(Inter)Cultural Dialogue and Identity in Lithuanian Literature [1 ed.] 9783737016155, 9783847116158

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TRANSitions. Transdisciplinary, Transmedial and Transnational Cultural Studies Transdisziplinäre, transmediale und transnationale Studien zur Kultur

Volume / Band 3

Edited by / Herausgegeben von Renata Dampc-Jarosz and / und Jadwiga Kita-Huber

Advisory Board / Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Lorella Bosco (University of Bari, Italy), Leszek Drong (University of Silesia, Poland), Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello (Salem State University, USA), Frank Ferguson (University of Ulster, Ireland), Odile Richard-Pauchet (University of Limoges, France), Monika Schmitz-Emans (University of Bochum, Germany), Władysław Witalisz (Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland) The volumes of this series are peer-reviewed. Die Bände dieser Reihe sind peer-reviewed.

Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ / Adelheid Rundholz (eds.)

(Inter)Cultural Dialogue and Identity in Lithuanian Literature

With one figure

V&R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: https://dnb.de. Printed with the financial support of Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. © 2023 by Brill | V&R unipress, Robert-Bosch-Breite 10, 37079 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: © Sandra Ragaisˇiene˙ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2751-8345 ISBN 978-3-7370-1615-5

Contents

Adelheid Rundholz / Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ Introduction: Literature and (Inter)Cultural Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part One: Boundaries and Crisscrossings as Inter(Textual) Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature Adelheid Rundholz Chapter 1 – Facets: Identity Work in Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s Writing . . .

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Vijole˙ Visˇomirskyte˙ Chapter 2 – Dialogue, Culture and Identity in Gintaras Beresnevicˇius’s and Herkus Kuncˇius’s Postmodernist Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Kristina Aurylaite˙ Chapter 3 – ‘Remix Culture’: Intertexts, Appropriations, and Other Forms of Cultural Dialogue in Contemporary Lithuanian Experimental Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙ Chapter 4 – Natural Boundaries and Urban Fragmentation in the Literary Topographies of Vilnius and Kaunas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ingrida Egle˙ Zˇindzˇiuviene˙ Chapter 5 – In Search of Cultural Exoticism in Some Lithuanian Travel Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

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Contents

Part Two: Migration and (Inter)Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature Milda Julija Danyte˙ Chapter 6 – A Lithuanian Child’s Dialogue with War in Alain Stanke’s Autobiography Des Barbelés Dans Ma Mémoire (So Much To Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Dalia Kuiziniene˙ Chapter 7 – Lithuanian Literary Tradition and Intertexts of Western Culture in Lithuanian E/Migrant Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ Chapter 8 – Migrancy and Cultural Belonging in Selected Fiction by Contemporary Lithuanian Women Writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

Part Three: (Inter)Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature in Translation Aurelija Leonavicˇiene˙ Chapter 9 – Translation as Intercultural Dialogue: Intertextuality and Cultural Content in Lithuanian Literature Translated into French . . . . . 215 Jurgita Macijauskaite˙-Bonda Chapter 10 – Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Literary Translations from Lithuanian to Italian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Carmen Caro Dugo Chapter 11 – The Translation of Cultural References from Lithuanian into Spanish: Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai (Las estaciones del año) and Antanas Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis (La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai) . . . . . 271 Sigita Barnisˇkiene˙ Chapter 12 – Cultural Codes in Lithuanian Archaisms and Historicisms: Analysis of Petras Cvirka’s Fiction Translated into German and Its Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ / Adelheid Rundholz / Elizabeth Mary Cummings In Place of a Conclusion: Dialoguing Identities in Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s Vilnius. Wilno. ‫ווילנע‬. Three Short Stories . . . . . . . . . 309 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

Adelheid Rundholz / Irena Ragaisˇiene˙

Introduction: Literature and (Inter)Cultural Dialogue

On February 10, 2019, the Frankfurter Allgemeine journal published some thoughts about European literature by Andreas Platthaus.1 The German commentator notes that although Europe, as an idea or concept, first appears in literature—namely, in Homer’s Iliad, Europe does not refer to a culturally connected territory, but has been understood in political and, more recently, in economic terms. Platthaus finds the absence of ‘Europe in literature’—especially in novels—unsurprising and observes that writers well understand “how difficult it would be to represent phenomena encompassing all of Europe in a narrative form [that is, the novel] that emerged at a time when national cultures were created.”2 He goes on to question the need for writers to espouse a pan-European perspective and concludes that any novel—out of any European country—“is a most welcome piece in the mosaic that will decorate . . . ‘our common [European] house.’”3 Thus, it appears that Europeans’ cultural identification is (still?) dependent on national literature and that it may, or may not, someday, encompass a wider scope. (Inter)Cultural Dialogues and Identity in Lithuanian Literature illustrates that the idea of a ‘national’ literature is profoundly problematic, and it does so in three separate parts. The chapters in the first part, “Boundaries and Crisscrossings as Inter(Textual) Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature,” show how a nation and its writers’ works do not exist in isolation from their history. They also show that there are no monolithic ideas about nation or ‘Lithuanianness.’ Lithuanians are used to great cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity among themselves. Contemporary Lithuanian writers, therefore, tend to engage with 1 “Das Geisterkonzil unseres Abendlandes: Kommentar zu Europa-Literatur” (“The Council of Ghosts of our Occident: Commentary about European Literature”). The article can be accessed at www.faz.net. 2 The original language is: “wie schwer es sein würde, mit der aus dem Entstehen der Nationalkulturen geborenen Erzählform des Romans gesamteuropäische Phänomene darzustellen.” 3 The original language is: “ein willkommener Mosaikstein bei der Ausschmückung des . . . ‘gemeinsamen Hauses.’”

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other Lithuanians’ texts that belong to another era and were written in another language, for example. So, without necessarily leaving their country, they engage in intercultural dialogues. The writers’ explorations of ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ are linked to questions about (narrators’ or characters’) personal identity. It becomes clear that individual identity is no more unchanging over time than is a national identity—both are always in motion, always a process. The part, “Boundaries and Crisscrossings as Inter(Textual) Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature,” explores how Lithuanian writers and poets treat Lithuania as an intercultural phenomenon from within Lithuania based on the writers’ chosen subject matter, diachronic approaches, or geography. Adelheid Runholz’s chapter, “Facets: Identity Work in Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s Writing,” is an analysis of several short stories, in which Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s narrators try to find a way to align ‘national identity’ with ‘personal identity,’ how the latter changes ideas about the former, and how, ultimately, a negotiation between these two identities questions notions of nationality. In “Dialogue, Culture and Identity in Gintaras Beresnevicˇius’s and Herkus Kuncˇius’s Postmodernist Texts,” Vijole˙ Visˇomirskyte˙ works with select texts by Beresnevicˇius and Kuncˇius. Reading their works side by side and also against each other, the author finds that in the postmodern texts, ‘dialogue’ is always an intercultural activity. The third chapter, Kristina Aurylaite˙’s “‘Remix Culture’: Intertexts, Appropriations, and Other Forms of Cultural Dialogue in Contemporary Lithuanian Experimental Poetry,” investigates how internet users’ ability to cut and paste material from diverse sources leads poets to engage in a dialogue with canonical Lithuanian texts and to question how these texts function in the contemporary cultural context. Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙’s “Natural Boundaries and Urban Fragmentation in the Literary Topographies of Vilnius and Kaunas” discusses representations of Vilnius and Kaunas in the literary topographies of the twentieth century to establish a relationship between literary spaces and geographical locations in the context of literature depicting these places in different languages. Ingrida Egle˙ Zˇindzˇiuviene˙’s chapter, “In Search of Cultural Exoticism in Some Lithuanian Travel Writing,” concludes the part, and the author investigates how the motives and goals of travel writing have changed throughout the centuries in accordance with Lithuania’s changing historical and political realities between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. The chapters of the following part, “Migration and (Inter)Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature,” deal with intercultural encounters very explicitly and with characters who either choose, or are forced by circumstances, to migrate to a different country. In “A Lithuanian Child’s Dialogue with War in Alain Stanke’s Autobiography So Much to Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell,” Milda Danyte˙ works with the author’s memories of the occupations of his hometown between 1940 and 1945 and interprets the child’s experience of war as a particular mode of

Introduction: Literature and (Inter)Cultural Dialogue

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dialogue in which language becomes an important medium of learning ‘the foreign.’ Irena Ragaisˇiene˙’s “Migrancy and Cultural Belonging in Selected Fiction by Contemporary Lithuanian Women Writers” chooses fiction by Gabija Gruˇ epaite˙ to assess how the characters in the sˇaite˙, Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙, and Zita C works by these writers establish, or fail to establish, a sense of belonging not only within the context of globalisation, but also within the context of Lithuania since independence (1990), where matters of migration and ‘nomadism’ are judged to be expressions of regained freedom, but can also be criticised as lack of commitment and responsibility towards one’s country. The final part includes chapters that discuss Lithuanian literature in translation. Aurelija Leonavicˇiene˙’s contribution, “Translation as Intercultural Dialogue: Intertextuality and Cultural Content in Lithuanian Literature Translated to French,” presents an analysis of how translators solve the problem of translating intertextual source material, and the author includes a survey on the visibility of Lithuanian literature in French culture. Jurgita Macijauskaite˙-Bonda, in “Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Literary Translations from Lithuanian to Italian,” is interested in how translators convey the meaning of different folkloric intertexts and also maintain the specific (Lithuanian) cultural connotations of these intertexts in the target language. Carmen Caro Dugo focusses on cultural differences and how translators represent cultural material from Lithuanian in Spanish in two classical poetic works of Lithuanian literature in “The Translation of Cultural References from Lithuanian into Spanish: Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai (Las estaciones del año) and Antanas Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis (La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai).” Sigita Barnisˇkiene˙’s chapter concludes the section and works with Petras Cvirka’s works in translation to German. Her “The Cultural Potential and Reception of Translation of Archaisms (Based on Petras Cvirka’s Works and Their Translation into German)” pays close attention to obsolete and archaic words in the source prose texts and how their translations to German affect the target reader’s comprehension when translators select similarly obsolete or archaic words in the target language. The final essay in the volume (Inter)cultural Dialogue and Identity in Lithuanian Literature analyses Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna. Three Short Stories for meanings attached to the multiculturality of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and recapitulates some of the salient points foregrounded in the previous chapters focused on the links between culture, identity, and dialogue. There are roughly three million native speakers of Lithuanian and there is, generally, a dearth of Lithuanian literature translated into other languages. While the section on Lithuanian literature in translation makes this point explicitly for Lithuanian literature in French, Italian, Spanish, and German, the lack of a visible presence in other languages can also be inferred from the other chapters, in which the authors regularly produce their own translations of por-

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tions of the texts they are discussing, because there are no (English) translations of these works. While interest in Lithuanian literature has gained momentum since the country’s regained independence and since joining the European Union, experts agree that there is much that can be done to make Lithuanian literature known to speakers of other languages. The purpose of (Inter)Cultural in Lithuanian Literature is to introduce some of Lithuania’s creative and writerly genius to a wider audience. Readers will certainly come to see that Lithuania’s literature is a fine piece, indeed, in the ‘mosaic of our (European) house.’ This book is for readers with a general curiosity about Lithuania and Lithuanian literature. It is also for readers or scholars who are interested in concepts like (inter)cultural dialogue, nation, or identity and would like to see how these play out in the Lithuanian context. Finally, it is for readers who are also translators; may this book inspire some among them to make more Lithuanian writers’ texts accessible in other languages. The editors wish to thank each contributor. This book could not have come into existence without their participation and untiring efforts in what has turned out to be a long and involved process.

Part One: Boundaries and Crisscrossings as Inter(Textual) Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature

Adelheid Rundholz

Chapter 1 – Facets: Identity Work in Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s Writing

As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity . . . engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity.’ —Benedict Anderson

1.

The ‘Impossible’ Identity of Nation

Benedict Anderson’s description of nation as an ‘imagined community’ is well known. Specifically, Anderson defines nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6), and he insists that “nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind” (4). Implicit in Anderson’s thinking is that ‘nation’ is imagined by a participating or engaged community in its ‘own image’ (i. e., in distinction to other communities) and that members of the community thus feel a need to do for the nation what they do for themselves: create a narrative of ‘identity.’ This project, it seems, is encumbered from the start because of the qualitative difference between human beings and nations. As Anderson notes, “[i]n the secular story of the ‘person’ there is a beginning and an end. She emerges from parental genes and social circumstances onto a brief historical stage, there to play a role until her death. After that, nothing but the penumbra of lingering fame or influence” (205). Opposed to the ‘graspable’ story of an individual, Anderson continues, “[n]ations . . . have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural” (205).1 In other words, all individuals are (for 1 Hence the need to ‘invent’ foundational narratives, such as Vergil’s Aeneid for Ancient Rome, that create meaning and an interpretative basis for the community as a whole and serve as a frame of reference for the members of a community within which they situate and create their own identity. In the postmodern (fragmented) world, foundational narratives have smaller scopes and survive in the contexts of ‘branding’ and business. Abensour & Partners, for instance, is a company that helps brands find and create their foundational narrative. Ex-

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the span of their lifetime) ‘real’; they can be seen, touched, and their identity can be inferred by others based on what they say and how they act. A ‘nation’ or ‘the nation’, however, remain abstract (imaginary) and escape perception (do not exist as ‘one thing’) in the ‘real world.’ In addition to the qualitative differences between ‘individual’ and ‘nation’ pointed out by Anderson, the difficulty with creating a narrative of identity for the nation (or a national identity) hinges on the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘nation’, respectively.2 Typically, sociologists identify ‘identity’ as an individual’s “awareness of being a unique individual with his or her own biography, to demonstrate a certain consistency through his or her actions, and to have found a balance between individual and societal expectations in his or her interactions with others” (Abels 258).3 Understood thusly, ‘nation’ and ‘identity’ cannot be considered on the same level because individuals can have awareness, but nations cannot (except through the many ‘awarenesses’ of exactly each member of the community).4 Furthermore, ‘identity’ originates in the Latin pronoun idem (“the same”) and is also related to the variant identidem (from idem et idem, “repeatedly, again and again, continually”). In a literal sense, a nation cannot have an identity as it cannot remain ‘the same’: not only does a nation consist synchronically in form of many individuals, but also diachronically through each new generation.5 One might wish to intervene at this point and argue that the point of the ‘imagined’ community is precisely that it is an imagination which, however, has presence in its many articulations such as standard(ised) print-languages, monuments, national anthems, administrations of bureaucracy, (public) edu-

2 3

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amples like “Harley Davidson: rebel with a cause,” “Ikea: turn your house into a home,” or “Facebook: everybody’s life is a story” are not just ‘slogans,’ but, according to the website, increases the number of groups that individuals (buyers) can choose to identify with. The ‘modern mythologies’ do not privilege any particular ‘Myth,’ and their multiplicity is visible in, or translated to, what one might call ‘life styles’ (Abensour and Partners). Additional problems arise with the concept of ‘narrative,’ and are discussed in the third section of this chapter. Original German: “Identität ist das Bewusstsein, ein unverwechselbares Individuum mit einer eigenen Lebensgeschichte zu sein, in seinem Handeln eine gewisse Konsequenz zu zeigen und in der Auseinandersetzung mit Anderen eine Balance zwischen individuellen Ansprüchen und sozialen Erwartungen gefunden zu haben” (Abels 258). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s own. If all members, as singular individuals, were to ‘imagine’ the community in exactly the same way or in exactly identical terms, ‘nation’ would, in effect, become a totalising concept outside of which nothing else exists. Considering the sociologists’ definition of an individual’s identity and each individual’s contingency in time and space, such a scenario, fortunately, remains highly unlikely. Not to mention that “sociology is sceptical about there even being a stable and constant identity” for individuals [“Die Soziologie ist skeptisch, ob es eine gleiche und konstante Identität überhaupt gibt”] (Abels 248).

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cation, standardised curricula, or “flags, costumes, folk-dances, and the rest” (Anderson 133). While it is easy to concede, based on history and also lived experience of most of this text’s readers, that these and other articulations of the ‘imagined nation’ served and serve to perpetuate a sense of community or nation, these articulations, however, do not help define what a nation is. Especially revealing is Anderson’s “and the rest.” In philosophical terms, the substance ‘nation’ is ultimately not any (one) substance because it—if it exists—is hidden behind or beyond its infinite manifestations.6 In structuralist terms, ‘nation’ is a signified (‘nation’) with too many signifiers (anthem, language, folklore, flag, etc.); the multitude of signifiers do not point back to a discernible signified, whose (single) ’meaning’ is obscured or, perhaps, erased because of a surplus of meanings. Finally, one might envision ‘nation’ and its manifestations as centrifugal: the heavier elements (the manifestations) are flung outward from the light element (‘nation’); thus the heavy elements come to the fore while the key element, ‘nation,’ remains at the heart of the centrifuge—central, light, and hidden. While ‘manifestations of nation’ abound in numerous forms in individuals’ lives, it seems that the notion of ‘nation’ and its identity resist both understanding and definition. The member of the ‘imagined’ community senses the light and hidden, the substance beneath the manifestations by virtue of their overwhelming number and thus feels both at home (in and with the manifestations of ‘nation’) and also like a stranger in his or her inability to comprehend the core of ‘nation’. In “Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction,” Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s narrator reflects on a series of friends whom she would like to meet again and articulates a unique comment in relation to ‘identity’ and ‘nation.’ In one passage, she is thinking of Milda Katinaite˙ and asks: “Do you know who you are to me, like all others I would like to meet again?” (“Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again” 128). Responding to her own question, the narrator answers: A nation. With a replacement heart valve or two. A nation whose banks lend money in the middle of the night, and without interest. A nation with treaties to sign. . . . Full of urgent crises too, for which, without regret, I will set even the most interesting of books aside. . . . And of course with gold reserves. . . . A nation with its own laws, its own justice. . . . Free seminars on business, sex, and knitting. A military too, destroyers, spreading a cloud of melancholy across the world. . . . And a flag, flying high, made out of graying pubic hair. (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again” 128)

6 For Aristotle, ousia (“substance”) is that which is not predicted by or originates in something that underlies it. For Kant, substance is one of the ‘categories’ and has validity only for things as appearances. Kant determines substance as that which endures in or adheres in appearances as characteristics change.

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‘Nation’ here becomes identifiable because it becomes associated with and is embodied in Milda. This nation/Milda is not perfect (it has a heart valve replacement), engages in banking, trading, and signing treaties, suffers urgent crises, has laws and justice, education, a military, and a flag. Significantly, while these are all articulations or manifestations of Anderson’s ‘(imagined) nation,’ they are aimed in this passage not toward a description or definition of nation but rather toward encapsulating the characteristics of an individual, the friend Milda, based on her disposition and on her actions.7 In other words, the narrator’s idea of ‘nation’ or community exists through the people one meets. Throughout the ten stories in the collection, there are many people to ‘meet again,’ from Vilnius to Chicago; thus, there is also no distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘nations.’ Seemingly, the narrator’s life is defined, and her own identity constituted, not by nationality or borders but through encounters with individuals. “Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction” (emphasis added) is the last story in Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again. As such, it not only repeats the collection’s title but marks itself as an introduction. This reversal of the expected formal order—in which an introduction precedes and provides a guide to that which follows—is not only an invitation to the reader to reread the stories: having read the ‘introduction’ s/he is encouraged to ‘meet’ the stories again. Following Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s direction from the end to the beginning, the final paragraph and, specifically, the last sentences of “Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction” capture the reader’s attention. The narrator notes that “among all those whom I’d like to meet again, I’ll also single out the man who translated Salinger into Lithuanian” (129). Doing his work “at a farmstead in a small village,” the translator “would try to rally the army of English words at his command, to force it—all of it—to desert their posts, to join up with his native language” (129). Two worlds (‘nations’?) come together in the act of translation: rural Lithuania and metropolitan America (New York) and, of course, the English and Lithuanian languages. As they come together, however, these worlds become entwined to the point that they cannot be separated anymore. Describing the complex work of translation (and dealing with two structurally very different languages), the translator quotes: “A great part of the moonlight would fall next to the barn and the barn door. I guarantee that if 7 Another way to interpret this passage is to invoke the notion of ‘symbol’. From Greek ‘sun’ and ‘ballein’ (σύν, βάλλειν), “to throw together,” the ‘symbol’ is a mark or sign consisting of at least two elements (that were “thrown together”). Read this way, the ‘blending’ of ‘nation’ and ‘Milda’ constitutes a symbol in which one part (nation) is discernible only because of its other part (Milda). Put differently, the two elements of this symbol can be brought together, but they cannot be separated into two distinct parts: were one to subtract or extract ‘nation’ from ‘Milda’, it is Milda who remains visible and identifiable; were one to subtract ‘Milda’ from ‘nation’, one would be able to see nothing.

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someone had written the very name of God on that door, it would be impossible to read because of the moonlight poured over it” (129). Is being blinded by moonlight, so that the ‘name of God’—were it written—cannot be seen not akin to the inability to see the (tree of) ‘nation’—were it there—for the (forest of its) articulations and, among the articulations the very number of nations? Yet the translator does not elaborate on the meaning of the sentence. His interest lies in the sentence itself and on how his world has become entangled with that of Salinger: “I don’t know where this sentence came from . . . Is it mine or not?” (129). The answer is that it can only be both: the English sentence becomes Lithuanian; it started in the English language (and is thus Salinger’s) but became Lithuanian by virtue of the work, knowledge, and choices on the part of the translator (and is thus his, as well). The translator, however, remains uncertain and concludes that “[s]o long as I don’t know, I have to say, it intimidates me more than a little . . . ” (129; ellipsis in the original). Feeling intimidated, meaning both to be frightened and overawed, is a peculiarly appropriate reaction to not knowing. Not knowing (answers to perennial questions, how to solve a problem, etc.), can be terrifying. At the same time, not knowing begets the awe and wonder that inspire and drive the very search for answers. In this way, the translator’s intimidation is emblematic of that of the narrator, of the reader, of all human beings. And his central question about ownership of the sentence points to more fundamental questions about identity, the need to define and differentiate oneself and others.

