Donskis, Leonidas, The Second Voice of Lithuanian Politics and Culture: Sketches of Three Moral Biographies. Uppsala: Institutionen för östeuropastudier, 2001. 31 p. Donskis, Leonidas, Troubled Identity and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. - 218 p. Drakšas, Romualdas, Man: The Awakening. New York: Strategic Book Publishing, 2009. - 307 p. Gavelis, Ričardas, Memoirs of a Life Cut Short. Translated by Jayde Will. Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2018, - 190 p. Gavelis, Ričardas, Vilnius Poker. Translated from Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. Rochester: Open Letter, 2009. - 485 p. Gavelis, Ričardas, Vilnius Poker. Translated from Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. Flossmoor: Pica Pica Press, 2016. - 437 p.

Grajauskas, Gintaras, Then What. Translated by Rimas Uzgiris. Eastburn: Bloodaxe Books, 2018, - 96 p. Greimas, Algirdas, J, Of Gods and Man: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology. Indiana University Press, 1992. - 248 p. Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia, Shadows on the Tundra. Translated by Delija Valiukenas. London: Peirene Press, 2018, - 192 p. Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia, Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea). Oxford: Elena Gaputytė Trust, 2002. Hinsey, Ellen, Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017. - 406 p. How I Became a Comrade: An American Growing Up in Siberian Exile. By John Armonas and Algis Rukšėnas. Meridia Publishers, 2013. - 272 p. Ivanauskaitė, Jurga, 108 Moons. Translated by Paul Perry and Ruta Suchodolskytė. Dublin: The Workshop Press, 2010. - 60 p. Jonynas, Antanas, The Hill. Translated by Yuval Lirov; Marlboro, N.J.: Affinity Billing, 2007. - 92 p. Juknaitė, Vanda, My Voice Betrays Me. Translated and edited by Laima Sruoginis. Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs; New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. - 139 p. Kanovich, Grigory, Shtetl Love Song. Nottingham: Noir Press, 2017. - 520 p. Karpinowitz, Abraham, Vilna, My Vilna. Translated by Helen Mintz. Syracuse University Press, 2015. – 224 p. Katilius, Vitas, Archy, Hero K9. Translated by Audrone Tupikina. London: Agatha Press, 2011. - 236 p. Katkus, Laurynas, Bootleg Copy. Translated by Kerry Shawn Keys. - Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective, 2011. - 89 p. Kavolis, Vytautas, Moralizing Cultures. University Press of America, 1993. - 154 p. Kunčinas, Jurgis, Tūla. Translated by Elizabeth Novickas. Pica Pica Press, 2016. 231 p. Lingis, Alphonso, Violence and Splendor: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Northwestern University Press, 2011. – 172 p. Lingis, Alphonso, The First Person Singular: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Northwestern University Press, 2007. -160 p. Lingis, Alphonso, Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture. Routledge, 2005. -162 p.

126

Lingis, Alphonso, Trust: Theory Out of Bounds. University of Minnesota Press, 2004. - 224 p.

Mickūnas, Algis, The Divine Complex and Free Thinking. New York: Hampton Press, 2012. - 249 p.

Lingis, Alphonso, The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. - 237 p.

Paliulytė, Sonata, Still Life. Translated by Kerry Shawn Keys and Irena Praitis Dunbar: Calder Wood Press, 2011. - 44 p.

Lingis, Alphonso, Foreign Bodies. Routledge, 1994. – 256 p.

Parulskis, Sigitas, Darkness and Company. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2018, - 256 p.