2.

The ‘Impossible’ Identity of Nation: Lithuania8

All nations have complex histories as they emerge in the world and become present as such. Lithuania’s story, however, may well be more labyrinthine than that of many another. From its first being mentioned in chronicles in the sixth century, to the Grand Duchy created by the first king, Mindaugas, the dynastic union with Poland and, later, the Commonwealth (with Polish becoming the state language of Lithuania), absorption into Russia in 1795, the 1918 declaration of the Republic of Lithuania, the Soviet and German occupations, respectively, during World War II, to the second Soviet occupation lasting into 1991, Lithuanian independence, and its 2003 vote to join the European Union (in 2004), this 8 ‘Impossible’, already in single quotation marks in the title of this section, here needs to be understood in two ways. First, ‘impossible’ is linked to the first part of this article and its discussion of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’. Second, it is also meant as an acknowledgment of the centuries-long struggle that Lithuanian literature (and the Lithuanian language) has suffered. These centuries, as Almantas Samalavicˇius writes in the introduction to his anthology, are “a period that was closely connected to the evolution of statehood—its creation and loss—and the quest for freedom and independence” (“Introduction” 19).

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list captures but some of the elements of Lithuania’s story. In significant ways, Lithuania appears not a ‘good fit’ for Anderson’s ‘imagined community.’ Regarding language, for example, Anderson contends that it is wrong to treat languages “as emblems of nation-ness;” instead, “the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities” (133). These ‘solidarities’ are based in a print culture which, in turn, relies on a standardised language. “Lithuanian literature,” as Vytautas Martinkus reminds his readers, “has been multilingual: it was written in Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Polish and Yiddish. It was, however, the literature of Lithuania” (126). Literary production at different points in time and in multiple languages suggests that the Lithuanian imagined community has a history of multiple solidarities and an ability to accommodate such plurality. Complicating the situation for literature is the fact that there have been two Lithuanian literatures for much of the twentieth century: that produced by writers in Lithuania (under occupation and censorship) and that produced by émigré authors (or, more recently, those born abroad with Lithuanian background and who may or may not create their works in Lithuanian). Two anthologies of Lithuanian literature (in English), Lithuania: In Her Own Words (1997) and The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature (2013) include texts of both types of literature.9 Laima Sruoginis, in the “Editor’s Note” underscores the anthology’s aim to familiarise readers with Lithuanian writing and asserts that the reader will encounter “multiple layers of voices, generations, political differences, cultural diversity and literary styles” (16). As the thusly ‘imagined (literary) community’ of Lithuania encompasses Lithuanians at home and abroad, questions about the definition of Lithuanian literature (or Lithuanian literatures) become as complicated as are those about (Lithuanian) ‘national identity.’

9 The inclusive gesture of the anthologies can be understood as logical and necessary in the context of Lithuanian traumata of the twentieth century. This gesture must be appreciated, at the same time, as an intentional and willful choice, because it is not the only way to create such an anthology. Millions of Turks, for instance, have migrated to other countries like France, the Netherlands, and Germany, among others, from the 1960s onward. Some of these migrants (or their children born in the parents’ chosen country of residence) have acquired the reputation of important writers or artists. Yet there is, to the best of this writer’s knowledge, no anthology of Turkish literature that includes any (Turkish) literature produced abroad, and one cannot find translations of their works in even the well-stocked bookstores in Istanbul. The Literaturstreit (“literature battle”) of the 1990s in Germany may serve as another example. This ‘battle’ began shortly after the re-unification of Germany and was ‘fought’ in daily newspapers and magazines. Its target was the literature of East Germany, the former GDR, and at issue was its evaluation. One group wished to dismiss the entirety of East German literature because it had been produced under conditions of Soviet censorship and was therefore thought to be incompatible with and not part of (West) German literature on the grounds of (West) German cultural principles (see Wittek and Anz for detailed accounts of the Literaturstreit).

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Additionally, Lithuanians, by virtue of Lithuania having become a member state of the European Union, have to evaluate if or how they identify as Europeans in addition to being Lithuanian and to identifying with other collective identities. Robert Miller, in his The Development of European Identity/Identities: Unfinished Business, proposes to consider identity as a “mosaic” which can be based in geography, but may also “relate to a variety of other types of aggregate, such as gender or sexuality, ethnic or linguistic group, social class, affiliation with an organization or political party etc.” (8). Lithuanians may have joined the European Union more recently than others, but, arguably, they have a much longer history and more practice with living and enacting identity as “mosaic”—especially in the capital of Vilnius. As Laimonidas Briedis writes, “everyone in Vilnius can be a stranger, not because of her or his foreign origin, but because the city possesses so many names and histories that a single human identity can hardly embrace it all” (17). Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙ confirms in one of her texts: “[i]n Lithuania, your own people can start to feel like strangers very quickly, and it takes a long time to make a stranger one’s own again” (“The Native Land and Other Connections” 7). As he traces Vilnius’ history through the centuries, Briedis comments time and again on its cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity. Through wars and occupations, the city’s one enduring characteristic is to be the “home of liberating multiplicities” (Briedis 150).10 Multiplicities create strangers. One here needs to understand ‘stranger’ not only in the sense that s/he does not know others, or is not known in a given place, but also in the sense of being a person who is not at all used to or accustomed to a given phenomenon such as a place, a language, an experience, etc. Human beings are programmed to be social, and no individual could endure being a stranger unceasingly. Exploring environments and interacting with other individuals, the stranger eventually identifies relationships or affiliations that, over time, habituate the stranger to a place, to a feeling, to people, to mention but a few. In Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s texts, the narrator frequently thinks about foreignness and describes the process of habituation as affiliation through connections—like the narrator in “Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction,” who can make sense of ‘nation’ only because of her friendship, her connection to Milda. In “The Native Land and Other Connections,” the narrator reflects on two migrations: from Vilnius to Chicago and back to Vilnius. In Chicago, she discovers that “the whole world is here” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “The Native 10 Briedis points to a connection between Vilnius and the renowned critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who lived in Vilnius (then known as Vilna) from 1904 until 1910. Based on information provided by “his brother Nikolai, the city left a defining imprint on Bakhtin’s comprehension of the world. And some of Bakhtin’s biographers suggest a direct link between the scholar’s literary formulation of linguistic dialogue and narrative polyphony to his adolescence spent in imperial Vilna” (Briedis 150).

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Land” 15), and the people she meets in the American metropolis are this ‘world’: Candy, whose parents were Italians, the old couple Kasparus and Birute˙ from Lithuania, Alicija, who is Polish, a nurse from the Philippines, and Mexicans. Based on their occupations and the amount of time they have spent in Chicago, these individuals have gone from being strangers to making life as Americans routine to different degrees. The prospect of becoming a stranger initially does not trouble the narrator. To an adult and independent individual, a decision to move to another country is neither difficult nor requires much effort: “[t]o change one’s circumstances (home is only one of them) is no great feat for a modern, rational person. You check the exchange rate. Have your cavities filled. Rent out your apartment” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “The Native Land” 7). As she meets and connects with fellow migrants, the narrator realises that those who ‘change their circumstances’ also transform. Over time, a new or additional identity emerges that may entail nostalgia (the nurse from the Philippines, for instance, misses a particular fruit from home) or forgetting (Kasparus and Birute˙ don’t remember many Lithuanian words). When she returns to Vilnius, the narrator discovers that connections she has made abroad have a correlation to connections not made at home, and she is now a stranger at home; she has changed, and so did ‘home’: Like the river, it’s impossible to wade into the same native land twice. The sluice gates have closed; new connections have been made; there’s a gap between what a person experiences living in a strange place for so long a time, and what her native land might have experienced over that same period. (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Native Land” 8)

When the narrator meets her native land again, both appear to be different. The difference that is felt by the narrator suggests that strangeness and familiarity are not opposites but mark different points on a continuum along which individuals unceasingly move. In other words, individuals have to continuously work to feel ‘at home’ in the world, in themselves, and with others. Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s narrator performs this work through ‘connections’ or contact and engagement with her environment. Importantly, these connections can be made on three levels: in time, in place, and in thought/imagination. In “The Native Land and Other Connections,” the impact of time and place are evident. The narrator feels estranged from the native land because both she and it have existed for a period of time in different places. How this work is done in thought or in imagination requires an examination of the formal arrangement of Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s work.

Facets: Identity Work in Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s Writing

3.

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Against Plot

In order to understand how identity work functions in Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s texts, it is necessary to look at their formal aspects. The subject of writing permeates her work—as do references to and comments about other literary works by Allende, Kuncˇinas, Murakami, Nabokov, Salinger, Tolstoy, and many more. To reveal what writing accomplishes and what kind of writing best suits the chosen purpose, it is useful to look at “A Long Walk on a Short Pier.” The story is set in motion by a publisher’s late-evening phone call to the narrator, who is at home with her daughter and her cat. He suggests that she become a ‘real’ writer and produce novels (preferably the kind that also include recipes) instead of ‘mere’ essays which are “basically a parasite, right from the start, thriving at the expense of real literature” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 64). He tries to convince her that her refusal to write novels is the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding: “you’re mistaken when you say, as you did in the title of one of your essays, the plot should be shot dead” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 64). For the remainder of the evening, the narrator goes to a store and later takes a bath, but she keeps thinking about writing and writers and about what writing means to her. The narrator considers writing about an individual’s activity to make sense of herself and to organise her understanding of others and the world. In other words, writing is the way in which this narrator articulates and communicates the thoughts and imagination of her identity. As such, she rejects constructions of reality that are shaped to fit the demands of a literary genre such as the novel. “I write from experience,” she tells the publisher, and “I can only write down as much as I live. I can no more write faster than live faster” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 63). The novel, it seems, is particularly opposed to the narrator’s understanding of the purpose of her creative work, because novels centre on plot. Plots, in turn, are the “already logically and motivationally structured story that precede their medialization” or novelization (Fludernik 40). Plots are the structured interaction between characters, events, and actions. The reader, to understand the plot or to give a synopsis, must recognise the texts’ having been “organised so as to achieve their particular effects” (Abrams 139). To achieve the desired effect, the novel writer has to begin with the structure and thus has to write the novel, in a way, by beginning at the end. For Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s narrator, however, writing reflects (upon) her life and, simultaneously, life’s experience necessarily flows into and guides the texts she produces. She cannot predict the content of her texts any more that she can predict everything that is going to happen in her life during the following day. “Strange as it may seem,” the publisher asserts, “the best-seller lists are still dominated by novels, you know” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 64) and thus hints that if the narrator were to write novels, she would have a chance to become

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famous and rich (which would increase the publisher’s fortunes as well, of course).11 Unwilling to resist a serious challenge—the publisher “had thrown an offer at my feet like one of Dumas’s heroes might throw down his glove” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 66)—, she considers imagining to become a ‘real’ writer and decides to go for a walk to think this through. Not completely immune to the lure of fame and having an ‘image’ (or becoming one’s own brand), she briefly thinks of famous women (Pamela Anderson and Madonna) who have written ‘real’ books. But ‘branding’ is swiftly equated with ‘fake’ when she remembers Camus and quotes his comment about artists: “[a]ny artist who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist in him” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 66). Losing oneself, becoming inauthentic (because the true artist is dead), inspire the narrator with fear: “I bite my nails because I’m afraid” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 67). An example of what inspires her fear are reality shows on television in which the ‘real’ people who arrived for the first filming “disappear.” After she dismisses the horror of becoming inauthentic, the narrator next considers a series of famous writers whose works have “hitched” their “existence to eternity” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 69). A real writer has “to leave home for good. You begin to shape your life, like Jurgis Kuncˇinas would say, ‘from the start,’ Writers are damned” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 70). The reader understands, of course, that the narrator does not believe in ‘remakes’—life having been lived and being lived in actual time, life cannot be ‘done’ over.12 In the 11 The publisher’s comment about the dominance of novels on best-seller lists is interesting in the context of contemporary literature. Any reader frequenting (real or internet-based) bookstores knows that the publisher’s assessment of the situation is accurate. Kornelius Platelis points to the richness of Lithuanian poetry, which has “an ancient and deep tradition of folk song” (28), and Rimvydas Sˇilbajoris confirms that “[t]raditionally, . . . poetry is considered to be the prominent genre in Lithuanian letters” (129). Platelis agrees with the fictional publisher in that “Lithuanian poetry no longer is dominant in our society’s spiritual life and is slowly withdrawing into the same place this art form holds in the Western World” (35). It appears that prose—especially novels—has the prominence formerly held by poetry, but it is not clear why this is so. On the one hand, the publishing industry may cleverly provide what is most in demand (to increase earnings)—like the fictional publisher implies he wishes to do. On the other hand, the novel genre may well be what the ‘mentality’ or disposition of readers in the twenty-first century craves (i. e., the novel as an escapist safe haven from the daily stress). Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s “Long Walk on a Short Pier” does not directly discuss (the ‘withdrawal’ of) poetry, but the passage certainly invites questions about the novel and provokes critiques of the genre beyond the narrator’s very individual objections. 12 Possibly, the narrator’s reference to the famous Lithuanian writer has less to do with his novel Tu¯la (and thus with ‘real’ writing in the context of Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s text) and more with the fact that Kuncˇinas wrote (semi-autobiographical) stories, poetry, and non-fiction essays. With the exception of poetry, his diversity of artistic production is comparable to what happens in Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s texts. Incidentally, the back cover of the English translation of Those Whom I

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writer’s life, creating (plots) becomes the only religion: “Invention must be the writer’s daily and only bread” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 70). The writer has to work in complete isolation with unwavering focus on invention and “cannot have either a house, or a job, or money, or any sort of peace, spiritually speaking. He must be steeped in loneliness. Must torture himself” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 70). The ‘real’ writer seems to ‘disappear’ from his work and sacrifices his identity for the important and socially relevant plot.13 In a brilliant passage, the narrator makes clear reference to Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, James Jones, Max Frisch, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Mitchell, and Thomas Wolfe without, however, mentioning any of their names. Her enumeration continues to demonstrate how she imagines a (real) writer’s life to be and also articulates the emotional response these thoughts provoke in her: The novelist must listen for whom the bell tolls, and climb the magic mountain. Wander from here to eternity. . . . One hundred years of solitude. Immortality. Feeling the tears brimming up in my eyes, I’m gone with the wind. . . . Yes, blown from here to eternity. Look homeward, angel. (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Long Walk” 70)

More than a reference to famous literature and its creators, the titles that come to the narrator’s mind show the decision she is about to make: to go home (and not become a ‘real’ writer). In addition, the narrator has read these (and many more) novels, and they have become part of her being and of her identity. Knowing these novels helps the narrator to articulate to herself, to the publisher, and to the reader how and why she is not a novelist and how she does not live the life of a novelist, either. The narrator of “The Native Land and Other Connections” shows how identity work happens in and is determined by the contingencies of time and space. Others can be known by what they do and what they say. Likewise, we show who we are by our words and actions. In this configuration, identity is tied to the narrator’s interactions with others at home and abroad. In “A Long Walk on a Short Pier,” identity work is shown on the level of thought or imagination. Again, it hinges on interactions of the narrator with real or fictional (literary) others. Importantly, this dimension of identity would normally have to stay hidden from (the readers’ or any others’) knowledge. For the reader to understand this person (to grasp the narrator’s identity), she has to write, and this is the raison d’être not just for the text but also for the fact that it is not in novel form. Would Like to Meet Again reflects uncertainty about characterising the nature of the author’s work and describes it as ‘stories,’ ‘fiction,’ ‘memoir,’ and ‘essay.’ 13 The pathos and exaggerated language in this part of the text invokes important literary works (including the Bible) but also suggests that the production of literature has been in the hands of men mostly (of all the writers this passage invokes, all but one are male). Against this canon of men, the narrator asserts female authorship.

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“Obituary”

“Obituary” is a wickedly funny and profoundly satirical text that engages with postmodern (fragmentation of) life and the resulting social consciousness(es).14 In this story, as is true for many of the others, the narrator is interested in the concept of identity and especially in her identity as a writer. In this particular story, however, the topic is that of identity in crisis. The crisis, in turn, is linked to life in postmodernity and is experienced as a traumatic event. Furthermore, this story conveys an urgency that everybody thinks about his or her identity and how we function (or do not function) as a collective culture or cultures in the twentyfirst century. With great economy, the first paragraph designates the narrative’s addressees, makes an appeal to the audience, establishes the mood, and specifies occasion and location: I’ll begin with some information intended for pretty much everyone. Please turn off your mobile phones for about twenty minutes. It’s a mournful evening in the Interpol Kebab Restaurant in the Old Town. If any foreigners are looking for it, they’ll find it by the smell. (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 211)

The reader (everyone) is as much a recipient of the speaker’s information as is her audience in the restaurant in Vilnius. The speaker asks for undivided attention and requests that telephones are turned off so that the audience (and the reader) can focus on the speech (the text) that is to follow. In today’s world, there are so many situations in which one is asked to silence electronic devices (in the cinema or theatre, in lecture halls, houses of religious worship, airplanes, busses, and many more) that the actual request has become a standard or formulaic introduction to whatever event is to follow. Yet the very need for this reminder to put away mobile phones points to a general lack of manners. It is true that some people may be intentionally selfish or inconsiderate and others simply forgetful. Not having worked out the proper telephone etiquette after about ten years with the (smart) technology, however, ought to raise questions about people’s solipsism (their absorption by these devices) on the one hand, and their inability to behave properly in public, on the other hand. Such lack of manners is also a lack of civility. Civility, the capacity to have tact and respectfulness, is essential to the functioning of the social fabric when other parameters such as ‘master narratives’ 14 The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zˇizˇek sees postmodernity as the mode of thinking that brings together both the ‘grand’ project of modernity and also a particular lifeworld. He notes: “postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity but its fulfillment: in the postmodern universe, pre-modern ‘leftovers’ are no longer experienced as obstacles to be overcome by progress towards a fully secularized modernization, but as something to be unproblematically incorporated into the multicultural global universe—all traditions survive, but in a mediated ‘de-naturalized’ form, that is, no longer as authentic ways of life, but as freely chosen ‘life-styles’” (Zˇizˇek 283).

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(about one’s nation or culture, for example) or ‘master ideologies’ have become diffuse or have disappeared.15 And it is needed in the kebab restaurant to interact with the foreigners who may be attracted at any moment. The speech that follows is an obituary, a death notice. On the surface, the departed is the speaker’s best friend. The speaker “knew her best: all her biographical details, buried in that small village, all her unfulfilled plans for the future” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 211). The ‘friends’ had much in common and people even “confused [their] faces” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 211). They were even “born in the same town. The same day, the same hour, during the same snowstorm” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 224–225). Statements like these lead to a suspicion that the speaker, somehow, is talking about her own death. She confirms this in a later passage when she explains who and what had inspired her to give the ‘obituary’: One of my many close friends—among whom I consider all of you, especially those who came here by accident [the readers, perhaps?]—is always asking: ‘Why aren’t you writing anything anymore?’ I answer very directly: ‘Because the narrator in me has died. Or perhaps it would be more convenient to say that she has gone missing in action.’ (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 224)

The narrator’s ‘death’ thus refers to an identity crisis, to a writer’s identity crisis, which happens to be the result of a trauma. As Zˇizˇek writes, “all different forms of traumatic encounter, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbolic) lead to the same result—a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (or erasure) of its symbolic identity” (294). The ‘new subject,’ apparently, is the speaker minus the narrator. Significantly, the alternative formulation that the narrator “has gone missing in action” leaves room to hope that an altered (writer) identity can be found again. ‘Missing in action’ is an expression that refers to members of a group—usually military— that have gone lost, or with whom contact has been broken, and here conveys that working on identity entails not only hard work but fighting (for survival). The trauma that causes the narrator’s death is a broken mirror. This mirror serves as the narrator’s memory. In it, “she could see history,” and the mirror sometimes reflected “a hall, but in another city, fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years ago” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 218). In addition to various places, people, 15 “[C]ivility . . . supplements the lack or collapse of the substance of mores. Civility . . . assumes the key role when subjects encounter a lack of substantial ethics, in other words, when they find themselves in predicaments which cannot be resolved by way or relying on the existing ethical substance. In such situations, one has to improvise and invent new rules ad hoc; but, to be able to do so—to have at one’s disposal the intersubjective space in which, through complex interaction, a solution can be agreed upon—this interaction has to be regulated by a minimum of civility. The more the ‘deep’ substantial ethical background is missing, the more a ‘superficial’ civility is needed” (Zˇizˇek 324–325).

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too, appear in the mirror: a younger version of the narrator’s mother, an uncle, her daughter, her grandmother, and an old neighbour. Then, one evening, the narrator’s “cat attacked the neighbour’s dog in the mirror and chased him away, thus violating the permissible boundary of healthy fantasy. The mirror broke into five pieces, which . . . dispersed and settled in the kitchen’s darkness” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 219–220). The cat, unable to distinguish between an actual dog and a dog’s reflection (or between reality and a ‘healthy fantasy’) attacks the animal and shatters the mirror. The trauma involves a violent intervention—an attack—and is likely a shockingly noisy event. The narrator’s death is that of her symbolic identity, which the mirror represents. In addition to seeing herself reflected in the mirror, the narrator also regularly sees people from her past. These regular ‘encounters’ seem to define her identity and they provide continuity, a coherent narrative (about her life). When the mirror breaks, so does the narrator’s connection to herself and to her history: “[m]y friend said that after this event, her memory suddenly became weak” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 220; emphasis added). It may not be necessary to bemoan the death of the narrator, though, for the speaker of the obituary is critical of the ‘best friend’ throughout the speech, and brutally honest on many occasions: “she aged, got fat, went gray and became melancholic” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 211). She also seems to have enjoyed alcohol too much and “was neither energetic, nor beautiful, nor good, nor especially hardworking” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 213). In addition to laying bare the ‘friend’s’ inevitable (because human) imperfections, the speaker also talks about the ‘friend’s’ work. One of two unfinished projects is an essay with the title “The Last Time.” “You know, my friend used to say to me, there are volumes and volumes written about the mysteries of the first time” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 222), and she decides that it is time to write about ‘last times.’ First times will be repeated until an individual dies, “[b]ut the last time can only be repeated in memory, dreams and essays” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 222). The narrator here expresses a yearning for producing an important work: a ‘first time,’ through repetition, becomes commonplace or a habit; a ‘last time,’ however, would have a singular status. Her project is unfinished not only because the narrator has died, but also because of the essay’s impossibility—she cannot write about any ‘last time’ because she cannot be sure a given action occurs for the last time (in her life). Underlying the longing for something that truly stands out (like a ‘last time’) may be a sense of unease in a (globalised) world where things feel standardised or uniform in many places—airports around the world, for example—and lack local and specific inflections. In the text, this feeling is articulated through a memory about childhood in which the child gazes at a field and enjoys seeing a goat eating grass. But, “within five years the field had been developed with identical houses. Each of those houses became a home to people

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who dressed the same, ate the same food and who unlocked their French locks into the same rooms” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 215). As this passage, which is repeated almost verbatim at another point in the text (on page 225) suggests, there are aspects to contemporary life that are governed by indistinguishability: houses, clothes, food, and even, perhaps, literature.16 It appears that in the context of identicalness, an individual identity becomes lost. Or, conversely, it has to work harder to make itself visible to, and noticeable by, others. Such thoughts are perhaps driving the narrator’s wish to create something unique. Zˇizˇek asks a provocative question that applies to those who take note of such kind of identicalness, as the narrator does: “what if it is our particular identity which does not exist, that is, which is always already traversed by universalities, caught up in them?” (Zˇizˇek 285). Standardised ‘McMansions’ and globally distributed food brands create a sense that in this world, the ‘universal’ cannot be escaped and, in turn, leads to this question (which is, in fact, another way to summarise the narrator’s trauma): “[w]hat if, in today’s global civilization, we are more universal that we think, and it is our particular identity which is a fragile ideological fantasy?” (Zˇizˇek 285). The narrator’s second unfinished project, too, is inspired by the desire to create something new or unique, but its trajectory is somewhat different from the first project. In this project, it is not the environment that succumbs to sameness but individuals themselves. The Beauty of Death Strikes is intended to be a coffee table book that shows “prêt à porter funeral wear featuring colour photographs of the highest quality” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 223). The models in the photographs represent another ‘last time’: when a deceased person is seen for the last time. According to the speaker’s ‘friend,’ “‘Death’ . . . must be public—like sex, chastity, indigestions and shoe inserts that guarantee quality of life” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 223). It is logical to her that in a world where everything is public through news (sex scandals of prominent people, for instance) or advertisement (medication against indigestion), ‘death’ cannot remain private. The photographs in her book, then, feature ‘appropriate’ funerary apparel based on who the deceased was in life: The models lay inside coffins dressed in specially created suits. A businessman who had committed suicide. A motorcyclist who’d been killed on the road. An émigré who met his end in Ireland—a man rendered an abstract statistic. A politician. An ordinary guy —a beekeeper. A beautiful woman. A homeless person. A poet. A florist. A child. Each

16 The author places the same passage twice in her relatively short text and thus likely intends the reader to find some irony in the repetition. In addition, an attentive reader is likely to make a connection between this passage and the considerations about novels, ‘real’ writers, and best-seller lists in the text “A Long Walk on a Short Pier,” discussed in the previous section.

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got their own page with a short caption underneath the photograph. (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 223)

This passage is a parody of some aspects of contemporary life. The ability of an individual to define him- or herself through affiliation with one or more groups with whom he or she feels ‘at home’ is very much corrupted in this passage. Here, the sense of ‘belonging’ is rendered trivial and superficial and is also based on decisions made by others. The dead, of course, cannot object to how others see (and judge) them. But these models do not represent individuals, they represent types. In a world with seemingly infinite choices of belonging (cultural, sexual, ethnic, linguistic, etc. affiliations), the individuality of others can disappear behind a mask or a ‘type.’ Behind the multitude of ‘masks,’ individual identities—if they are even presumed to have existed in this passage—are invisible. The speaker’s friend, the narrator, appears to be caught in a ‘uniform’ world filled not with individuals but with different ‘genres’ of people who live inauthentic lives and follow the ‘plot’ that their affiliation(s) dictates. The speaker finishes the obituary after talking about her ‘friend’s’ work, and the remaining question involves how the speaker, who is minus the narrator, can continue to work and to reconstruct identity after the crisis. In the text, there are, at best, ambiguous answers to these questions. Regarding work, the speaker is engaging in linguistic puzzles, and they require her complete focus: “My head hurts as I try to imagine the solution to the riddle. What does the Estonian kroner have in common with my grandmother Ona who lived under President Smetona?” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 226). Unlike the narrator, the speaker does not conceive of a project, and her ‘riddles’ reveal no evidence that they contain any narrative. The speaker is willing to look at random elements that may or may not have meaningful connections. At some point, the speaker may produce a unique work based on coincidental discoveries. In the meantime, the speaker completely dissociates from everything and everyone. By her own admission, she only thinks of these puzzles, and they dominate all quotidian activities such as “standing in line at the post office or grocery story, while riding the trolleybus, while drinking nettle read diluted with white wine, while staring into the dark of night, while stroking my cat” (Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, “Obituary” 226). The speaker retreats into her mind. As Zˇizˇek contends, “the gap between thinking and reality is the very feature which sustains our freedom of thinking. It is the gap itself which preserves us from immediate immersion in reality, allowing thought to distance itself from reality” (348). Freed from the narrator who had been caught up in totalizing the interchangeable, the speaker now occupies a place apart, a place in which thought can occur and, perhaps, point to the way forward. The text ends with more linguistic riddles and leaves the question about identity (that may emerge in the future) unresolved.

Facets: Identity Work in Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s Writing

5.

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Conclusion

Considering that the topic of the text is a crisis of identity, it is not surprising that the reader does not see a new or ‘restored’ identity. This is the logical outcome of a crisis situation. The narrator has died, and what remains (the speaker) has to heal in time—like, say, the victim of an accident may have to spend months in physical therapy to regain full use of damaged limbs. The activity of creating one’s identity never ends until the subject dies. The ways in which one is at home with oneself and in the world vary throughout a lifetime and move, as some of Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙’s other work shows, along a continuum that ranges from ‘strangeness’ to ‘familiarity’—as is true for life itself, identity work is always a process. This text suggests that the continuum of identity can also include failure and crisis. To quote Zˇizˇek once again, it is perhaps the failure that is most significant, for “the subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it emerges only through the process of separation, of overcoming its presuppositions,” and he speculates that “[i]f the status of the subject is thoroughly “processual,” it means that it emerges through the very failure to fully actualise itself . . . a subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means of and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation” (Zˇizˇek 232). Identity, especially a writer’s identity, emerges because it fails to come into focus. For this very reason, however, the writer continues with her work. In each text, there is a failed articulation of identity. But each text, in turn, expresses some aspect of this ineffable identity—one facet at a time.

Works Cited Abate, Frank, et. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus. American Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print. Abels, Heinz. Identität. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010. Print. Abensour and Partners. “Cultural Exploration, Strategic Thinking and Communications.” Company Web Site. Web. 3 Nov. 2017. www.abensourandpartners.com. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Anz, Thomas. Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf. Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995. Print. Briedis, Laimonas. Vilnius. City of Strangers. Vilnius: Baltos Lankos, 2016. Print. Fludernik, Monika. Erzähltheorie. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010. Print.

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Martinkus, Vytautas. “Syndrome of a Critical Criticism. The Situation in Lithuania.” Raˇsanti Europa: Europos literatu¯ra ˇsiandien. Web. 15 Oct. 2017. www.etalpykla.lituanis tikadb.lt. Miller, Robert. The Development of Europe Identity/Identities: Unfinished Business. A Policy Review. Brussels: European Commission, 2012. Web. 1 Nov. 2017. https://ec.e uropa.edu. Platelis, Kornelijus. “About Modern Lithuanian Poetry.” Lithuania: In Her Own Words: An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Writing. Ed. Laima Sruoginis. Trans. Jonas Zdanys. Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 1997. 27–35. Print. Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙, Giedra. “A Long Walk on a Short Pier.” Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again. By Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙. Trans. Elizabeth Novickas. Champaign: Dakey Archive Press, 2013. 63–78. Print. –. “The Native Land and Other Connections.” Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙. Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again. Trans. Elizabeth Novickas. Champaign: Dakey Archive Press, 2013. 7–17. Print. –. “Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction.” Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯te˙. Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again. Trans. Elizabeth Novickas. Champaign: Dakey Archive Press, 2013. 117–129. Print. –. “Obituary.” The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature. Ed. Almantas Samalavicˇius. Trans. Ju¯ra Avizˇienis. Swarthy: Dedalus, 2013. 211–227. Print. Samalavicˇius, Almantas. Introduction. The Dedalus Book of Lithuanian Literature. Ed. Almantas Samalavicˇius. Trans. Medeine˙ Tribinevicˇius. Swarthy: Dedalus, 2013. 9–20. Print. Sruoginis, Laima. Editor’s Note. Lithuania: In Her Own Words. An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Writing. Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 1997. 15–18. Print. Sˇilbajoris, Rimvydas. “On Lithuanian Prose.” Lithuania: In Her Own Words. An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Writing. Laima Sruoginis. Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 1997. 129–135. Print. Wittek, Bernd. Der Literaturstreit im sich vereinigenden Deutschland. Eine Analyse des Streits um Christa Wolf und die deutsch-deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. Marburg: Tecum, 1997. Print. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2011. Print.

Vijole˙ Visˇomirskyte˙

Chapter 2 – Dialogue, Culture and Identity in Gintaras Beresnevicˇius’s and Herkus Kuncˇius’s Postmodernist Texts

. . . all crises in Europe start with an ominous silence and an unwillingness to sit down at the table, to look at each other, and to have a talk. —Leonidas Donskis1

1.

Introduction

Writing (in English) about Lithuanian literary texts, especially those that have not been translated into English, entails engagement with the intercultural and dialogic realms. And when one explores the dialogic in postmodernist texts, one enters the Borgesian library of Babel. What does dialogue signify in texts by Lithuanian postmodernist writers? How do their texts construct dialogue and reflect on it? What intercultural dialogues do they perform? How are conversations with other cultural texts related to representations of identity? How are the texts similar or different with regard to the ways in which they link modern Lithuanian identity to the concepts of dialogue and culture? I explore these questions with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s concept of “culture as a process of confrontation”—explained by Mieke Bal (“Heterochrony” 213), and Christian Moraru’s theory of postmodern “reprise.” In his Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism, Moraru notes: [T]he postmodern fundamentally rests upon a complex “engagement” with the world, upon a relational pathos that renders postmodernism’s texts, tunes, and art objects deeply “dialogic.” . . . In postmodern discourse, I listen, to recall Roland Barthes, for the “rustle of language,” but also for the murmur of culture and history and the frissons of 1 Original Lithuanian: “visos Europos krize˙s prasideda nuo gre˙smingos tylos bei nenoro suse˙sti prie stalo, pazˇvelgti vieniems ˛i kitus ir pasikalbe˙ti” (Donskis, “Baigiamasis zˇodis” 169). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Lithuanian are my own, with editing assistance from Kristina Aurylaite˙.

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politics, albeit indirectly, intertextually, by way of other texts and visions. These representations are reprised, “remembered” and thus reenacted but not without alteration, as postmodernism spins its own stories, memoriously. (Moraru 9)

Narratologist Bronwen Thomas remarks that “it is difficult to imagine a narrative that does not include some kind of representation of speech, but the extent to which this is foregrounded varies considerably” (80). Paraphrasing her words, one might also say that it is difficult to imagine a literary text that does not represent a cultural dialogue, but the scope of such representation can be vastly different from one text to another. For my analysis of the representations of the dialogic in relation to culture and identity, I choose texts by two contemporary Lithuanian writers: Gintaras Beresnevicˇius (1961–2006) and Herkus Kuncˇius (b. 1965). Gabriele˙ Gailiu¯te˙ has described Beresnevicˇius’s work as “groundbreaking,” . . . humorous and intellectually complex, almost encyclopaedic. His insights into people and society are chillingly deep” (12). For Gailiu¯te˙, there is no doubt that Beresnevicˇius’s texts are among the finest of Lithuanian literature, and she notes that he “can proudly be presented as an introduction to the Lithuanian psyche for readers abroad” (13). ˇ ersˇkute˙ notes that he is “among the first Regarding Kuncˇius’s writing, Ju¯rate˙ C clearly recognisable postmodernists in Lithuanian literature and among the most translated Lithuanian authors. Educated as an art historian, he positioned himself as a provocateur and rebel, writing as he pleases” (17). One can claim that Beresnevicˇius’s and Kuncˇius’s texts differ from other works in contemporary Lithuanian literature if one takes into account the extent to which both authors foreground dialogism and Lithuanian identity. Incidentally, these authors also stand out because of their enormous productivity. Kuncˇius, for example, has published a book almost every year since 1996, and seventeen of them are novels. Reflecting on Lithuanian identity and offering new interpretations of it are the main narrative concerns of the texts by Beresnevicˇius and Kuncˇius. In an annotation to one of his books, Pramanytos ˇsalies pasakojimai (2015 [The Stories of a Made Up Country]),2 Kuncˇius writes: “This is a book devoted to Lithuania as fiction. All the talk about Lithuanianness and the state is not bad—if we do not reflect on this, we won’t be able to create new meanings. If we are not interested in ourselves, there is little chance that people of, say, Senegal will get interested in Lithuania” (Back cover).3 2 In the discussion that follows, titles of Kuncˇius’s and Beresnevicˇius’s literary works will be introduced in the original and in English translation. Subsequently, the English translation of the title is used in the main text. In in-text references, titles in both languages are indicated. 3 Original Lithuanian: “Tai knyga, skirta Lietuvai, kaip fikcijai. Tos kalbos apie lietuvisˇkuma˛, valstybe˛ ne˙ra blogai – jei mes nereflektuojame, tai ir nesukursime nauju˛ prasmiu˛. Jei nesidome˙sime savimi, tai nedidele˙ tikimybe˙, kad koks Senegalo gyventojas susidome˙s Lietuva.”

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The choice of Beresnevicˇius’s and Kuncˇius’s texts for an analysis of the dialogic and the intercultural is not accidental; both writers’ works are permeated with stylistic hybridity—which Mikhail Bakhtin defines as dialogism—on various textual levels that include genre, form, and content. Their postmodernist texts display an explicit and marked heteroglossia. Bakhtin writes: For the writer of artistic prose . . . the object reveals first of all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its names, definitions, and value judgments. Instead of the virginal fullness and inexhaustibility of the object itself, the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads, and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness. Along with the internal contradictions inside the object itself, the prose writer witnesses as well the unfolding of social heteroglossia surrounding the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around any object; the dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it. For the prose writer, the object is a focal point for heteroglot voices among which his own voice must also sound; these voices create the background necessary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot be perceived, and without which they “do not sound.” (Bakhtin 278)

References to the tower of Babel are also present in both Beresnevicˇius’s and Kuncˇius’s texts and, for these writers, often imply an apocalyptic scenario. At the same time, the ironic diversification of life “after Babel” functions both as a compositional principle and as a metaphor. Beresnevicˇius’s and Kuncˇius’s texts are challenging to read and to analyse precisely because of the heteroglossia, hybridity, and “unevenness of style” that characterise them. From the enormous corpus of Beresnevicˇius’s and Kuncˇius’s works, I am choosing three books by each of the writers for analysis in this chapter. Beresnevicˇius’s Ant laiko asˇmenu˛ (2002 [On the Edge of Time]) and Vilku˛ saulute˙ (2003 [The Sun of the Wolves]) are collections of essays published in various periodicals between 1997 and 2002. The third work under consideration here is his novel Paruzija (2005 [Parousia]). Kuncˇius’s texts relevant for my analysis are the following: a collection of travel writing, Trys mylimos (2014 [The Three Beloved]), the novel Dervisˇas isˇ Kauno (2014 [A Dervish from Kaunas]),4 and Lietuvio ir lenko pokalbis (2016 [A Conversation Between a Lithuanian and a Pole]). The latter was originally published in Polish as Rozmowa Litwina z Polakiem in 2015 and contains para-essayistic conversations with Polish poet Piotr Ke˛pin´ski. Kuncˇius’s and Beresnevicˇius’s literary texts probe into Lithuanian identity as if ‘from the outside,’ or ‘from a distance,’ and they ‘translate’ Lithuania for Lithuanians. These ‘translations’ are challenging to read, and the reflexive, es4 Citations from Dervisˇas isˇ Kauno are from the 2015 edition. The novel was published as part of the book Dviveidis romanas (A Two-Faced Novel). As the latter title suggests, this publication contains two novels; A Dervish from Kaunas appears as a ‘sequel’ to the other novel, which is Lietuvis Vilniuje (A Lithuanian in Vilnius), originally published in 2011.

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sayistic, metanarrative character of their writing somewhat invites a deconstructive approach. My focus is on those elements and components of the texts that come to the fore, or stand out, as I am reading both authors’ texts side by side drawing on theoretical insights discussed above.

2.

(Mis)Communication and (Mis)Understanding: Life after Babel in Gintaras Beresnevicˇius’s Essays

In his essay collections On the Edge of Time and The Sun of the Wolves, Beresnevicˇius pays much attention to issues of misunderstanding and miscommunication, as well as to the absence of dialogue, while constantly highlighting the very need for dialogue. In the essay “Nesusikalbe˙jimo metas” (“The Time of Miscommunication”), originally published in December of 2001, at the turn of the millennium, he comments on our inability to understand or even communicate with each other, and he writes: But now, with the sound of bells ringing, after trumpets trumpeted, we can say that there appears a possibility to ask about new meanings that are put forward to us by various languages or dialects, or to ask about the languages of individual groups (entrepreneurs, teenagers, computer scientist, criminals), whose words and sentences, to the uninitiated outsider, may sound like some sacred language, or outright jibber-jabber. Now it also seems that whatever dialect or language we use, we fail to understand each other—just like we did right after Babel. (Beresnevicˇius, “Nesusikalbe˙jimo metas” [“The Time of Miscommunication”] 183–184)5

Beresnevicˇius’s reference to Babel indicates that our inability to understand each other has a long history. At the same time, he suggests that our current inability to understand each other contains a new element, and, in the same essay, he explains that [t]he time of miscommunication and misunderstanding which has come at the beginning of the third millennium is merely a continuation of other, older miscommunications. But, if rationality disappeared altogether, we would have to deal with the totally amorphous language of clones, genetic engineering, sectarian morality, and darkness. To change it—the use of science and an unexpected, horrific new reality of immeasurable terror of nefarious genetic experiments—through conversation, that is, through creation of a new vocabulary, is a task befitting the social elite. In Lithuania, 5 Original Lithuanian: “Bet dabar, varpams i˛siskambe˙ jus, trimitams nutrimitavus, galime pasakyti – atsiranda ne tik galimybe˙ klausti apie naujas prasmes, kurias mums veria kalbos ar dialektai, ir net ne apie atskiru˛ sluoksniu˛ kalbas (verslininku˛, paaugliu˛, kompiuterininku˛, nusikalte˙liu˛), kuriu˛ zˇodzˇiai ir sakiniai nepasˇve˛stajam atrodo kaip sˇventakalbe˙ ar nesa˛moniu˛ kratinys, tohu bohu. Dabar, regis, kad ir kokia˛ tarme˛ar kalba˛ vartotume, imame nesusisˇneke˙ti apskritai, nelyginant po Babelio.”