Lingis, Alphonso, Dangerous Emotions. University of California Press, 2000. - 195 p. Lingis, Alphonso, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common: Studies in Continental Thought. Indiana University Press, 1994. -196 p. Lukša, Juozas, Forest Brothers: The Account of an Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Freedom Fighter, 1944-1948. Translated and with an introduction by Laima Vincė. Budapest; New York: Central European University Press, 2009. - 411 p. Markelis, Daiva, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. – p. 2016. Martinaitis, Marcelijus, The Ballads of Kukutis. Translated by Laima Vincė. Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2011. - 158 p. Martinaitis, Marcelijus, K.B. the Suspect. Translated by Laima Vincė. Buffalo; New York: White Pine Press, 2009. - 140 p. Mekas, Jonas, Idylls of Semeniskiai; Authorized translation from the Lithuanian by Adolfas Mekas. Annandale, N.Y.: Hallelujah Editions, 2007. - 58 p. Mekas, Jonas, I Had Nowhere to Go. New York: Black Thistle Press, 1991. - 469 p. Mekas, Jonas, Just Like a Shadow. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2000 (Germany). - 86 p. Mekas, Jonas, Scrapbook of the Sixties: Writings 1954-2010. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015. - 455 p. Mekas, Jonas, There Is No Ithaca: Idylls of Semeniskiai & Reminiscences. Foreword by C. Milosz; translated by V. Bakaitis. New York: Black Thistle press, 1996. - 181 p. Meras, Icchokas, Stalemate. New York: Other Press, 2005. - 160 p. Mickūnas, Algis, From Zen to Phenomenology. Nova Science Pub Inc, 2018. Mickūnas, Algis; Pilotta, Joseph J., The Logic of Culture. New York: Hampton press, 2014. - 315 p. Mickūnas, Algis; Pilotta, Joseph J., The Lived World of Social Theory and Method. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2017. - 266 p.

Parulskis, Sigitas, The Towers Turn Red. Translated by Liz O’Donoghue. Cork: Southword Editions, 2005. - 64 p. Parulskis, Sigitas, Selene’s Hole. Translated by Aušra Simanavičiūtė. Paris: Union des Théátres de l‘Europe, 2005. - 42 p. Platelis, Kornelijus, Solitary Architectures. Translated by Jonas Zdanys. Lamar University Press, 2014. - 116 p. Platelis, Kornelijus, Zones. Translated by Jonas Zdanys and Kerry Shawn Keys. Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective, 2004. - p. 35. Putrius, Birutė, Lost Birds. Birchwood Press, 2015. - 298 p. Radvilavičiūtė, Giedra, Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again. Champaign, Ill. [etc.]: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. - 129 p. Raw Amber: An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Poetry. Ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Laima Sruoginis, translated by Laima Sruoginis. Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 2002. - 224 p. Rožukas, Vytenis, XX c. Top. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2014. - 286 p. Rožukas, Vytenis, Back in the USSA. Philadelphia, Pa.: Xlibris Corporation, 2012. - 104 p. Six Lithuanian poets, translated by Eugenijus Ališanka, Kerry Shawn Keys, Medeinė Tribinevičius, Laima Vincė and Jonas Zdanys; edited and introduced by Eugenijus Ališanka. Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2008. - 159 p. Sverdiolas, Arūnas, Initiation and Preservation. Modes of Cultural Philosophy, translated by Algis Mickūnas. New York: Nova Publishers, 2015. – 209 p.

Šileika, Antanas, The Barefoot Bingo Caller. ECW Press, 2017. - 228 p. Šileika, Antanas, Buying on Time. Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1997. - p. 232 p. Šileika, Antanas, Dinner at the End of the World. Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1997. - 232 p. Šileika, Antanas, Underground. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2011. - 310 p.

Vince, Laima, Lenin’s Head on a Platter. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. - 414 p.

Šileika, Antanas, Woman in bronze. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004. - 387 p Šimkutė, Lidija, Weisse Schatten = White Shadows. Translated by Christian Loidl, Wien: Selene, 2000. - 125 p.

Zdanys, Jonas, Maine Aubade. Newington: Appletree Chapbooks, 1990.

Sutkus, Antanas, Leonidas Donskis, In memoriam: Vilniaus ir Kauno geto kaliniams:For the Prisoners of the Vilnius and Kaunas Ghettos: 23 September - 22 October 2016. London: WhiteSpace Gallery, 2016. - 111 p.

Zdanys, Jonas, The White Bend of the River. New Haven: The Carl Purington Rollins Press, Yale School of Art 1994.

The Baltic Quintet: Poems from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden, ed. Edita Page. Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, 2008. - 192 p.

Zdanys, Jonas, Lithuanian Crossing. New Haven: The White Birch Press and The Carl Purington Rollins Press, Yale School of Art, 1999.

The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature / ed. Almantas Samalavičius; translated by Jūra Avižienis, Aušrinė Byla, Violeta Kelertas, Elizabeth Novickas, Medeinė Tribinevičius, Ada Mykole Valaitis, Jayde Will. Sawtry: Dedalus, 2013. - 250 p.

Zdanys, Jonas, White. New Haven: The White Birch Press and The Carl Purington Rollins Press, Yale School of Art, 2004.