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though, intellectuals are too fearful to assume either the label or the role. In the West, the responsibility for language and communication is in the intellectuals’ hands. (Beresnevicˇius, “Nesusikalbe˙jimo” [“Miscommunication”] 190)6

The conversation in which an intellectual should engage, according to Beresnevicˇius, is a necessary condition for survival. The author’s desire to discuss miscommunication and the use of different vocabularies is inspired by an article. This article, from the German monthly publication Chrismon, is a sociological survey about “What the average German basically believes in.” In Beresnevicˇius’s view, this is the “kind of survey which we [Lithuanians] need but lack” (“Nesusikalbe˙jimo” [“Miscommunication”] 190).7 The strategy to include texts and discourses (oral or written) from other languages and countries, to explicitly credit them with having inspired another thought, and to then apply the ‘foreign’ thought to the situation in Lithuania occurs frequently in Beresnevicˇius’s essays. The writer’s technique underscores that neither communication, nor exploration of Lithuanian identity can occur without integrating foreign elements. In Lithuanian, the reflexive verb susikalbe˙ti (from kalbe˙ti, “to speak, to talk”) means both susisˇneke˙ti (“to understand each other”) and susitarti (“to come to an understanding with,” “to agree with,” “to arrange things with”).8 Beresnevicˇius talks about the necessity to understand others and, simultaneously, to arrange things with others not only between different social groups, but also between people and their new realities. A reference to the essay “Po dabarties” (“After the Present”) provides an example: To communicate with new circumstances and to understand them, one needs to prepare. And instead of attending one or another business college, it would be much more useful to pursue the otherwise “impractical” comparative research of civilisations, such as Eastern Language Studies—or comparative studies, in general—which enable one to understand the future others with whom one will have to live side by side, and to whom one has to adapt, or, more preferably, whom one has to integrate into one’s world. (Beresnevicˇius, “Po dabarties” [“After the Present”] 153)9

6 Original Lithuanian: “Nesusikalbe˙jimo metas, uzˇe˙je˛s trecˇiojo tu¯kstantmecˇio pradzˇioje, tik senu˛ nesusikalbe˙jimu˛ te˛sinys, tacˇiau per anksti isˇnykus racionalumui, uzˇgriu¯tu˛ visisˇkai amorfisˇka klonu˛, genetine˙s inzˇinerijos, sektu˛ morale˙s, tamsos kalba. Ja˛ pakeisti, moksla˛ ir netike˙ta˛ nauja˛ neisˇmatuojamos gelme˙s teroro ir pragaru atsiduodancˇiu˛ genetiniu˛ eksperimentu˛ realija˛ susodinti pokalbiui – bent jau naujam zˇodynui kurti – gali tik visuomene˙s elitas, kuriuo taip baugsˇcˇiai Lietuvoje nedri˛sta pasivadinti intelektualai. Vakaruose ˇsi kalbos, susisˇneke˙jimo pastanga ju˛ rankose.” 7 Original Lithuanian: “tokia, kokiu˛ pas mus labai tru¯ksta.” (Beresnevicˇius, “Nesusikalbe˙jimo” 190). 8 For the meaning of the Lithuanian verbs, see LKZˇ, Lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas. 9 Original Lithuanian: “Susikalbe˙ti su naujom aplinkybe˙m reikia ruosˇtis. Ir vietoje dar vieno ar kito verslo koledzˇo daug labiau praverstu˛ ˇsiaip ‘neapsimokantys’ civilizaciju˛ lyginamieji tyrimai, Rytu˛ kalbu˛ studijos, sˇiaip – ‘komparatyvistika apskritai,’ leidzˇianti suprasti bu¯simus

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At the bottom of such conversation and understanding (susikalbe˙jimas), according to Beresnevicˇius, one finds not an ethnic origin, but rather one’s cultural roots. For Lithuanians, these roots lie in the peasant culture and peasant mentality, from which the French or the British with their urban cultures separated themselves a long time ago. [Yet] Lithuanians, Russians, Croats, Serbs, and the Irish, not to mention the Poles, are all relying on their peasant roots up to this day. [Thus] [e]thnicity does not coincide with culture; the reach of culture is wider [than that of ethnicity] and culture is thus the base for conversation and mutual understanding. (Beresnevicˇius, “Po dabarties” [“After the Present”] 152)10

In a text on the history of a literary essay in modern Lithuania, Beresnevicˇius gives an example of the important role of culture and singles out the potential for productive dialogue between writers: Actually, the idea of reconciliation with the Poles was first voiced in an essay in 1993. That is, the essay genre functioned like some kind of kindling. . . . The fact that [Lithuania’s] relationship with Poland did become closer and significantly warmer is an accomplishment of politicians. But cultural elites, as is often the case, were the first to voice the idea, and they relied on the essay form. (“Eseistikos tendencijos moderniojoje Lietuvoje” [“The Literary Essay in Modern Lithuania”] 290)11

The need “to create a new vocabulary” and to talk about self-perception, about awareness and understanding, appears in the face of a threat—“with the sound of bells ringing,” “after trumpets have sounded,” and in the face of “the unexpected and horrific new reality of immeasurable terror and nefarious genetic experiments,” “as if after Babel,” to recall some of Beresnevicˇius’s words quoted earlier. The author uses the image of life “after Babel” to represent life in the contemporary world, in which we communicate in three different languages: We also “speak languages,” and our vocabulary, depending on the circumstance and the participants—viewers, listeners, readers—is, accordingly, religious, scientific, or that of beliefs. Consequently, the object of a conversation, depending on which of the three “languages” is spoken, may appear very different. There is nothing strange here. We do speak different languages. In a group of friends, having chosen a common language, kitus, su kuriais teks gyventi sˇalia, ir ne tik sˇalia, o integruojantis. Labiau pageidautina – integruojant.” 10 Original Lithuanian: “Tai eurazijinis valstietisˇkos kultu¯ros ir valstietisˇko mentaliteto arealas, nuo kurio prancu¯zai ar britai atsiskyre˛˛seniau, su savo miestu˛ kultu¯romis. Bet lietuviai, rusai, kroatai, serbai, airiai, nekalbant apie lenkus, iki ˇsiandien kultu¯risˇkai remiasi i˛ tas pacˇias sˇaknis. Etnisˇkumas su kultu¯riniu pagrindu nesutampa, kultu¯ros laukas daug platesnis, o tai ir yra pagrindas susikalbe˙ti.” 11 Original Lithuanian: “Susitaikymas su lenkais, tarkime, eseistine forma buvo siu¯lomas 1993 m. Tai yra ese˙ zˇanras buvo tam tikras saugiklis. Jis negale˙jo apsaugoti, bet dave˙ tam tikra˛ “stoga˛.” Tai, kad ve˙liau su Lenkija uzˇsimezge˙ sˇilti ir nuosˇirdu¯s santykiai, politiku˛ nuopelnas, tacˇiau pirmuosius zˇodzˇius kaip ir daugeliu atveju˛ tare˙ kultu¯ros zˇmone˙s, ir dazˇnai kaip tik ese˙ forma.”

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that is, having agreed upon it, we will be sharing similar problems. In random company, however, it is inevitable that we slip and talk nonsense. Since they have to deal with unfamiliar audiences, often composed of random individuals, lecturers may well know that, unless one chooses a language for a specific audience, incomprehension may lead to an uncomfortable silence. Scientific language prevails at universities; in an academic environment, its influence is still strong. Religious language is dominant in religious communities and among believers. Our daily life, however, is dominated by a language of beliefs, which is irrational, emotionally charged, gripping, and which lacks the power of argumentation. (Beresnevicˇius, “Nesusikalbe˙jimo” [“Miscommunication”] 192)12

In Beresnevicˇius’s collections of essays On the Edge of Time and The Sun of the Wolves, the word ‘dialogue’ appears in six essays: “Barbarai” (“Barbarians”), “Me˙ginant susivokti” (“Trying to Understand”), “Atlaikyti Ve˙lines” (“To Hold Out All Souls’ Day), “Rankrasˇcˇio pabaiga” (“The End of the Manuscript”), “Tiu¯bingenas, rudens pasaka” (“Tübingen, An Autumn Tale”), and “Partizanisˇka laisve˙” (“Partisan Freedom”). In all these essays, ‘dialogue’ denotes communication and attempts at mutual understanding and, importantly, dialogue is presented as either impossible or possible. Dialogues that are impossible are those between you/me (Lithuanians) and Westerners—“an ordinary German,” some “Westerner,”—between me and sects, followers of The Word of Faith—as in the essay “Barbarians,”—between you and “bulldozers,” meaning regulations or “new structures” discussed in the essay “Trying to Understand,” and between me/us and paper, as in “The End of the Manuscript.” Beresnevicˇius judges the latter dialogue to be obsolete, because paper has been replaced by digital technologies, which have come to dominate the writing process: Now all the paper we use is of one kind: suitable for printers. Each sheet is blindingly and boringly white and accepts the Epson needle strokes without any resistance or even reaction. No dialogue with paper is possible anymore. There is no play with its colours, there is no smell, there is no buzz of the typewriter when a new sheet is inserted, and

12 Original Lithuanian: “Mes irgi ‘kalbame kalbomis,’ ir mu¯su˛ zˇodynas, atsizˇvelgiant i˛ aplinkybes, pokalbio dalyvius, zˇiu¯rovus/klausytojus/skaitytojus, yra atitinkamai religinis, mokslinis ar tike˙jimu˛. Atitinkamai – ir pokalbiu˛ objektas, kuris, vienu isˇ tu˛ triju˛ pozˇiu¯riu˛ nusˇviestas, gali pasirodyti labai jau skirtingai nuspalvintas. Nieko cˇia keisto, bet mes kalbame skirtingomis kalbomis: draugu˛ bu¯ryje, pasirinkus kalba˛, t. y. de˙l jos nebyliai susitarus, problemos bus bendros, o atsitiktine˙je kompanijoje – nusikalbe˙jimas neisˇvengiamas. Kaip zˇino lektoriai, bijantys nepazˇ˛istamu˛, atsitiktinai suburtu˛ auditoriju˛, ˇsiai nepasirinkus tinkamos kalbos, nesupratimas pakibs nejaukia tylos siena. Moksline˙ kalba vyrauja universitetu˛ auditorijose, akademine˙je aplinkoje ir netoliese, kur dar tebeveikia jos ˛idirbis; religine˙ – religine˙je bendruomene˙je, tarp tikincˇiu˛ju˛, o bendrakalbe˙je vyrauja iracionalybe˙s, argumentu˛ trukumo netrikdoma, emocisˇkai paje˙gi ir ˛itraukianti tike˙jimu˛ kalba.”

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there is no leaden rustle of carbon paper… (“Rankrasˇcˇio pabaiga” [“The End of the Manuscript”] 179; ellipsis in the original)13

Then, no dialogue is possible with a uniform, the well-ordered, the depersonalised, and all that which is incapable of a reaction. The dialogues that are possible and do take place in Beresnevicˇius’s essays can take one of the following forms: a mental dialogue between me and my inner voice in “Tübingen, An Autumn Tale,” an ontological dialogue between us and the dead ones in “To Hold Out All Souls’ Day,” academic dialogue between me and a German professor in “Barbarians,” a literary dialogue between me and a writer, Hölderlin in “Tübingen, An Autumn Tale,” or an intercultural dialogue between me/us/my/our generation and “a Pole, or a Czech, or a Jew” in “Barbarians.”14 These dialogues are possible because the interlocutors speak the same language, which is, share similar views. The possible dialogue connects one to one’s inner self, one’s dead ones, to intellectuals, texts, and to “a Pole, a Czech, or a Jew” (as opposed to random ‘someones,’ or ‘Westerners’).

3.

Books as Dialogues: A Conversation between a Lithuanian and a Pole and The Three Beloved

The need for dialogue—especially in times of danger—is also emphasised by Leonidas Donskis in the closing chapter of the book of conversations between Herkus Kuncˇius and Piotr Ke˛pin´ski, A Conversation between a Lithuanian and a Pole: [The book] appears at a time when there is urgent need to voice the common experiences of Lithuanian and Polish writers of the same generation. Agreeing about security, survival, and a shared future is vital [for both Lithuania and Poland] not so much because we are apprehensive about any specific or impending catastrophe (how many of these have already happened, how many more will happen still . . .), but because all crises in Europe start with an ominous silence and an unwillingness to sit down to look at each other, and to have a talk. We may choose to rely on conventional wisdom, or the winged phrases we use to express political dangers and existential fears. And yet, they do not bring any clarity. There are still many unclear and obscure things around us. Much like personal relationships, relations between states and nations, too, often depend not on content, but on process. It is necessary to talk. (Donskis, “Baigiamasis zˇodis” 169)

13 Original Lithuanian: “Dabar visi popieriai spausdintuvams vienodi. Vienodai akinamai bukai balti, priimantys adatinius ‘Epsono’ kircˇius be meile˙s ir be jokios reakcijos. Dialogo su popieriumi nebeliko. Nebeliko zˇaidimo su jo spalvomis, kvapo, mielo masˇine˙le˙s zirzimo, pasigirstancˇio ˛isukant nauja˛ lapa˛, sˇvininio kalke˙s sˇlamesio…” 14 Original Lithuanian: “su lenku ar cˇeku (ir zˇydu, beje).”

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Donskis stresses dialogue as an activity that brings clarity. The latter as an impetus is central in the book A Conversation between a Lithuanian and a Pole by Herkus Kuncˇius and Piotr Ke˛pin´ski, writers from two different, though neighbouring, countries. Three texts written by Adam Michnik, Kuncˇius, and Ke˛pin´ski, respectively, constitute the introduction to the book. These essays, together with Donskis’s text that comes at the end of the book, frame A Conversation between a Lithuanian and a Pole, and each author highlights the importance of dialogue. In his “Pagarba pokalbiui” (“Respect for Conversation”), Michnik discusses earlier publications of conversations between Lithuanians and Poles, and he singles out a book by Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova. Miłosz and Venclova, however, were writing/talking while physically absent from their countries whereas for Kuncˇius and Ke˛pin´ski, the departures and distances which occasion their conversation are metaphoric. Ke˛pin´ski’s “Pamatyti kitomis akimis” (“To See Through Other Eyes”) stresses the ultimate, or ideal, goal of any dialogue: for the interlocutors to come to a changed point of view. Kuncˇius’s “Bendros vietos” (“Shared Places”), in turn, draws attention to the conditions that are necessary for dialogue to take place. The prerequisites for dialogue to become possible are: Vilnius, the city where the two writers meet and start to write the book; the Polish language, which is the one language they both share; mutual friendship, and their profession: “those conversations could happen because we both are writers” (Kuncˇius, “Bendros vietos” [“Shared Places”] 11).15 Donskis points out that Kuncˇius and Ke˛pin´ski belong to the same generation and thus share yet another commonality (169). Another book by Kuncˇius, The Three Beloved, features dialogue as cultural dialogue. This text is a form of travel narrative, travelogue. By projecting culturespecific discourses, constructing alterity and self-identity, travelogues in their essence embody “inter-culturality,” as Barbara Korte points out (620). The same scholar also notes that while travelogues “vary in the degree to which they are focused on the travelled world or on the travelling subject, . . . they inevitably reveal both the culture-specific and the individual patterns of perception and knowledge which every traveller [sic] brings to the experience of a journey” (Korte 619). The travels recorded in Kuncˇius’s book are presented in an autobiographical style, as a diary, written by the writer-traveller-narrator. On the book’s cover, Kuncˇius explains that “[t]hese are three travels into the past. No matter where I am or what I am doing, I always want to return there—to near the Bosphorus, to the Caucasus, or to the Balkans” (Trys mylimos [The Three

15 Original Lithuanian: “Sˇie pokalbiai gale˙jo vykti tik tode˙l, kad mus siejo literaratu¯ra, abu esame literatai.”

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Beloved] back cover).16 The three “beloved” of the title thus are Turkey, Georgia, and Bulgaria, and the past to which the writer wants to return is the nineteenth century. Travel as a means to return to the past is also implied by the book’s title, which is a direct intertextual reference to the late nineteenth-century comedy, “Trys mylimos,” 1897, (The Three Beloved), by Lithuanian realist writer Zˇemaite˙ (Julija Beniusˇevicˇiu¯te˙-Zˇymantiene˙, 1854–1921). Kuncˇius’s text, composed of three parts, can also be read as a postmodernist reprise of Zˇemaite˙’s three-act play. In the comedy, a young farmhand is wooing a rich widow and both her daughters simultaneously. His objective is to obtain money and then run away to the Caucasus with the girl he actually loves. Despite his hope that the plan will succeed, he remains poor in the end and is the one who is being cheated on. The intertextual title invites the reader to read Kuncˇius’s The Three Beloved with Zˇemaite˙’s comedy in mind. In the play, the young man’s truly beloved is none of the main characters, but a fourth woman. Likewise, the truly beloved country in Kuncˇius’s text is none of the travel destinations (Turkey, Georgia, or Bulgaria), but a fourth country: Lithuania. Lithuania is not on the travel itinerary; it is an idea the narrator travels with. Lithuania emerges as the ‘true love’ because the narrator inserts a culturally significant Lithuanian’s voice into the accounts of the countries he visits. These insertions, or intertexts, point to some of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern Lithuanian culture—Adam Mickiewicz (1798– ˇ iurlionis (1875–1911)—and 1855), Jonas Basanavicˇius (1851–1927), and M. K. C function like a thread that weaves through and connects the three parts (the three ˇ iurlionis’s letters are read countries visited) of Kuncˇius’s text. Mickiewicz’s and C and quoted as if these persons were still alive and writing them now. The pretence ˇ iurlionis contemporary with the narrator (and the of making Mickiewicz and C readers of Kuncˇius) transforms The Three Beloved into an envelope for these letters (from the nineteenth century) that is addressed and sent to contemporary (Lithuanian) readers. Letters (as a form of text and discourse) and travel (as a chronotope, a topic, or a genre), which both essentially connote inter-personal or inter-cultural relations and encounters, are especially frequent in Kuncˇius’s texts. For this author, dialogue is travel, and one cannot return unchanged after passing through it.

16 Original Lithuanian: “Tai trys kelione˙s ˛i bu¯ta˛ji˛ laika˛. Ten – nesvarbu, kur sˇiandien bebu¯cˇiau ar ka˛ beveikcˇiau – man visada norisi sugri˛zˇti – prie Bosforo, ˛i Kaukaza˛ ar Balkanus.” “[B]u¯tasis laikas” means both past tense (as a gramatical category), and the past as a temporal category.

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4.

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Apocalyptic Eschatology and Adam Mickiewicz’s Intertext in the Novels

The theme about the end of history at a time of great danger is present in many of Beresnevicˇius’s and Kuncˇius’s texts and is most prominent in their postmodernist, apocalyptic, dystopian novels: Beresnevicˇius’s Parousia and Kuncˇius’s A Dervish from Kaunas. In addition to the end of history motif, both novels also use Adam Mickiewicz’s voice intertextually. In Beresnevicˇius’s Parousia, Mickiewicz’s voice is inserted into a long and complex sentence which ironically describes an encounter between two dead civilisations as illustrated in the quotation below: In Napoleon’s army, there were some Lithuanians from Sudovia, ruled for some time by the French Empire, which had been bringing freedom not only to Europe, but also to the Turkish Mamelukes; now, sunken under heavy guns on their shoulders . . . and under sacks filled with . . . all sorts of magic figurines, their lucky charms, a few village lads were looking at the pyramids, but the pyramids did not even glance at them one, bequeathing this honour to the Sphinx; and the blue of the fields and the lakes of Sudovia, reflected in the Sphinx’s pupil-less gaze, was fading at the understanding that some sort of an epochal meeting between two dead civilisations was taking place, for the Lithuanians had by now been categorised as a deceased nation even by their own bards, who were singing in Polish; even Mickiewicz, the last Lithuanian poet writing in Polish that he was Lithuanian, considered Lithuania to be dead and himself a poet of a dead nation; so in this gaze, two once powerful civilisations met, one–of several dozen pyramid, and the other–of some three thousand hill forts . . . ; the two civilisations were coevals, and in the eyes of this Lithuanian lad, a representative of the dead nation, who would soon fall dead, hit by a crocheting Turkish bullet, the Sphinx could discern the strangest message . . . saying that this nation had not died, not yet, although the grave had already been dug and a cross had been erected. (Beresnevicˇius, Paruzija [Parousia] 24; emphasis added)17

17 Original Lithuanian: “Napoleono armijoje buvo lietuviu˛ isˇ Suvalkijos, laikinai priklausiusios Prancu¯zijos imperijai, laisve˛ nesˇusiai ir turkams mameliukams, ne tik Europai; ir keli lietuviai kaimo bernai, uzˇsiverte˛ ant pecˇiu˛ sunkius sˇautuvus, . . . daiktamaisˇius su . . . de˙l visa ko ˛isimestomis stebuklingomis figu¯re˙le˙mis, zˇvalge˙si ˛i piramides, o piramide˙s net nezˇiu¯re˙jo ˛i juos, perleidusios sˇia˛ garbe˛ sfinksui; taigi Suvalkijos lauku˛ ir ezˇeru˛ me˙lis, atsispinde˙je˛s sfinkso bevyzdzˇiame zˇvilgsnyje, bluko isˇ nuostabos ir supratimo, kad vyksta kazˇkoks epochinis dvieju˛ mirusiu˛ civilizaciju˛ susitikimas, nes lietuvius net ju˛ dainiai, giedoje˛ lenkisˇkai, priskyre˙ prie mirusiu˛ tautu˛; net Mickevicˇius, paskutinis lietuviu˛ poetas, lenkisˇkai rasˇe˛s, kad jis lietuvis, laike˙ Lietuva˛ mirusia, o save – mirusios tautos dainiumi; taigi ˇsiame zˇvilgsnyje susitiko dvi kadaise galingos civilizacijos, viena, pastacˇiusi kelias desˇimtis piramidzˇiu˛, ir kita, supylusi tris tu¯kstancˇius piliakalniu˛ . . . ; abi civilizacijos buvo amzˇininke˙s, ir sˇio lietuvio bernioko, mirusios tautos atstovo, po keliu˛ dienu˛ zˇu¯siancˇio nuo rikosˇetuojancˇios turku˛ kulkos, akyse sfinksas gale˙jo ˛iskaityti sau pacˇiam keistoka˛ zˇinia˛ . . . , kad ta tauta dar nemire˙; nors jai jau isˇkastas kapas ir uzˇkrautas kryzˇius, ji dar ne˙ra mirusi.”

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Mickiewicz’s voice intersects with that of the narrator, who translates and “memoriously reprises” them. In addition to echoing the literary discourse of Mickiewicz’s play, Forefathers’ Eve (orig. Polish Dziady, Lith. Ve˙line˙s), and the Romantics’ discourse about the poet-prophet and “the end of history,” Parousia and A Derwish from Kaunas use discourses of nationalism and revolt. Thusly, both novels engage in an apostrophic conversation with the past, in general, and, specifically, with the culture of the nineteenth century, a culture that is gone, but which can be ‘reprised’ in these dialogues with the dead. Beresnevicˇius makes a direct reference to the living dialoguing with the dead in “To Hold Out All Souls’ Day.”18 This dialogue, in turn, brings the living and the dead into a single shared place: It is not without reason that [All Souls’ Day] is a holiday, one which is essentially communal and participatory. It is easier this way. Everyone “on the ground” commemorates those “in Heaven,” and so, for a few days and in many places, two figures —“we” and “they”—become involved in a two-way dialogue, and this wordy dialogue can be summarised in one statement: we are all one. There are no separate sides; we are all alive, and the question is about which ones are more alive. There is no death, and if we, because of our imperfection, do see a boundary between us, it is a boundary that unites rather than divides. At least for these two days. (Beresnevicˇius, “Atlaikyti Ve˙lines” [“To Hold Out All Souls’ Day”] 65)19

Mickiewicz stands out among the dead ones for Lithuanians, because he is both ‘one of us,’ a Lithuanian, and also a foreigner. Mickiewicz’s singular status becomes evident in that he is given a voice in both Kuncˇius’s and Beresnevicˇius’s novels which explore the meaning of Lithuanianness as regards its past, present and future. The essayist and poet Tomas Venclova stresses the presence of Mickiewicz’s voice in different discourses on Lithuanian cultural identity: Mickiewicz’s influence on Lithuanian culture was rife with extraordinary contradictions. The very image of his native land, its past and its ethnic character, which became a standard paradigm for generations of Polish (and foreign) readers, underwent peculiar reinterpretations in the country he had, not without reason, considered his own. The process of the establishment of the modern cultural identity of Poland and Lithuania, which owes much to Mickiewicz and to Polish Romanticism in general, reveals an intense love-hate relationship: one may say that Lithuanian and Polish cul18 In the Lithuanian title “Atlaikyti Ve˙lines,” atlaikyti means both ‘to withstand’ and ‘to perform a divine service.’ 19 Original Lithuanian: “Ve˙line˙s juk – ypatingo bendravimo metas, ir ne veltui tai sˇvente˙ , kuri isˇ esme˙s atliekama bendruomene˙je ar bent jau bendrai. Taip tiesiog lengviau. Visi ‘apacˇioje’ mini ‘virsˇuje esancˇius,’ ir taip kelias dienas milzˇinisˇkuose regionuose atsiranda du abipusiame dialoge dalyvaujantys asmenys, ‘mes’ ir ‘jie,’ ir tas daugiazˇodis dialogas sutelpa i˛ viena˛ minti˛: visi esame viena, ne˙ra nei anos, nei sˇios puse˙s, visi esame gyvi, ir nezˇinia, kurie gyvesni. Ne˙ra mirties, o jei de˙l savo netobulumo ˛izˇiu¯rime tarp mu¯su˛ riba˛– tai greicˇiau jungiancˇia˛ja˛, ne skiriancˇia˛ja˛. Bent jau tas dvi dienas.”

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tures are complementary and yet, at the same time, provide a polemical background for each other. In the development of Lithuanian culture, one easily discerns two conflicting, if sometimes interwoven, threads that start with Mickiewicz’ classmate Daukantas and Mickiewicz’s correspondent Nezabitauskas . . . Mickiewicz’s own concept of Lithuania . . . contributed to the birth of those opposite ideologemes. (Venclova; emphases added)

In dialogic investigations of modern Lithuanian identity, it appears, echoes of Mickiewicz’s voice are unavoidable. Kuncˇius’s A Dervish from Kaunas quotes three of Mickiewicz’s letters. Of these, two are fictional (addressing the town of Kaunas), and one is authentic (penned in 1820 to his friends while Mickiewicz was working in Kaunas). Citations from the authentic letter appear in a chapter that heavily features dialogue. The chapter of Kuncˇius’s novel which cites the authentic letter of Mickiewicz also includes typified conversations among people of Kaunas. These conversations are presented as “authentic”; they are set off in the text by different formatting and by use of a larger font for the speakers’ names. The conversations are included as an illustration meant to explain “the subtleties of the relationships between people in Kaunas” (Kuncˇius, “Dervisˇas isˇ Kauno” [A Dervish from Kaunas] 273).20 The conversations deal with what is everyday life in the eyes of the city dwellers, but may well surprise a visitor or newcomer unfamiliar with Kaunas, the “provisional capital of Lithuania” (272)21 and “stronghold of Lithuanianness” (271).22 One peculiarity of the conversations is that the participants often seem to make an unlikely pair: The people of Kaunas were never surprised to witness an amiable chat on the street between a feebleminded individual and a wise soul or between an authoritative clergyman and a KGB agent who had been torturing him just the day before. Criminals enjoyed spending their time with judges, investigators, and law enforcement officers of all kinds. (Kuncˇius, “Dervisˇas isˇ Kauno” [A Dervish from Kaunas] 272)23

The conversations in the novel are stylistic hybrids, carnivalised dialogues, and, as such, they illustrate a narrative strategy of the novel: hierarchical power relations are made explicit and turned upside-down. In addition to ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ being reversed, ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures are being displaced in conversations that take place in an unexpected or unlikely way. In one example, a professor and a student talk in a nightclub (a striptease bar). Both use language 20 21 22 23

Original Lithuanian: “kauniecˇiu˛ santykiu˛ subtilybes.” Original Lithuanian: “Laikinoji sostine˙.” Original Lithuanian: “lietuvybe˙s tvirtove˙.” Original Lithuanian: “Kauniecˇiai nesistebe˙davo, pamate˛, kaip bicˇiulisˇkai gatve˙je sˇnekucˇiuojasi silpnaprotis su isˇmincˇium, autoritetingas dvasininkas su vakar ji˛ kankinusiu kage˙bistu. Kriminaliniai autoritetai smagiai leido laika˛ su teise˙jais, tyre˙jais ir kitu˛ moscˇiu˛ teise˙saugininkais” (italics in the original).

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that is punctuated by Russian swear words and vulgarities that are reminiscent of how the criminal underworld speaks. In another conversation, a dignified old countess delivers a review of a theatre performance as if she were an expert art critic and then extends advice to an actor. The problem here is that this conversation takes place in a public restroom, where the old lady works. While the conversation in the first example is too vulgar (considering the status of the interlocutors), the one in the second example is too refined, pompous, and pretentious (considering the place in which it takes place). The age of the interlocutors is also significant, because neither an old woman nor a young man typically wields much power in society at large. The professor initially tries to be polite and addresses the student by using the formal second person pronoun (which raises the young man to be closer to the professor’s social status), but he later resorts to the young man’s unceremonious style (which lowers the professor to the young man’s social status). Characteristic of both conversations is that they take place in peripheral districts of Kaunas that lack prestige. These dialogues are not only visually differentiated in the text, but they are also intentionally crafted stylistic hybrids which expose and explicitly foreground the dialogical nature of each interlocutor. In Bakhtin’s words, “every type of intentional stylistic hybrid is more or less dialogised. This means that the languages that are crossed in it relate to each other as do rejoinders in a dialogue; there is an argument between languages, an argument between styles of language” (76). The “stylistic hybrid,” in other words, “is a dialogue between points of view, each with its own concrete language that cannot be translated into the other” (76). The last scene of A Dervish from Kaunas features the novel’s protagonist, Mecˇislovas, in a shocking event. Mecˇislovas sets fire to a garage in which all the novel’s main characters have gathered to celebrate a dervish orgy. The fire destroys the entire city and, as the text suggests, burns Mecˇislovas, too. The latter scene in the novel links back to an earlier episode re-presenting a real historical fact. The episode refers to Romas Kalanta’s 1972 self-immolation, which was a desperate act of protest against the soviet system. Mecˇislovas repeats the act of setting fire with petrol. He watches the flames from the roof of Church of the Resurrection. Both scenes in the novel and the actual 1972 scenes are related through references that include “petrol,” “guilt,” “fire,” and “death.” Considering the revolutionary potential that is embedded in the apocalyptic imagination, one can interpret Kuncˇius’s apocalyptic text as a novel that is not only interested in depicting an apocalypse, but that is also invested in the future and the preservation of culture: Apocalypses often address the issues of political and social liberation. . . . The apocalyptic revolution is a revolution in the imagination. It entails a challenge to view the

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world in a way that is radically different from the common perception. The revolutionary potential of such an imagination should not be underestimated, because it can foster dissatisfaction with the present and generate visions of what might be. The legacy of apocalypses includes a powerful rhetoric of denouncing the deficiencies of this world. It also includes the conviction that the world as it is now is not the end. It entails an appreciation of a great resource that lies in the human imagination to construct a symbolic world where the integrity of values can be maintained in the face of social and political powerlessness and even of the threat of death. (Collins 283)

A Dervish from Kaunas and Parousia are apocalyptic narratives which both tell a story about secret sects. In the novels, the sects are groups of people who worship some (newly) fabricated gods and prophets. At the same time, the sects are closed to outsiders. The sects in the novels are criticised and, eventually, destroyed. Yet, when the sects face destruction, so does the entire world in both novels. Through total destruction, the novels show that culture is doomed when seclusion and sectarian behaviour prevail. To survive, the narratives suggest, one needs to get rid of sectarian thinking. As an alternative to the sect, the novels introduce islands —both real and as metaphor. The sects are closed to outsiders and thus separated from those who are not members. In a way, the sects are islands, too. However, the novels insist that while sects are destructive, islands are places of safety that can even inspire. In Parousia, Beresnevicˇius evokes the image of an island which protects by emphasising cultural translation as a condition for survival: “islanders are the very best translators and interpreters; such were the Irish monks” (125).24 Furthermore, in Parousia, Lithuania herself is an island—a territory surrounded by water. Many public places in the novel also function like islands of sorts, and examples are a café, a museum, or a particular district of the city. In Kuncˇius’s A Dervish from Kaunas, the island is a place of safety and retreat. An island in the river Nemunas provides a safe haven from the despised Soviet Komsomol School. Aside from inducing pupils to skip classes, the island in the Nemunas had “a magnetic pull on teenagers and made their lively imaginations soar” (Kuncˇius, “Dervisˇas isˇ Kauno” [A Dervish from Kaunas] 323).25 In both novels, the image of an island is related to escaping from an oppressive system. As Gintaras Beresnevicˇius “A system is there in order to crush you. If you are part of it, you are already half-broken. It’s just the way it is—neither good, nor

24 Original Lithuanian: “saliecˇiai – patys geriausi verte˙jai ir interpretatoriai; tokie buvo airiu˛ vienuoliai” (Beresnevicˇius, Paruzija 125). 25 Original Lithuanian: “Kaip magnetas trauke˙ paauglius, audrindama lakia˛ ju˛ vaizduote˛.”

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bad, it breaks you in two. Unless you don a wolf ’s coat. Unless you create an island for yourself” (Paruzija [Parousia] 205).26

5.

Gintaras Beresnevicˇius’s Essays Revisited: Looking for “Mickiewicz”

Rereading Beresnevicˇius’s essays once more in search of the signifier “Mickevicˇius” (Mickiewicz), it was not too surprising to find Mickiewicz mentioned in “Rankrasˇcˇio pabaiga” (“The End of the Manuscript”) and in “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” (“The Memory of Amalgams”)—the very essays that contain the signifiers “dialogas” (dialogue) and “pokalbis” (conversation). Originally published in a periodical in 2000, “The End of the Manuscript” discusses the changes in writing and reading processes after new digital media arrived: “[t]he dialogue with paper is gone” (179).27 In the essay, the thrill of reading a handwritten text becomes tangible when the author describes reading one of Mickiewicz’s letters: Once, in the Vilnius University library, I was reading manuscripts from the first half of the nineteenth century and, among them, several letters by Adam Mickiewicz. A lot of tiny minutiae—brown ink, calligraphy, and paper: watermarked, made with love, durable, lasting several hundred years. Some letters were placed in envelopes with the addresses written something like this: “Mr. Z.’s house, second floor, to Mr. student X.” And the feeling of participation. It is quite different from reading printed texts; you get transported to the nineteenth century just by looking at the faded colouring, which creates a mood much stronger than five monographs put together are capable of creating… And it is not some antique tea-pot I am looking at; the power of the manuscript is much stronger. There is something formidable about it, and maybe, which is why it is so hard to say goodbye to it. To its epoch. (Beresnevicˇius, “Rankrasˇcˇio pabaiga” [“The End of the Manuscript”] 180; ellipsis in the original)28

26 Original Lithuanian: “Sistema yra tode˙l, kad tave triusˇkintu˛. Jei esi jos dalis, vis tiek esi perlauzˇtas. Ji tokia – nei gera, nei bloga, ji perlauzˇia. Nebent – uzˇsivilktum vilko kaili˛. Nebent – susikurtum sala˛.” 27 Original Lithuanian: “Dialogo su popieriumi nebeliko.” 28 Original Lithuanian: “Vilniaus universiteto bibliotekoje kadaise skaicˇiau pirmosios XIX a. puse˙s rankrasˇcˇius, tarp ju˛ – kelis Adomo Mickevicˇiaus laisˇkus. Daugybe˙ menku˛ smulkmenu˛ – rudas rasˇalas, kaligrafija, popierius, tvirtas, su meile pagamintas, dar ne viena˛ sˇimtmeti˛ atlaikysia˛s, su vandens zˇenklais, dar kartais vokai isˇlike˛, adresai mazˇdaug tokie: ‘Pono Z namai, antras auksˇtas, ponui studentui X.’ Ir dalyvavimo poju¯tis. Tai visai kas kita, nei spausdinti tekstu˛ rinkiniai, vien kazˇkoks sunkiai nusakomas koloritas, nuotaika perkelia i˛ XIX a. daug stipriau nei penkios monografijos… Ir cˇia ne koks antikvarinis arbatinis, rankrasˇtis veikia stipriau. Kazˇkas jame slypi, ir gal de˙l to taip sunku su juo atsisveikinti. Su jo epocha.”

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The example of reading Mickiewicz’s letters illustrates the reader’s clearly felt sense of participation, his sense of the other’s presence, and his connection to a bygone era. Mickiewicz again functions like a bridge between past and present in Beresnevicˇius’s “The Memory of Amalgams” originally published in 2001. Here, the topic is a changed perception regarding Lithuanian identity in the twenty-first century, which is juxtaposed to those of other times: “I am all too familiar with the Lithuanian ideal of a homogeneous state, which haunted and led us [Lithuanians] during the entire twentieth century” (Beresnevicˇius, “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 262).29 This (older) perception of Lithuanian identity constructs Lithuania as a monoethnic, monolinguistic and homogeneous state. In the light of such idea of Lithuania, the representatives of the Vilnius Romantic School of the nineteenth century—most of whom wrote in Polish—were perceived as Lithuanians, in the same way as Lithuanian writers of the twentieth century were: Adomas Mickevicˇius [Adam Mickiewicz] was as Lithuanian as Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, only taken away from us by the Poles. Julius Slowackis, Wladislavas Syrokomle˙, the Philomaths and the Philarets—they, too, were Lithuanian in my perception, even though the circumstances had made them Polish. Vilnius and Lithuania were under some sort of prism splitting everything into two colours, white and black, us and them. We saw the years of shared statehood with Poland as Polish occupation, and the Lublin Union was considered to have been a conspiracy. (Beresnevicˇius “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 262–263)30

In the twentieth century, the homogenising line of thought functioned as a defence mechanism. In the twenty-first century, however, such thinking is no longer considered productive, because it leads to discomfiture and leaves gaps in Lithuanians’ understanding of their own cultural history: “[E]thnic purity” allows us to identify, let us say, several dozen Lithuanian books, phrases, names, and ethnographic details in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But looking at these very ages we discomfit by a sense of not having our own history. But our history did not disappear, it fused together [into a coalescence]. And instead of looking for the quicksilver in the alloy maybe it would be better to describe the alloy

29 Original Lithuanian: “Pats puikiai zˇinau lietuvisˇka˛ homogenisˇkos valstybe˙s ideala˛, kuris mus persekiodamas vede˙ per visa˛ XX a.” 30 Original Lithuanian: “Adomas Mickevicˇius buvo toks pat lietuvis kaip ir V. MykolaitisPutinas, tik isˇ mu¯su˛ lenku˛ atimtas; Julijus Slowackis, Władisławas Syrokomle˙ , filomatai, filaretai, ir tie man buvo lietuviai, tiesa, aplinkybiu˛ sulenkinti, bet – lietuviai. Virsˇ viso Vilniaus kaip ir visos Lietuvos kybojo prizme˙, sklaidanti viska˛i˛dvi spalvas, juoda ir balta, mes ir jie. Bendra lenku˛ ir lietuviu˛ praeitis buvo lenku˛ okupacija, Liublino unija – sa˛mokslas.”

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itself—the amalgam. (Beresnevicˇius, “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 266)31

Beresnevicˇius’s comparison of identity with an amalgam, a blend or a mixture, coalescence embraces both the essence of Mickiewicz’s identity and that of Lithuania: In the complicated history of Vilnius, the Polish Vilnius—as a town of the Polish state— too, is but a passing moment. The Polish-speaking Vilnius is not the same thing as the Polish Vilnius. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, everyone, from the Freemasons and the Szubraws’ Society [Society of Scoundrels] to the Romantics, celebrated Lithuanianness in Polish. The matter was Polish, but the spirit—fervently Lithuanian. (“Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 265; emphases in the original)32

Adam Mickiewicz was a representative of the Vilnius Romantic School, and the sign “Mickiewicz” thus becomes a metaphor for the mixed, hybrid nature of cultural and national identities and a signifier that foregrounds the ethnic impurity of cultural identity. “The Memory of Amalgams” is actually a review of Pokalbiai apie atminties ateiti˛ (Conversations about the Future of Memory), a compilation of speeches by Günter Grass, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Tomas Venclova.33 The essay-review tells us how the speeches have changed the narrator’s perspective regarding Lithuanian identity and invites “us” (Lithuanians) to adopt another’s, Czesław Miłosz’s viewpoint. Beresnevicˇius quotes several “unpleasant” sentences from Miłosz’s speech, which “were like a kick to the shins” (“Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 264)34 and which “took [him] half a year to take in” (“Amalgamu˛ atmintis” 261).35 Yet the narrator urges readers to listen to Miłosz, because “Miłosz is our old friend, probably the last true citizen of the

31 Original Lithuanian: “Toks ‘etninis grynumas’ leidzˇia mums, tarkime, XVII–XVIII a. isˇskirti keliasdesˇimt lietuvisˇku˛ knygu˛, fraziu˛, vardu˛, etnografiniu˛ smulkmenu˛, – tacˇiau kaip tik sˇiais amzˇiais mes sutrinkame neturi˛ savos istorijos. Tacˇiau ji nedingo, ji susilyde˙. Ir gal vercˇiau bu¯tu˛ ne iesˇkoti gyvsidabrio lydinyje, o aprasˇine˙ti pati˛ lydini˛. Amalgama˛.” 32 Original Lithuanian: “Sude˙tingoje Vilniaus istorijoje ir lenkisˇkas Vilnius kaip Lenkijos valstybe˙s miestas te˙ra akimirksnis; o lenkisˇkai kalbantis Vilnius ne˙ra tas pats, kas lenkisˇkas Vilnius. XIX a. pradzˇioje visi, nuo masonu˛ ir sˇubravcu˛ iki romantiku˛ literatu˛, lenkisˇkai sˇe˙lo lietuvybe. Materija lenkisˇka, dvasia perde˙m lietuvisˇka.” 33 Pokalbiai apie atminties ateiti˛ = Gespräche über die Zukunft der Erinnerung = Rozmowy o przyszlos´ci pamie˛ci (2001) was compiled by Martin Wälde. The speeches, published in the book, were written by three Nobel Prize winners (Grass, Miłosz, and Szymborska) and Tomas Venclova, a Lithuanian poet, for the purpose of a meeting held in Vilnius in October 1–2, 2000. 34 Original Lithuanian: “buvo kaip spyris ˛i pakinklius” (Beresnevicˇius, “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” 264). 35 Original Lithuanian: “cˇia labiausiai lietuviu˛ skaitytojui uzˇkliu¯va Czesławo Miłoszo tekstas, kuri˛ priimti man pacˇiam reike˙jo gal gero pusmecˇio, isˇ pradzˇiu˛ jis atstu¯me˙.”