Transitions of Lithuanian Postmodernism: Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period, ed. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. Amsterdam-New York, NY: Brill/ Rodopi, 2011. - 363 p. Vaičiūnaitė, Judita, Selected Poems of Judita Vaiciunaite in Lithuanian and English: Fire Put Out by Fire. Lewinstron: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. - 210 p. Venclova, Tomas, The Junction. ed. Ellen Hinsey; translated by Ellen Hinsey, Constantine Rusanov & Diana Senechal. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008. - 168 p. Venclova, Tomas, Vilnius: a Personal History. Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo. With A dialogue about a city by Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2009. - 276 p. Venclova, Tomas, Seinų eilėraščiai = Wiersze sejneńskie = Сейненские стихи = Sejny poems. Sejny: Pogranicze, 2008. -108 p.

Sepetys, Ruta, Between Shades of Gray. New York: Speak, 2012. - 352 p.

Venclova, Tomas, Forms of Hope. New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2002. - 380 p.

Sepetys, Ruta, Out of Easy. London: Penguin Books, 2013. - 346 p.

Venclova, Tomas, Winter Dialogue. Translated by Diana Senechal; foreward by Joseph Brodsky; dialogue between Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997. - 148 p.

Šerelytė, Renata, The Music Teacher. Nottingham: Noir Press, 2018. - 200 p.

Vince, Laima, The Snake in the Vodka Bottle: Life Stories from Post-Soviet Lithuania Twenty Years after the Collapse of Communism. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. - p. 326.

Žagrakalytė, Agnė, Artistic Cloning. Translated by Jonas Zdanys; illustrated by Rachel Burgess. Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective, 2010. - 88 p.

Sepetys, Ruta, Between Shades of Gray. New York: Philomel Books, 2011. - 344 p.

Sepetys, Ruta, Salt to Sea. New York: Philomel Books, 2016. – 391 p.

Lithuanian Literature Translation Grant Programme

127

Zdanys, Jonas, The Metaphysics of Wolves. New Haven: The White Birch Press, 1994.

Zdanys, Jonas, The White City. New Haven: Branford College Press and Jonathan Edwards College Press of Yale University, 2004. Zdanys, Jonas, The Woman on the Bridge. Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective, 2005. Zdanys, Jonas, Salt. Chicago: Virtual Artists Collective, 2007.

Lithuanian Culture Institute invites publishers to submit applications for Translation Grant Programme. The purpose of the Translation Grant Programme is to promote Lithuanian literature through granting foreign publishers for the translation of works from Lithuanian or which are related to Lithuania. Publishers may apply for either partial or total coverage of the cost of the translation. Grants will be allocated for the translation of original works of literature, fiction, children’s literature, publications on the cultural heritage, or the humanities (philosophy, literary criticism, non-fiction, history and other fields) as well as for the translation of other important books and publications. The deadlines for applying are 1st April and 1st October. The application for translation grant must include: • filled application form (document can be consulted online), • a copy of the contract with the owner of the rights, • a copy of the contract with the translator, • translator’s qualifications (e.g. CV, previous translations), • a brief presentation of the publishing house, • a short cover letter justifying the proposed work. Translators and other natural persons, publishers may also apply for sample translation grant. The application for sample translation grant must include: • filled application form (document can be consulted online), • short cover letter justifying the proposed work, • translator’s qualifications (e.g. CV, previous translations), • the owner of the rights agreement for translating proposed work, In extra cases the copy of proposed text (maximum 1 author sheet or 40 000 signs (with space) for prose and 120 lines for poetry) might be asked. Applications can be submitted only by e-mail. For further information, please contact by e-mail: vakare.smaleckaite@lithuanianculture.lt More information www.lithuanianculture.lt

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Editors: Elžbieta Banytė, Marius Burokas, Vakarė Smaleckaitė Translators: Darius Sužiedėlis, Jeremy Hill English text editor: Joseph Everatt Design and layout: Indrė Klimaitė We thank everyone who brought this publication to life through their articles, translations, art work, advice, best wishes, and organisational and managerial assistance. We also express our gratitude to those who permitted the use of their images from personal archives and to those who advised us on locating the best sources for the images used to illustrate the texts in this publication. Published by the Lithuanian Culture Institute, Lithuania www.lithuanianculture.lt Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania Printed in Lithuania by Kopa www.kopa.lt

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ISBN 978-609-8015-64-5 @ Lithuanian Culture Institute, 2018 All rights reserved. The reproduction of this book, even in part, in any form or media is prohibited without written consent of the copyright holder. Edition 500