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State of Both Nations, a Lithuanian in Polish (or a Pole in Lithuanian)” (Beresnevicˇius, “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 262).36 In her comment on Fabian’s concept of culture as a process of confrontation, Mieke Bal writes that confrontation and negotiation are the very activities through which “the cultural” emerges, and she explains that “the cultural” is always necessarily political, while the political “happens” in the cultural. . . . But it is also too easy—too generalising—to identify the cultural with the political. Although they can never be severed, the two domains are distinguished by a difference of perspective. . . . Allegedly cultural negotiations can ostensibly be focused on seemingly mundane issues and superfluous things, while political ones concern disagreement and (group) identities (and their interests). Only if we understand that the former determine how we consider the latter—determine, in other words, if we are able to debate what bothers us, emotionally, aesthetically, in someone else’s “culture” as antagonistic instead of casting it out as inimical—can the bond between the cultural and political be put to socially productive use. (Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak 57–58)

Beresnevicˇius’s “The Memory of Amalgams” is an example of the (productive) bond between the cultural and the political that Bal describes, because the essay represents a process of confrontation and negotiation. The essayist identifies the bothersome parts of Miłosz’s speech, but by choosing not to “cast them out as inimical,” the writer comes to advocate a new mode of thinking: We should probably create new categories—or at least agree on which from among the existing ones to use or not to use—and develop nuanced definitions for each category. For example, the Republic of Both Nations . . ., however Polonised, is not Poland. And we [Lithuanians] are not newcomers, but the quicksilver, melted and amalgamated with various other metals. It is time to interpret the historical and cultural traditions of Lithuania and Vilnius as an amalgam, an alloy. . . . [A] homogeneous Polish or Slavic Vilnius is a myth, and we should also admit that a purely Lithuanian Vilnius is a myth, too. At this point, we need to begin to rely on other categories—on those that apply to talking about amalgams. We will find a wholly different vocabulary and an altered way of thinking, whose principles can be discerned in the analyses carried out by Grass, Venclova, and Miłosz of their own amalgams. (Beresnevicˇius, “Amalgamu˛ atmintis” [“The Memory of Amalgams”] 265)37 36 Original Lithuanian: “Miłoszas, senas mu¯ su˛ draugas, Abieju˛ Tautu˛ valstybe˙ s ar ne paskutinis pilietis, lietuvis lenkisˇkai (ar atvirksˇcˇiai), tad i˛ jo zˇodzˇius i˛siklausyti privalome.” 37 Original Lithuanian: “Tikriausiai reike˙tu˛ susikurti naujas kategorijas ar bent jau susitarti, kurias isˇ jau esancˇiu˛ju˛ naudoti ir kokia˛ niuansuote˛ teikti kiekvienai sa˛vokai. Kad ir Abieju˛ Tautu˛ Respublika… Kad ir kaip polonizuota, tai ne Lenkija. Ir mes – ne ate˙ju¯nai, mes – gyvsidabris, lietas su ˛ivairiausiais metalais, ir istoriniu bei kultu¯rologiniu pozˇiu¯riu Lietuvos bei Vilniaus tradicija jau privalo bu¯ti aisˇkinama kaip amalgama, kaip lydinys. Tam tikrai metas. Tacˇiau homogenisˇkai lenkisˇkas, slavisˇkas Vilnius – mitas. Matyt, jau turime pripazˇinti, kad ir grynai lietuvisˇkas Vilnius. O cˇia jau ture˙tume imti ma˛styti kitom kategorijom, tokiom, kurios galioja kalbant apie amalgamas. Tai jau kitas zˇodynas ir kitas ma˛stymas: isˇ esme˙s jo principus galima ˛izˇvelgti Grasso, Venclovos, Miłoszo zˇvilgsniuose i˛ savas amalgamas.”

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Beresnevicˇius inscribes the Conversations about the Future of Memory in the subtitle of his essay. Titles and subtitles, according to Gérard Genette, are paratexts that function as “thresholds of interpretation,” inflecting the way we read and interpret a text. In the case of “The Memory of Amalgams” and “The End of the Manuscript,” their titles and the subtitle guide the reader to interpret references to Mickiewicz in relation to the historical, national, and literary discourses of memory, in relation to blending, ending (of history or tradition), and to writing, in general. One could also argue that in Beresnevicˇius’s essays the paratextual references to the past (end, memory) and the future (in the subtitle) describe Mickiewicsz’s position in the literary and cultural imaginations of Lithuanians: albeit a figure of the past, no future can be envisioned that does not include him.

6.

Conclusion

In the essays and novels discussed in this chapter, an aesthetic exploration of Lithuanian identity becomes possible as the writers create distance in time and in space: by looking through the eyes of a stranger, for instance, or by choosing an unusual angle (as in Beresnevicˇius’s Parousia, where, due to the bird’s-eye view, Lithuania looks like an island and is surrounded by waters). Texts and people from different cultures play an important role in these literary works, and narrators encounter them, talk with them, and argue with them. New facets of being emerge from texts, and dialogue, indeed, functions as a means of traveling to unexplored territories of thought, of creating an extraordinary experience, or of establishing a distance from the ordinary and the known. An exploration of modern Lithuanian identity by traveling to the past is a central aspect of both Kuncˇius’s and Beresnevicˇius’s texts. For both writers, cultural identity is shaped by a dialogue between an authentic/documented or fictive past and the present. My reading of the essays and novels shows that the “intertextual sign” (the name and the voice of) Mickiewicz is almost inevitably part of a discussion about contemporary Lithuanian identity. Why Mickiewicz? Why the familiar and unfamiliar voices from the nineteenth century? Why these “skeletons” from “our Lithuanian closet of history,”38 as Beresnevicˇius puts it in “Elito identitetas” ([“The Identity of Elite”] 275). From Beresnevicˇius’s standpoint, dialoguing with the past is an activity through which a cultural tradition can be adapted to challenges created by a globalised world, and history, as he has it, is, “if not a guardian angel itself, then a mirror, which allows us not to confuse our own face with that of another. History constantly 38 Original Lithuanian: “mu¯su˛ lietuvisˇkoje istorijos spintoje apskritai vieni griaucˇiai.”

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challenges identity. Otherwise, without challenges, it cannot endure” (Beresnevicˇius, “Tu¯kstantis metu˛ be penkiu˛ dvylika [Thousand Years Five to Twelve”] 371).39 For the process of translating Lithuanian cultural tradition into current concepts about Lithuanian identity, Mickiewicz is an important sign, name, and voice. To be identified or perceived, the self needs something from the outside, and the ‘something’ may well cause discomfort: And as for me, cold gives me identity: I am freezing, hence I exist. This is such a strong sense of self-awareness, and it gives me focus and concentration. Summer heat dissolves, whereas winter cold solidifies everything into a solid structure. Even water. In summer, rain nourishes identity. Thankfully, it rains a lot in Lithuania: God is watering identity. (Beresnevicˇius, “Elito identitetas” [“The Identity of Elite”] 275)40

If, as Beresnevicˇius writes, heat dissolves identity and cold condenses it, it follows that identity is not like an inflexible object, but more like a metal, which can be solid or liquid, and the writer’s metaphor of modern Lithuanian identity as an amalgam is dialogic: interaction with outside forces gives identity its structure. Mickiewicz, as a sign, name, and voice, too, has a place among outside forces that can cause ‘discomfort.’ On the one hand, the themes of ‘cold’ and ‘discomfort,’ in addition to images of the dead body and the skeleton, are present in Mickiewicz’s play, Forefathers’ Eve. On the other hand, the discourse about Mickiewicz’s peculiar place in an otherwise neatly organised Lithuanian literary and cultural tradition contains elements of ‘discomfort.’ Beresnevicˇius’s cycle of postmodern literary anecdotes “Isˇ gyvenimo rasˇytoju˛ Lietuvos” (“From the Lives of Writers of Lithuania”), for instance, shows Mickiewicz as one among many Lithuanian classics, but also notes how Mickiewicz, unlike other writers, is constantly misidentified and misrecognised. However, the sign “Mickiewicz” in the texts analysed in this chapter relates to notions of love, friendship, and participation. The (inter)textual duality implied by signs connoting coldness or warmth points to strong emotional tensions and contradictions which, in turn, correlate with Mickiewicz’s role in the modern Lithuanian cultural narrative. When they write about cultural dialogue in relation to Lithuanian identity, Mickiewicz—as a name, a voice, and a text—is significant for Beresnevicˇius and Kuncˇius, because both writers are engaged in postmodernist aesthetic explorations of contemporary Lithuanian identity. Mickiewicz’s name in their texts is 39 Original Lithuanian: “. . . jei ne angelas sargas, tai veidrodis, leidzˇiantis savo veido nesupainioti su kitais. Istorija, nuolat metanti isˇˇsu¯kius identitetui. Kitaip, be tu˛ isˇˇsu¯kiu˛, jo neisˇlaikysi.” 40 Original Lithuanian: “Man tai identiteta˛ suteikia sˇaltis, sˇa˛lu, vadinasi, egzistuoju, stiprus savimone˙s poju¯tis, sutelkiantis ir sukaupiantis, vasara˛ karsˇtis viska˛ tirpdo, o sˇaltis viska˛ pavercˇia struktu¯ra. Net vandeni˛. O vasara˛ identiteta˛ stiprina lietus. Ne veltui Lietuvoje lyja, Dievulis identiteta˛ laisto.”

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both like a hinge on and a skeleton in the closet of cultural identity. The authors’ “memorious reprise” also betrays a sense of insecurity about the postmodern subject. Most references to Mickiewicz in these texts are accompanied by signs of threat, war, death, or apocalypse, and Mickiewicz is brought in as an interlocutor for liminal cultural dialogues (usually in scenes where confrontations occur between two different civilisations or cultures, between two distinct eras, or between an ending and a beginning). No matter what the specific context, however, the sign “Mickiewicz” is central for those who wish to begin a discussion about linguistic, national, and historical elements of modern Lithuanian identity, and also for those who think about the links between integration, struggle, revolt, (geo)politics, war, and literature.

Works Cited Bal, Mieke. “Heterochrony in the Act: The Migratory Politics of Time.” Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency. Ed. Mieke Bal and Miguel Á Hernández-Navarro. Brill, 2011. 211–238. ProQuest Ebook Central. Web. 25 October 2021. Bal, Mieke. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. EBSCOhost. Web. 27 October 2021. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holguist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin (Tex.): U of Texas, 1985. University of Texas Press Slavic Ser. No. 1. Print. Beresnevicˇius, Gintaras. “Amalgamu˛ atmintis.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ sa˛jungos leidykla, 2003. 260–266. Print. –. Ant laiko asˇmenu˛. Vilnius: Aidai, 2002. Print. –. “Atlaikyti Ve˙lines.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 63–70. Print. –. “Barbarai.” Ant laiko asˇmenu˛. Vilnius: Aidai, 2002. 8–26. Print. –. “Elito identitetas.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 275–281. Print. –. “Eseistikos tendencijos moderniojoje Lietuvoje.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 282–292. Print. –. “Isˇ gyvenimo rasˇytoju˛ Lietuvos.” Pabe˙ge˛s dvaras. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2005. 124–145. Print. –. “Me˙ginant susivokti.” Ant laiko asˇmenu˛. Vilnius: Aidai, 2002. 96–105. Print. –. “Nesusikalbe˙jimo metas.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 182–192. Print. –. “Partizanisˇka laisve˙.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 352–355. Print. –. Paruzija. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2005. Print. –. “Po dabarties.” Ant laiko asˇmenu˛. Vilnius: Aidai, 2002. 148–153. Print.

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–. “Rankrasˇcˇio pabaiga.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 177–182. Print. –. “Tiu¯bingenas, rudens pasaka.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 303–320. Print. –. “Tu¯kstantis metu˛ be penkiu˛ dvylika.” Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. 356–371. Print. –. Vilku˛ saulute˙: eseistika. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2003. Print. Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998. Print. ˇ ersˇkute˙, Ju¯rate˙. “Herkus Kuncˇius.” Books from Lithuania: Fiction and Essays. Trans. Karla C Gruodis et al. Vilnius: Lithuanian Culture Instittute, 2016. 14–17. Print. Donskis, Leonidas. Baigiamasis zˇodis. Lietuvio ir lenko pokalbis. By Piotr Ke˛pin´ski and Herkus Kuncˇius. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016. 167–172. Print. Gailiu¯te˙, Gabriele˙. “Gintaras Beresnevicˇius.” Best Books from Lithuania. Vilnius: International Cultural Programme, 2013. 12. Print. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Ke˛pin´ski, Piotr, and Herkus Kuncˇius. Lietuvio ir lenko pokalbis. Trans. Vaiva Grigaitiene˙. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016. Print. Ke˛pin´ski, Piotr. “Pamatyti kitomis akimis.” Lietuvio ir lenko pokalbis. By Piotr Ke˛pin´ski and Herkus Kuncˇius. Transl.Vaiva Grigaitiene˙. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016. 13–14. Print. Korte, Barbara. “Travel Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2008. 619–620. Print. Kuncˇius, Herkus. “Bendros vietos.” Lietuvio ir lenko pokalbis. By Piotr Ke˛pin´ski and Herkus Kuncˇius. Transl. Vaiva Grigaitiene˙. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016. 11–12. Print. –. “Dervisˇas isˇ Kauno.” Dviveidis romanas. Vilnius: Kultu¯ros barai, 2015. 239–423. Print. –. Pramanytos ˇsalies pasakojimai. Vilnius: Gelme˙s, 2015. Print. –. Trys mylimos. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ s-gos leidykla, 2014. Print. Michnikas, Adamas. ˛Izˇanga: Pagarba pokalbiui. Lietuvio ir lenko pokalbis. By Piotr Ke˛pin´ski and Herkus Kuncˇius. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016. 7–10. Print. Moraru, Christian. Memorious Discourse. Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005. Google Book Search. Web 8 July 2018. Venclova, Tomas. “Native Realm Revisited: Mickiewicz’s Lithuania and Mickiewicz in Lithuania.” Lituanus 53.3 (2007): n. pag. lituanus.org. Web. 10 July 2020. . “susikalbe˙ti” Lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas. www.lkz.lt. Jan. 2018. Web. 3 Nov. 2021. Thomas, Bronwen. “Dialogue.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 80–93. Print. Zˇemaite˙ (Julija Beniusˇevicˇiu¯te˙-Zˇymantiene˙). Tris mylimos: komedija trijuose aktuose. South Boston, Mass.: Isˇleista su pagelba So. Bostono Darbininkisˇkos Kuopos, 1907. epaveldas.lt. Web. 10 June 2017.

Kristina Aurylaite˙

Chapter 3 – ‘Remix Culture’: Intertexts, Appropriations, and Other Forms of Cultural Dialogue in Contemporary Lithuanian Experimental Poetry

1.

Introduction

In a poem in the collection XXI a. Kudirka (2016 [Kudirka of the 21st Century]), Zˇygimantas Kudirka (b. 1987) asks: “Can believing in the future, as opposed to garnering inspiration from the past, be the source of our strength?” (7).1 The question references and, simultaneously, refutes a line from Vincas Kudirka’s (1858–1899) “Tautisˇka giesme˙” (1989 [“National Song”]).2 “National Song” is Lithuania’s official National Anthem and calls upon Lithuanians to seek strength in the past. In the essay “Mu¯su˛ likimo data—Lietuvos Respublikos sˇimtmetis” (“The Date of Our Destiny—The Centennial of the Lithuanian Republic”), written in 2016 with the 2018 centennial anniversary of Lithuanian statehood in mind, Lithuanian literary critic Viktorija Daujotyte˙ cites the slogan proposed for the centennial celebrations, which is: “Inspired by the Future” (“Mu¯su˛ likimo data”). This slogan, like Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s question, seems to be openly irreverent about the past. Daujotyte˙ insists that while it is masterful, the phrase is a mere advert, a construct, “pompous” and devoid of substance. The future, Daujotyte˙ argues, is always rooted in the present, and the latter—in the past; without recognising these connections, future is a hollow concept that cannot inspire (“Mu¯su˛ likimo data”). Somewhat ironically, despite Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s obvious favouring of the future, his strategies in the collection rely on the past: several of his poems are what he himself calls “remixes” of pre-existing texts, which he rearranges and transforms according to his own agenda (14, 31–34, 37, 40, 47–48, 49). Many of the texts selected for various makeovers are also explicitly not contemporary; they range from prayers, such as the “Pater Noster,” and the Lithuanian National Anthem to the work of famous Lithuanian poet, Salome˙ja Ne˙ris (1904–1945). Kudirka is not the 1 In the original: “Ar galima semtis stiprybe˙s ne isˇ praeities, o isˇ tike˙jimo ateitimi?”; here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translation mine. 2 The text can be found in Vincas Kudirka’s Laisvos valandos (Idle Hours 43).

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only contemporary Lithuanian poet who engages in dialogues with pre-existing texts, which are appropriated and transformed or “remixed.” In this chapter, I aim to explore the ways in which two poets, Zˇygimantas Kudirka and Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius (b. 1973), both known for their experiments with poetic forms, engage in a reflective dialogue with other writers’ work by remixing it. In their poems, this dialogue does not imply any critique against the canon, or the “classics,” nor does it produce counter messages (as was the case, some might argue, with postmodernist revisionism). Instead, both poets foreground dialogue as a process which opens selected source texts for unlimited re-readings, and allows the contemporary poets to negotiate and articulate their own space in the literary tradition. In addition, the poets’ dialogues constitute an “intercultural dialogue”; when they rework or remix traditional material in new contexts for contemporary readers, the poets point to the continuum that links the past with the present and, significantly, also suggest, that despite the links, the past and the present are different realms, different “cultures.”

2.

Remix as Culture, Discourse, and Practice

The links to the past in ways that poets like Zˇygimantas Kudirka or Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius establish and explore them, and their play with what Marjorie Perloff, in “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric,” has described as “déja dit” (“already said”), have a quality differentiating these engagements from more familiar techniques which rely on borrowing (such as adaptation, intertextuality, pastiche, or parody) (“Poetry on the Brink”). Their poetry, albeit in different ways, is informed and influenced by digital information technologies, which have transformed language into substance. Language can now be perceived as material, quantifiable, movable, pliable, and mutable, and it is valued not only for what it “says” but also for what it “does”: for instance, the poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith foregrounds that “[w]ords very well might be written not to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated” (xxi, xviii, xix).3 Goldsmith argues that writing needs to adapt to and “redefine itself” in these new conditions, when writers are faced with the overwhelming quantity and accessibility of texts transformed into digital data: “digital media has set the stage for a literary revolution,” enticing writers to imitate the workings of the computer as well as practices introduced by social media (xvii–xviii). Notably, the newfound materiality of language invites an approach that entails essentially physical acts when engaging with pre-existing texts. Goldsmith calls these acts “re-gestures,” such as sharing, re-blogging, re-tweeting, or re-posting, but also, and more importantly, 3 See also Craig Dworkin, “The Fate of Echo” xxxvi, xlii.

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re-formatting, and re-arranging the material accessed online, rather than focusing on rewriting or revising its content (xviii–xix).4 The term that has become central in describing the various appropriative procedures undertaken in the digital environment is “remix.” This is how Zˇygimantas Kudirka identifies many of his poems in the collection, and it is also the term used by one of the voices in the poem “Interviu su Kudirkos paminklu” (“Interview with the Statue of Kudirka”): “Has the copyright of the national anthem expired yet? Is it now available for sampling? What is your opinion about remix?” (7).5 These lines capture the essence of cultural practices of appropriation which are informed by and involve digital technologies: selection and reworking of pre-existing material, undertaken by using digital tools in order to, as Lev Manovich would have it, “create particular aesthetic, semantic, and/or bodily effects” (“Remix Strategies in Social Media” 142). Different from the more familiar intertexts or collages, contemporary remixes thrive on the unprecedented availability of material in digital form. As Goldsmith explains, “[t]he previous forms of borrowing in literature —collage or pastiche, taking a sentence from here, a sentence from there—were predicated on the sheer amount of manual labor involved: to retype an entire book is one thing, and to cut and paste an entire book is another. The ease of appropriation has raised the bar to a new level” (xix). The concept of remix is broader than describing computer-inspired writing techniques rooted in appropriation, and it is closely linked to recent advancements in technologies of mechanical reproduction.6 The origins of remix are usually traced back to the New York City disco and hip hop music communities of the 1970s, specifically DJ performers’ experiments on turntables, which soon spread to major cities worldwide. Starting in the late 1990s, remix practices developed into “an organic international movement . . . , which is closely linked to open source and do-it-yourself (DIY) activities that became relevant on the internet around that time,” as well as to Web 2.0 and social media with their emphasis on user-generated content and collaboration.7 Of importance here is the emphasis on the newly and increasingly active role of the internet and the media user, who becomes crucial in “activating the material” (Navas, Remix Theory 75) online by incessantly filtering, sampling, and sharing it. Lev Manovich similarly notes that new media has replaced the traditional pattern of cultural communication according to which information moved “in one direction,” from 4 See also Dworkin, “The Fate of Echo” xlii. 5 In the original: “Ar tautisˇkos giesme˙s autorine˙s teise˙s nustojo galios? Ar jus galima sempluoti? Ka˛ manote apie remiksa˛?” 6 For more detailed information, see Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough, “Introduction” 1−12, and Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory 4, 17−27. 7 For further detail see Navas, Gallagher, and Burrough 1−12; Navas 4, 20, 35−63, and Manovich, “Remix Strategies in Social Media” 138.

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a source to a receiver, with a more fluid one, in which the reception point has become “just a temporary station on information’s path” before it is further reshared (“Remix Strategies in Social Media” 145). This change foregrounds new forms of interactivity and collaboration in communication, in which recipients of information vigorously reject the finiteness of messages delivered to them. This is evident, for instance, in public comments sections of news portals or social media pages. Moreover, with progressively larger numbers of application software offering various tools for editing images, sound, and videos, users are enticed not only to comment upon, but also to literally modify or even fully recycle sampled material before re-sharing it, granting them another form and experience of participatory power—especially when particularly appealing remixes go viral. Such activities reveal the willingness of individual internet users to participate in public discourse and to manifest their relationship with the social fabric on their own terms, even though these are not necessarily always constructive (as is obvious from hate speech online or the performance of internet trolls). Various critics have shown how it is the digital and, particularly, the new media technologies that have given users tools enabling unprecedented “collaborative remixability,” to borrow Barb Dybwad’s phrase (qtd. in Manovich, “Remix Strategies in Social Media” 145). This “remixability” is a form of social participation as well as “democratisation of production and a socialisation of reception” (Tavares 199).8 Significantly, users can exploit these tools to explore, fashion, and assert their own subjectivity, their social roles, and their social performance in new ways since the social space has expanded to include the digital environment. At the same time, these tools have also engendered new behavioral patterns and social norms. Among these patterns are the need to “constantly sta[y] connected” and to compulsively sample and (re)share content (Navas, Remix Theory 75, 124–125).9 John Lanchester’s recent essay, “You Are the Product: It Zucks!,” for instance, examines the ways in which social media manipulate the users’ behavior through algorithms which select and filter what information to make available to them (“You Are the Product”). When remix is an ‘obedient’ response to what technologies/algorithms seduce users to do, remix is, to use Navas’ words, “regressive” and “parasitical”; it merely ensures constantly “regenerated” data flow, but users do not critically scrutinize the information they receive and mechanically re-share (Remix Theory 73). On the one hand, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, remix has become a term to describe many “cultural trends in digital media,” as Lawrence 8 See also Legier Biederman and Joshua Callaghan 6; Navas, Remix Theory 75−76, 120–124; Manovich, Software Takes Command 84, 329−334; Manovich, “Remix Strategies” 145−146. 9 See also Manovich, “Remix Strategies in Social Media”; Manovich, Software Takes Command.

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Lessig asserts; on the other hand, the same scholar observes, remix also captures the various effects that digital technologies and the internet have “upon how culture is made” (Free Culture 7). Navas sees remix, alternatively, as an attitude, an aesthetic, and a discourse, rather than merely as a practice: Once a specific technology is introduced it eventually develops a discourse that helps shape cultural anxieties. Remix has done and is currently doing this to concepts of appropriation. Remix has changed how we look at the production of material in terms of combinations. This is what enables Remix to become an aesthetic, a discourse that, like a virus, can move through any cultural area and be progressive and regressive depending on the intentions of the people implementing its principles. (Remix Theory 126)

Hence, while the mechanics of reworking pre-existing material to create something different is not an invention of the late 1990s or the early twenty-first century, it is during this period that its application becomes ubiquitous and is no longer limited to artistic practices (e. g., Dada, Conceptual Art, Pop Art, to mention but a few), or practices controlled by economic elites (e. g., media or advertising). As a discourse, then, remix foregrounds how naturalised and mechanical the different appropriation, recombination, editing, and modification practices have become. These naturalisations alter our perception of the issues of legality (Lessig, Free Culture 196, 184–186, 201, 304–306; Lessig, Remix 18, 38, 108–114, 285; Sollfrank) and originality (O’Neil 23–25; Navas, Remix Theory 76– 77, 123, 145, 159). Importantly, they also affect our sense and experience of self, as well as our engagement with the material, the digital, and the social. Legier Biederman and Joshua Callaghan thus feel compelled to pose this question: when many now use digital technologies “organically as extensions of their hands, eyes, ears and mouths, . . . how have [these technologies] altered economies of the self ? What kinds of subjects are we becoming? What kinds of subjects are the millions of people without access to these technologies becoming?” (Biederman and Callaghan 6). Although many users yield to the technological seductions of networked culture without much contemplation, remix also opens space for more critical reflection on the meaning of remix and on the remix practice itself. Eduardo Navas calls these instances “reflexive remix” which “allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the ‘spectacular aura’ of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original” (Remix Theory 66) The emphasis here lies on “challenging” the source by means of the methods which are used to remix it in accordance with intentions and purposes of the remixer. Jamie O’Neil, in “The Remix Aesthetic,” also emphasises “a radical transformation of identity” of the pre-existing entity in remix; yet, the transformed identity is not conclusive and does not function as a new, finite, or “revised” identity (20). Instead, O’Neil contends, remix is its “single enunciation” (23).

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Through remix, one achieves a palimpsestic effect: “[r]emix denies essential identity by maintaining a transparency to the previous context and presents a sophisticated dual image [whereby the previous entity] is not lost [and] there is a co-presence of the past and the present in this embodiment, which mediates between the past and the future via a new vector of the eternally changing” (20). In similar fashion, Navas points to the meta-level that is inherent in remix, and he stresses its dependence on the “authority” of the original material in order to foreground that “the originality of the remix is non-existent, therefore it must acknowledge its source of validation self-reflexively. . . . The material must be recognised, otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism” (Navas, Remix Theory 67). Thus, the crucial element here is not so much the end product, but the process of selecting the sources, as well as devising and implementing procedures to transform them. The latter, in turn, manifest the remixer’s relationship to the appropriated material. Remix has been mainly discussed in the context of media, music, and art, but, thus far, not so much in the context of literature.10 Nonetheless, contemporary conceptual writing, based on the use—and, notably, “strategic misuse”—of preexisting texts, is a good example of reflective remix (Dworkin, Reading the Illegible 5). A conceptual writer’s engagement with the source texts is organised, in Perloff ’s view, by an “appropriative procedure” such as erasure, “transcription, citation, ‘writing-through,’ recycling, reframing, grafting, mistranslating, and mashing” (“Poetry on the Brink”). For Dworkin, this procedure does not “substitute for the writing,” but works to coordinate it: the procedure a writer selects is determined by an underlying idea, the concept for a conceptual text (“The Fate of Echo” 37). The remixer’s ‘conceptual text’ challenges the finitude of the source texts as it reworks and transforms them. In some cases, the focus on the concept and procedure behind conceptual texts can overshadow the textual product itself. As Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman contend, “one does not need to ‘read’ the work as much as think about the idea of the work” (25). Still, even if such texts can sometimes be deliberately unreadable in the traditional sense, the reader is expected to examine and engage with how the procedure selected has transformed the sources in ways other than revising their specific messages (Dworkin, “The Fate of Echo” xxxvii). At this point, the writer’s subjectivity and position in relation to the source material become central because they guide his/her “regesturing” of the text(s), as Goldsmith would have it (xviii–xix), and the procedure on the whole. As Dworkin points out, “impersonal procedures tend to magnify subjective choices” (“The Fate of Echo” 39). For instance, one type of conceptual writing is known as erasure poetry, when a poet literally erases 10 For a recent survey of the field, see The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, eds. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and Xtine Burrough (2015).

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passages of a selected text to come up with new connections between the words and phrases of the original and between the source text(s) and his/her own work.11 The erasure procedure, which connotes censorship and silencing, presupposes violence and often produces a remix that is in opposition to, and in conflict with, the (source) material. At the same time, the procedure can be seen as an instantiation of “productive violence,” to borrow Julia Kristeva’s phrase, which she uses to describe “gestures of confrontation and appropriation, destruction and construction,” whereby an elimination results in the creation of new structures (16). Violent or not, remix entails a form of physical contact, engagement with, and reshaping of the selected material, through which the remixer articulates his/her own subjectivity. As O’Neil puts it, remix “inherently” presupposes “a form of critical dialogue with the ‘original’ or overarching context” (22). How these forms of engagement and critical dialogue with the original text(s) are at play in Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius and Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s poems is the focus of the following section.

3.

Forms of Cultural Dialogue in Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius’s and Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s Poems

In her essay, “Poetry on the Brink,” Marjorie Perloff addresses the question that is also asked by contemporary conceptual poets/writers, namely, “what role, if any, poetry can play in the new world of instantaneous and excessive information” (“Poetry on the Brink”). Included in Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius’s latest poetry collection Zˇodzˇiai (2016 [Words]) is a poem evocatively titled “galbu¯t viskas jau parasˇyta” (“maybe everything has already been written”).12 In it, the poet lists a number of authors and their most famous works, ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to William S. Burrough’s Junkie, and Venedikt Yerofeyev’s Moscow-Petushki. After cataloguing some well or lesser-known details of the writers’ lives, and after having played with the phrasing of some book titles, as in “but then the irrepressible Jules Verne decided to show everyone / where the fishes go to sleep and dove Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (Janusˇevicˇius, “maybe everything has already been written”),13 Janusˇevicˇius ends the poem as follows: 11 For a historical overview of the form, see Travis Macdonald, “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” 12 Translation of the title from Lithuanian into English by Rimas Uzˇgiris (Vilnius Review). 13 Translation into English by Rimas Uzˇgiris (Janusˇevicˇius, “maybe everything has already been written”). In the original: “Tuomet nenuorama Zˇiulis Vernas nusprende˙ visiems parodyti, / kur ve˙zˇiai zˇiemoja, ir ne˙re˙ ‘Dvidesˇimt tu¯kstancˇiu˛ myliu˛ po vandeniu’” (Janusˇevicˇius, “galbu¯t viskas jau parasˇyta” 67).

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unmoved by ocean depths, Romain Gary became a pilot and rose up into the sky then shot himself later Kerouac went out on the road and never came back Mayakovsky shot himself Platonov died of tuberculosis Hemingway shot himself Pushkin didn’t want to do that, so he had to be finished off so what can we add to this? (Janusˇevicˇius, “maybe everything has already been written”)14

While the last stanza foregrounds the existential motif that punctuates the entire poem, the final line, resonating with the poem’s title, voices a concern similar to that formulated by Perloff: what contribution can a poet make in the contemporary world when s/he is overwhelmed by incessant data flows, including the abundance of literary texts in various formats, from printed to digitised (“Poetry on the Brink”). Perloff and Dworkin also give special importance to the stifling repetitiveness of certain techniques and motifs in much of contemporary writing, such as the use of enjambed free verse, “literary phrasing,” and the “present time stimulus —memory—epiphany” structure in poetry (Perloff) or “the hundred-thousandth coming-of-age novel developing psychological portraits of characters amid difficult romantic relationships and family tensions” (Dworkin, “The Fate of Echo” xxxix). In this context, creative engagement with pre-existent texts, instead of crafting new ones, may be a way to escape reliance on formulaic structures. Although the poem titled “maybe everything has already been written” is heavily marked by intertextuality, Janusˇevicˇius does not exploit appropriation in the ways conceptual writers or remixers would. Yet, he toys with techniques of assembling and information processing, not unlike those used in the digital environment (like an internet blog, for example), which typically consist of series of appropriated samples from other texts.15 In “maybe everything has already been written,” Janusˇevicˇius, too, constructs a catalogue of selected data, which are arranged and displayed in the form of a poem, and in which ‘informational 14 Ibid. In the original: “Romenas Gary vandenyno gelme˙ms buvo abejingas, jis tapo laku¯nu ir pakilo ˛i dangu˛ paskui nusisˇove˙ o Keruakas isˇkeliavo ir negri˛zˇo Majakovskis nusisˇove˙ Platonovas mire˙ nuo tuberkulioze˙s Hemingve˙jus nusisˇove˙ Pusˇkinas nepanoro to padaryti, tode˙l teko ji˛ nusˇauti ka˛ cˇia pridursi?” (Janusˇevicˇius, “galbu¯t viskas jau parasˇyta” 67) 15 I am drawing on Navas here (Remix Theory 120−124).

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bits’ are newly activated, or activated in a new way. The information provided in the poem does not communicate anything new to the reader who is familiar with the writers and texts mentioned in the poem, and Janusˇevicˇius refuses to offer any commentaries or insights about his sources. For instance, despite repeated allusions to war in his references to Lev Tolstoy, Erich Maria Remarque, Jaroslav Hasˇek, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Orwell, or to substance abuse in Charles Bukowski’s, Venedikt Yerofeyev’s, and William S. Burroughs’s works, Janusˇevicˇius makes no attempt to address any particularities of these experiences in either the works or their authors’ lives. Rather, in this poem it is the very selection process of the data that lies at the centre, because when dealing with strategies of borrowing and appropriation, “[f]iltering is taste,” as Goldsmith puts it (xix). Looking closely at the poet’s “filtering,” it is easy to notice the absence of Lithuanian writers on the list, and the geography of the references is limited to Russia, France, England, and the USA, with Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and Czech Jaroslav Hasˇek being two notable exceptions. Further, no contemporary texts are included; the most recent text referred to is MoscowPetushki, from 1969. There are no ancient texts, either; the oldest text mentioned dates to 1818 and is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Moreover, despite the fact that Janusˇevicˇius has a reputation as a tireless experimenter with the poetic form (“Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius”), the group of writers known for their literary experimentation is small; perhaps one can say that the only names included in it are surrealist and absurdist Daniil Kharms and magic realist Borges. As such, the collection of “informational bits” provided in Janusˇevicˇius’s poem should probably be regarded as a momentary enunciation of the subjectivity of the remixer caught in a particular configuration of the informational flow, rather than as a finite list of the remixer’s literary influences. The catalogue, after all, can always be updated and modified, and the poem implicitly invites the reader to do so. Thus, while he does not manipulate appropriated language the way conceptual writers do, Janusˇevicˇius, in “maybe everything has already been written,” nonetheless, addresses a concern that conceptual writers share, namely, the question about how to negotiate a place for a writer amid the contemporary overabundance of texts. While Janusˇevicˇius raises the question, Zˇygimantas Kudirka attempts to answer it by openly delving into the aesthetics of remix. Kudirka is straightforward in labelling his poems as conceptual and in positioning himself as a digital native (Kudirka qtd. in Tumasonyte˙). He openly embraces digital tools and even constructs his book, Kudirka of the Twenty-First Century, as an interactive space: time and again, he gives his reader instructions about how to read the poems, asks him/her to press a button (drawn), prompts him/her to follow an internet link, or to email the writer; the reader is thus invited to be an interactive reader-user. Moreover, many poems in the collection follow specific methods and procedures

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that are rooted in appropriation and rely on digital tools. For instance, several of his texts offer catalogues of information similar to the one in Janusˇevicˇius’s poem. In Kudirka’s case, however, all the material is exclusively sampled and copied from various online sources. Such poems include, for example, “X ir Afrikoje X” (“X is X, even in Africa”) and “Be penkiu˛ minucˇiu˛” (“Five minutes to”) (15–16; 40). They are compilations of fragments or complete sentences found online which contain the phrase indicated in each title, both of which, incidentally, are popular colloquialisms in Lithuania. Apart from including brief phrases to identify the context for each bit in “X is X, even in Africa,” Kudirka does not add any commentary of his own. Unlike Janusˇevicˇius’s poem, the two lists in Kudirka are not related to any particular issue or message. One can see them as mere technical exercises in sampling. Kudirka’s lists are not finite; they could be extended or shortened at will, or they could become the basis of a study interested in context (of the colloquialisms themselves, for instance). Yet, the regular repetition of the title phrases throughout each poem structures them by creating a form of parallelism and an impression of cadence. Furthermore, the instructions preceding each poem (about how to read them) draw attention to the poetic form as such (that is, as an intentionally composed, framed, and mediated form), and raise expectations about rhythm/sound to enhance/add to the message of the text. The many different voices brought together in “Five minutes to,” for example, emulate the experience of a contemporary internet user who is bombarded frequently with disconnected bits of unwanted and meaningless information. Because he refuses to rework the phrases and sentences collected online, Kudirka also offers an implicit commentary on our linguistic habits in public discourse: automatic or thoughtless repetitions of the same phrases exposes an excessive dependence on clichés and familiar structures. In other poems, Zˇygimantas Kudirka subjects his material to more transformative procedures. Introducing the poem “Erotinis” (“Erotic”), Kudirka explains it is composed of “the sexiest words in the English language,” appropriated from a YouTube video in which a text-to-speech robot reads such words in English (31). The origin of the list is not specified, but an internet link to the video is provided (Zˇygimantas Kudirka, “Erotinis” [Erotic] 31). These words are then translated into Lithuanian, using a computer translation program, and rearranged to form new clusters, adjusting grammar where necessary (31–34). Thus, the strategy here is almost consumerist, because the poet works with preexisting material already thematically filtered, processed, and translated, in addition to bearing a quality label: “the sexiest words in the English language” (31). Moreover, the label references choices of a distinctly different (English) linguistic culture and blends individual experiences into a single collective. As such, the poem takes a provocative stance against conventional expectations about poetic originality—particularly when dealing with a topic which involves

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intimacy and ‘raw’ emotion. The provocation is further enhanced by the instructions for the poem to be read in the voice of “a long-time member of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union,” an organisation which represents the more conservative literary establishment (31). Yet, the way Kudirka rearranges and edits the list of appropriated words results in a very long series of intricate images that are often unexpected in the erotic context (announced in the poem’s title), but that are also clearly Kudirka’s own constructs. For example: “A naked nurse trains the odor of the nymph / it is the oily opal discharge of opioids” (33).16 As is usual with remixes of appropriated material, neither the series of the images, nor the images themselves are finite as the phrases can be further rearranged into new combinations, including by Kudirka himself. Rather, they manifest the poet’s subjective choices in relation to the material at hand; in this instance, he apparently engages in a provocative play with the expectations about heightened intensity and indirectness, even opacity of poetic language. The principle of remix which Kudirka employs thus resonates with the concern voiced by Janusˇevicˇius’s poem “maybe everything has already been written”—and few would argue that we suffer dearth of love/erotic poems and songs. But Kudirka also offers a resolute response to it: it may be true that much (or even all) has been written, but why should one be satisfied with pre-existing forms and images when an individual reader can radically refresh them through new configurations? A similar strategy is used in Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s series of brief lyrics “Salome˙jos Ne˙ries metamorfoze˙” (“Metamorphosis of Salome˙ja Ne˙ris”). Here, he engages with the work by Lithuanian neoromantic poet Salome˙ja Ne˙ris (1904–1945). For his poems, Kudirka again uses a linguistic corpus. In this case, it is Salome˙jos Ne˙ries poezijos dazˇnumu˛ zˇodynas (The Dictionary of Word Frequency in Salome˙ja Ne˙ris’s Poetry), compiled by Viktoras Alekna. The dictionary is a compilation of all words used in Ne˙ris’s poems and grouped by Alekna, according to grammatical (for example, nouns, adjectives, verbs) and thematic (for example, nature, human being) categories. From this dictionary, Kudirka samples and constructs a set of five brief lyrics (49). Interestingly, though, even if the title of his poem references Ne˙ris, Kudirka does not enter into a dialogue with her texts directly, but through the medium of the aforementioned dictionary. In the dictionary, her poems are already taken apart and the words used in them listed alphabetically and then classified according to parts of speech, indicating the frequency of their usage. Kudirka samples from Alekna’s dictionary and rearranges the words back into poetic stanzas, but his aesthetics is brazenly different from that of his original source, Ne˙ris, and defamiliarises texts that are part of the Lithuanian school curriculum—but minting something ‘new’ from ‘an old currency’ is precisely his aim. The result, in Kudirka’s remix, are brief poems that 16 In the original: “Nuoga slaugytoja ugdo nimfos kvapa˛– / tai riebios isˇskyros opaline˙s opiate.”

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resemble Japanese haiku poems; they do not look like Ne˙ris’s usual stanzas, which are four lines or longer. Also, Kudirka’s rhyming is inconsistent and, when present, is usually internal and thus less soft and melodic, unlike Ne˙ris’s more traditional end rhymes. Ne˙ris’s characteristic diminutives have been made sparse, and nouns are overwhelmed with numerous verbs, frequently used in the infinitive form (like they are in Alekna’s dictionary); these arrangements create strong and assertive cadences and add an air of unbridled energy, aggression even, to the stanzas. Moreover, in the lyric titled “asˇ sˇaizˇus” (“i am strident”),17 most verbs openly denote physical violence: “to rage and smack to smash to gnash / to pound to break a cross / to get delirious – to take away” (Zˇygimantas Kudirka, “asˇ sˇaizˇus” [“i am strident”] 49).18 Some images, such as the comparison “i feel like an ox,”19 in the lyric with the peculiar title “asˇ fiordas” (“i am a fjord”) (Zˇygimantas Kudirka 49) may sound almost parodic, particularly when the reader considers the instruction to read the poem in Ne˙ris’s voice (49) and keeps the pervasive lyricism of her writing and the femininity of her lyrical subject in mind. Kudirka, however, is consistent in this remix: the titles of the lyrics all place “I” in the subject position: “i am a star,” “i am strident,” “i am a fjord,” “i am an airship,” and “i am satiated,”20 even if the identity of the (original) “I” in Ne˙ris’s lyrical poems has been radically transformed through blatant de-romanticising (49). Thus, while Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s remix does not attempt to reject poetic conventions, it works to defamiliarise and reconfigure Ne˙ris’s neoromantic writing. Kudirka’s poems would be seen as completely new texts were it not for the acknowledgement of Ne˙ris in the title and in the instructions on how to read the poems preceding them. Recognising the source is essential in remix (O’Neil 20; Navas, Remix Theory 67). The rearranged text, the remix, needs to be read through a palimpsestic presence of its source(s) in order to expose tensions between them, implicitly or explicitly, because such tensions are suggestive of the remixer’s agenda. Kudirka says in an interview: “I want to show existing things in a new light, to let them pass through the consciousness of the modern human being” (Kudirka qtd. in Tumasonyte˙). He thus “repurposes” the language that is not his own, as Dworkin would have it (“The Fate of Echo” xliii), extricating it from its familiar structures (the poetic stanzas and images that Ne˙ris used), which seem so finite and fixed when they are printed on a page, but which can suddenly become malleable when they are taken apart. His method is arbitrary, and another remixer might well arrange what s/he finds in a different way. Importantly, Kudirka shows that even canonical writing, apparently 17 18 19 20

Original capitalisation. In the original: “nirsˇti ir zˇiebti isˇtasˇkyti sugriezˇti / dauzˇti nulauzˇti kryzˇeli˛ / kliede˙ti – isˇvezˇti.” In the original: “jaucˇiuosi kaip jautis.” In the original: “asˇ zˇvaigzˇde˙”; “asˇ sˇaizˇus”; “asˇ fiordas”; “asˇ orlaivis”; “asˇ sotus.”

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‘fixed’ in how it is reproduced or interpreted, is nonetheless pliant and open to active, new re-readings. In his case, the remix does not target specific messages of the source texts, but it targets the ways in which the (source) texts work. Most significantly, Kudirka’s engaging in a dialogue (even though mediated through a dictionary) with a specific source (that is, Ne˙ris’s poetry), suggests that he positions himself within a particular literary tradition (in Lithuania) and is willing to create a continuity between past and present, as opposed to rejecting the predecessor (and literary tradition) as old-fashioned and irrelevant. Janusˇevicˇius also uses appropriation, and Ne˙ris is one of his targets, too. However, he focuses on a specific text, “Akmene˙lis turi sˇalta˛ sˇirdi˛” (1939 [“A Tiny Stone Has a Cold Heart”]), as opposed to an entire body of writing, and he transforms it even more radically than Kudirka does: where Kudirka foregrounds the text and its constructedness, Janusˇevicˇius obliterates it as illustrated in a side-by-side comparison of Ne˙ris’s poem and its re-writing by Janusˇevicˇius: Salome˙ja Ne˙ris, “Akmene˙lis turi sˇalta˛ sˇirdi˛” (“A Tiny Stone Has a Cold Heart”)

Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius, “Salome˙jos Ne˙ries eile˙rasˇcˇio ‘Akmene˙lis turi sˇalta˛ sˇirdi˛’ kulinarine˙ versija” (“Gastronomic Version of Salome˙ja Ne˙ris’s Poem ‘A Tiny Stone Has a Cold Heart’”)21

Leisk man prie ugnele˙s pasisˇildyt, – Nevaryk ˛i viesˇkelio audras! Akmene˙lis turi sˇalta˛ ˇsirdi˛ – Ir mazˇos nasˇlaite˙s nesupras. Skrenda gerve˙s, skrenda mano dienos, – Kad gale˙cˇiau ranka˛ joms paduot! Asˇ skurdi – skurdesne˙ uzˇ rugienas. – Begaline˙ sˇirdge˙la – ruduo. Iki zˇeme˙s ve˙tra berzˇa˛ lanksto, – Ne berzˇeli˛ – o veikiau mane. – Sˇiandie dar minu asˇ tavo slenksti˛, – O rytoj – tamsioji nezˇinia. Leisk man prie ugnele˙s pasisˇildyt, Nevaryk ˛i rudenio audras! Akmene˙lis turi sˇalta˛ ˇsirdi˛, – Kas ta˛ ˇsirdge˙la˛ rudene˛ besupras?

21 The image of the poem is courtesy of the poet.

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In Janusˇevicˇius’s reworking, which maintains the format of four four-line stanzas of the original poem, all words are substituted with a series of visual icons, meticulously drawn and replicated. Janusˇevicˇius calls this strategy “encryption,” but the visual icons do not exactly match the words, syllables, or letters of Ne˙ris’s text (Janusˇevicˇius, 0+6: zˇodzˇiai-daiktai 41). When the same ones recur, the repetition does not correspond either to the words repeated in the original poems or to the rhyming (abab) or rhythmical structure (trochaic, 5-5-5-5) of her poem. The icons depict food, as this is a “gastronomic version,” but they are completely unrelated to the imagery of the original poem, whose lyrical voice complains about loneliness, neglect, and desperation: the speaker of Ne˙ris’s poem assumes the identity of an orphaned girl, fragile and vulnerable, exposed to autumnal storms, who is asking for shelter. Since the poem was written in 1939, it may metaphorically suggest insecurity in the face of impeding historical cataclysms. The motifs of poverty, cold, solitude, and helplessness, which mark the original poem, in Janusˇevicˇius’s version are substituted with a depiction of physical comfort and domesticity that the availability of food, presented in such detail and abundance, can generate. However, his visual recycling does not offer (or attempt to offer) a counter or alternative message in response to Ne˙ris’s poem. Similar to the remix created by Kudirka, Janusˇevicˇius seems to be targeting the lyricism and pathos of the source text. Nonetheless, despite its blatantly disrespectful take on Ne˙ris’s poem, Janusˇevicˇius’s version derives much of its force from the source text: without the title referencing it and thus foregrounding its palimpsestal presence, his poem would be a series of repetitive visual signs, formatted to resemble the layout of a poem, which would need to be validated through some other verbal signage. Now, when preceded with a straightforward reference to the specific poem by Ne˙ris, Janusˇevicˇius’s text purposefully engages the reader in a detailed comparison of the source and its recycled version as well as in brainstorming new possible ways of reworking them. In the collection 0+6: zˇodzˇiai-daiktai (2006 [0+6: poems-things]), which contains the “gastronomic” version of Ne˙ris’s poem, Janusˇevicˇius similarly reworks two more texts, Kazys Binkis’s (1893–1942) “Ve˙javaikis” (1923 [“A Flight One”]) and Vytautas Montvila’s (1902–1941) “Viltis ne cˇia” (1931 [“Hope Is Not Here”]), offering a peculiar zoological version of the former and a military version of the latter (Janusˇevicˇius, zˇodzˇiai-daiktai [0+6: poems-things] 46–49). There is, again, a deliberate tension between the original poems and their visual “translations,” although, again, the signs Janusˇevicˇius uses do not express specific ideas or emotions the way emojis, for instance, do. Another important aspect is the choice of the texts Janusˇevicˇius selects to “encrypt” in this triptych. It is easy to notice that the three poets referred to in his remixes are of the same generation. Lithuanian literary critic Viktorija Daujotyte˙ singles

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out this particular generation to have decisively shaped Lithuanian national identity and to have established Lithuanian as the national language after the declaration of independence in 1918 (“Mu¯su˛ likimo data”). Each of the three poets died prematurely in the early 1940s, during World War II. At the same time, Lithuania lost its sovereignty and statehood—first to the Soviet Union in 1940, then to the Nazi occupation in 1941, and again to the Soviet Union in 1945. Notable, too, are the poets’ different aesthetics and ideological stances during their lifetimes, as well as their status and reputation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Montvila and his socialist aspirations, for instance, have been almost entirely forgotten, and the poem which Janusˇevicˇius reworks is not even available online. Thus, this small series of recycled texts can be seen as Janusˇevicˇius’s dialogue with the overall context of the first half of the twentieth century and, probably, a commentary on the instability of the canon. However, the context is evoked only implicitly, without necessarily expecting the reader to recognise the poems readily or to remember the details about the three writers’ biographies. Moreover, the gastronomical and zoological encryptions distance the reader from any potential engagement with any messages or ideologies, and may foreground the complete emotional, or even intellectual disconnect that a contemporary Lithuanian reader may feel in relation to them. Zˇygimantas Kudirka, too, subjects several individual texts to remix in his collection, but does so by establishing a clearer relationship to each text. The texts range from Hare Krishna to Scooter’s song “How Much Is Your Love,” to Lady Gaga’s songs, but the Lithuanian texts he selects are, notably, not as contemporary. The most interesting text in his collection is “Tautisˇ…”, a remix of Lithuania’s National Anthem, written by Vincas Kudirka in 1898. A side-by-side comparison of Vincas Kudirka’s “National Hymn” and its remix by Zˇygimantas Kudirka is provided below:

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Vincas Kudirka “Tautisˇka Zˇygimantas Kudirka “Tautisˇ…” giesme˙” (“National Song”) Lietuva, Te˙vyne mu¯su˛, Tu didvyriu˛ zˇeme, Isˇ praeities Tavo su¯nu¯s Te stiprybe˛ semia. Tegul Tavo vaikai eina Vien takais dorybe˙s, Tegul dirba Tavo naudai Ir zˇmoniu˛ ge˙rybei. Tegul saule˙ Lietuvoj Tamsumus prasˇalina, Ir sˇviesa, ir tiesa Mu¯s zˇingsnius telydi.

ka˛ gi, esme˙: Lietuva, Te˙vyne mu¯su˛ Tu, didvyriu˛ zˇeme, Isˇ praeities Tavo su¯nu¯s Te, stiprybe˛ semia. Tegul Tavo vaikai eina Vien takais

Tegul meile˙ Lietuvos Dega mu¯su˛ sˇirdyse, Vardan tos Lietuvos Vienybe˙ tezˇydi!22

dorybe˙s Tegul dirba Tavo naudai Ir zˇmoniu˛ ge˙rybei Tegul saule˙ Lietuvoj Tamsu mus prasˇalina, Ir sˇviesa, ir tiesa Mu¯s zˇingsnius telydiTe gulmeile˙… Lietu(s)… vos Degam u¯su˛ ˇsirdyse Vardan tos Li etu… vos Vienybe˙ tezˇydi!

22 Birute˙ Jatautaite˙’s translation from Lithuanian into English (1994): “National Song (Anthem)” Lithuania, our homeland, Land of worshiped heroes! Let your sons draw their strength From our past experience. Let your children always follow Only roads of virtue, May your own, mankind’s well-being Be the goals they work for. May the sun above our land Bannish darkening clouds around Light and truth all along Guide our steps forever.

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“Tautisˇ…” is a straightforward example of how language can be used as malleable matter. As Zˇygimantas Kudirka explains in the introduction preceding his poem, the ‘method’ in this case is to move words, often broken into syllables, closer to one another or further apart, thereby introducing new spaces and clusters, sometimes producing different phrasing and messages that are often witty and humorous due to their unexpectedness. For instance, the very first line of the remix, which is, in fact, part of the title of the original text, reads, “thus, the point” (Zˇygimantas Kudirka, “Tautisˇ…” 56).23 The remixed text does not do anything radical or deliberately parodic, although the very choice to remix the National Anthem of one’s country may seem provocative. Therefore, the poem is labeled by the poet as “an almost illegal remix” (Zˇygimantas Kudirka, “Tautisˇ…” 56). Kudirka picks the source text apart, but there is no evidence that he wants to question or parody the Anthem. Nor does the remix convey any scepticism about (or distrust in) the ideology of the nineteenth century nationalism that is prominent in the (source) text, whose line “your sons” is seen as discriminatory by some because of its exclusion of women: for instance, in 2012, the perceived gender bias prompted a group of Lithuania’s feminist poets to rewrite the anthem, replacing all words referring to men and masculinity with their feminine equivalents so that, for instance, “your sons” becomes “your daughters” and “fatherland” turns into “motherland” (see Kiure˙). What Zˇygimantas Kudirka achieves by moving words and syllables is primarily a major change in the structure of the poem: Vincas Kudirka’s four-line stanzas, regularly rhymed (abab) and rhythmical (trochees, 4-3-4-3), are rewritten as free verse; that is, the text is literally liberated from its carefully constructed layout, and, most importantly, sound pattern. Sound is crucial in this case: the National Anthem is to be sung, not read. The breaking up of the stanzas and lines in the remix introduces many more pauses, freeing the text from the enchanting effect of its regular beat and pathos. Thus, Zˇygimantas Kudirka is effectively “DJing” with the Anthem, producing a new musical arrangement instead of the familiar one. The reading Kudirka performs is not finite: once again, his readers are prompted to construct their own versions by toying with both layout and rhythm. The impulse here is to actively reread the text of the Anthem, which, known by heart, has been heard and repeated so often that few pay close attention—and merely mechanically and unreflectively recite it when necessary. This physical moving of words and syllables is thus truly an act of closely scrutinising the text of the Anthem, and the new lineation and rhythm May the love of Lithuania Brightly burn in our hearts. For the sake this land Let unity blossom. (Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, 2006). 23 In the original: “ka˛ gi, esme˙”; translation mine.

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also result in redistributions of emphases and new clusters with different meanings. One of the most striking examples of the latter is a product of breaking up the word “darknesses” (Lith. “tamsumus”), which in the original text functions as the object of the sentence: “Tegul saule˙ Lietuvoj / Tamsumus prasˇalina” (“Let the sun / clear up darknesses in Lithuania”) (Vincas Kudirka, “Tautisˇka giesme˙” 43).24 In the remixed version, the new line says, “It is dark in Lithuania / we are cleared up” (Lith. “Lietuvoj Tamsu / mus prasˇalina”) (Zˇygimantas Kudirka, “Tautisˇ…” 56). While apparently gloomy and contrasting with Vincas Kudirka’s original romantic vision of the bright future, these lines in Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s remix are nonetheless not exactly mocking or disrespectful of the source text. The change in the message is so unexpected that the effect is humorous and entertaining, the more so as the reader is aware that it is a result of processing Vincas Kudirka’s own phrasing. If there is any criticism intended in Zˇygimantas Kudirka’s remix, it seems to be targeting the chorus of disappointed and complaining voices in contemporary Lithuania. Still, even this is dulled by the rest of the text, where changes to the original message are only slight. Thus, the reader is invited to peruse the text and to compare it with the original, in order to engage with his/her own reading of the latter, instead of dismissing the original as an old-fashioned song marked by pathos that may hold little textual appeal today—except in terms of its social and ideological functions.

4.

Conclusion

The poems by Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius and Zˇygimantas Kudirka discussed in this chapter are not the only examples of reflective remixing of pre-existing material. They are suggestive of the ways these poets find inspiration in texts already written, and they illustrate how the poets respond to them in their own writing. Working through explicit acknowledgment and recycling of selected texts (as opposed to intertextual invocations of them), both Janusˇevicˇius and Kudirka openly engage in dialogues with their sources to challenge their structural finitude and their messages. Their work thus foregrounds that even canonical writing, apparently frozen in its status, is nonetheless malleable and open to active new re-readings. In most cases, Janusˇevicˇius and Kudirka are not interested in questioning or rewriting the source texts, or in delving into the contexts that inform them, or in imposing their own values. Instead, they address the status and function of canonical texts in the contemporary cultural space where participants can or do feel detached from former ideologies, norms, and values. Yet, Janusˇevicˇius and Kudirka remix existing texts and thus opt to work from 24 Word-for-word translation mine.

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more than their individual perspectives. Significantly, their method of production exemplifies each poet’s need to be actively engaged with the cultural tradition within which they are trying to negotiate a space for themselves. Thus remix, as a practice, an aesthetic, and an attitude, entails active dialogue and almost physical contact with the sources to rework them. Through remix, therefore, the poets discover novel opportunities to formulate and deliver their own ideas and to also foreground cultural continuity.

Works Cited Alekna, Viktoras. “Salome˙jos Ne˙ries poezijos dazˇnumu˛ zˇodynas” [Dictionary of Word Frequency in Salome˙ja Ne˙ris’ Poetry]. Literatu¯ra ir kalba [Literature and Language]. Ed. Kostas Korsakas. Vol. 16. Poetika ir metodologija [Poetics and Methodology]. Vilnius: Vaga, 1980. 167–423. Print. “Benediktas Janusˇevicˇius.” Vilnius Review. Oct. 5, 2016. Web. 12 Apr. 2021. . Biederman, Legier, and Joshua Callaghan. Introduction. Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus. Art in the Age of Technological Seduction 2.3 (Fall 2006): n. pag. Web. 16 Mar. 2021. . Daujotyte˙, Viktorija. “Mu¯su˛ likimo data – Lietuvos Respublikos ˇsimtmetis” [The Date of Our Destiny: The Centennial of the Lithuanian Republic]. Lituanistu˛ sambu¯ris. 16 Sept. 2016. Web. 29 Apr. 2021. . Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Print. Dworkin, Craig. “The Fate of Echo.” Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010. xxiii–liv. Print. Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?” Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010. xvii–xxii. Print. Janusˇevicˇius, Benediktas. 0+6: zˇodzˇiai-daiktai. [0+6: poems-things]. Kaunas: Kitos knygos, 2006. Print. Janusˇevicˇius, Benediktas. “Maybe everything has already been written.” Translated by Rimas Uzˇgiris. Vilnius Review. 5 Oct. 2016. Web. 12 April 2021. . Janusˇevicˇius, Benediktas. Zˇodzˇiai [Words]. Vilnius: Zˇiemos zˇodzˇiai, 2016. Print. Kiure, Fiokla Vilma. “Performansas Po Kudirka arba patriarchams paliepus, mums panore˙jus” [Performance Under Kudirka or What Patriarchs Ordered and What We Wished]. Youtube. 24 Sept. 2013. Web. 12 Dec. 2021. . Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Print.

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Kudirka, Vincas. Laisvos valandos [Idle Hours]. Vilnius: Vaga, 1976. Print. Kudirka, Vincas. “National Song (Anthem).” Translated by Birute˙ Jatautaite˙. (1994). Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania. 5 January 2006. Web. 9 January 2020. . Kudirka, Zˇygimantas. XXIa. Kudirka [Kudirka of the 21st Century]. Vilnius: Kitos knygos, 2016. Print. Lanchester, John. “You Are the Product: It Zucks!” London Review of Books 39.8. 17 August 2017. Web. 12 August 2017. . Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. Print. Macdonald, Travis. “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” Jacket 2 38 (2009): n. pag. Web. 12 June 2014. . Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Print. Manovich, Lev. “Remix Strategies in Social Media.” The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Ed. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. 135–153. Print. Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Wien and New York: Springer, 2012. Print. Navas, Eduardo, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. Introduction. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Ed. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. 1–12. Print. Ne˙ris, Salome˙ja. “Akmene˙lis turi sˇalta˛ sˇirdi˛” [A Tiny Stone Has a Cold Heart]. Rasˇtai [Collected Works]. Vilnius: Vaga, 1984. 157. Print. O’Neil, Jamie. “The Remix Aesthetic.” Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus. Art in the Age of Technological Seduction 2.3 (Fall 2006): n. pag. Web. 11 Feb. 2020. . Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” Boston Review. 18 May 2012. Web. 12 September 2014. . Place, Vanessa, and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualism. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2009. Print. Sollfrank, Cornelia. “Copyright Cowboys Performing the Law.” Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Found – Sampled – Stolen – Strategies of Appropriation in New Media 8.2 (Fall 2012): n. pag. Web. 16 Mar. 2021. . Tavares, Monica. “Digital Poetics and Remix Culture: From the Artisanal Image to the Immaterial Image.” The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Ed. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. 192–203. Print. Tumasonyte˙, Jurga. “Zˇygimantas Kudirka: My Poetry is Controlling and Programming.” Interview. Vilnius Review. June 15, 2016. Web. 26 May 2021. .

Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙

Chapter 4 – Natural Boundaries and Urban Fragmentation in the Literary Topographies of Vilnius and Kaunas

1.

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to analyse literary topography of two major cities in Lithuania, Vilnius and Kaunas, focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, and to foreground the role of natural boundaries in urban fragmentation. The focus is on literary representations of distinct social and cultural spaces which are constituted along natural boundaries such as rivers and hills. These geographical features are central in the topography of both cities situated in valleys and surrounded by steep slopes. What is more, both cities are located at confluences of rivers. Vilnius lies at the meeting point of the river Neris, the second longest river of the country, and the rivulet Vilnia. Kaunas is situated at the crossing point of the Neris and the Nemunas, the largest river in Lithuania. The rivers create geographical boundaries within the city space, leading to its fragmentation along social, ethnic and cultural lines, the textualisation of which is the focus of the present analysis. It has been pointed out that the urban space of Vilnius was used as a setting of literary works more frequently than that of Kaunas and thus received more critical attention by literary scholars (Kelertiene˙ 176–191; Kale˙da 128–139; Briedis 11–17).1 This can be related to the fact that, after receiving the Magdeburg city law in 1387, Vilnius has been the capital of Lithuania with a few exceptions over the course of centuries. Furthermore, Vilnius has nearly always been a multicultural city “where Muslim Tatars from Crimea, Lutheran German merchants, Jewish craftsmen, the Catholic Lithuanian and Polish elite, pagan-leaning Lithuanian commoners and Orthodox Ruthenians lived side-by-side, each group building their own temples in their own streets and districts” (Zˇemaitis, “History 1 An exception to the relatively scarce academic interest in literary research on Kaunas is the study Literatu¯rine˙ Kauno regiono savimone˙ (The Literary Self-Consciousness of Kaunas Region), ed. Indre˙ Zˇakevicˇiene˙ (2011), which analyses the literary representations of the Kaunas region, focusing on specific transformations of the places from the nineteenth century to the present.

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of Vilnius”).2 At the beginning of the twentieth century, after Lithuania had liberated itself from the 1795–1914 Russian and 1915–1918 German occupation, the historical capital became an issue of contention between Poland and Lithuania. In 1920, Vilnius and its surroundings were annexed by Poland. As a result, the capital was relocated to Kaunas, which functioned as the provisional capital until 1940. During these decades, particularly in Lithuanian literature, the literary mapping of Vilnius, as Violeta Davoliu¯te˙ has noted, becomes dominated by “a heroic, epic tradition of literary representations of the city” (29). In addition to past-oriented national sentiments, the representations of Vilnius reverberate with a determination to reclaim the city from the Polish rule.3 Nevertheless, literary representations of Vilnius in the interwar period are not limited to expressions of national commitment to the city. Literature, especially in languages other than Lithuanian, also features sociocultural tensions, unavoidable in a relatively small city space populated by ethnically and socially diverse groups, struggling to define their identities with regard to diverse spatial and social boundaries within the city space.4 Kaunas, the second largest city of Lithuania, located at the confluence of two major rivers, was important for military defence and trade since its establishment in the medieval period (Zˇemaitis, “History of Kaunas”). After becoming the provisional capital of Lithuania, Kaunas became associated with Lithuanian (homogeneous) identity, and the new capital thus functioned differently from Vilnius, the multicultural former capital.5 During the interwar years, Kaunas was 2 In the first half of the twentieth century, the ethnic structure of Vilnius as of the population censuses of 1916 and 1931, respectively, included the following groups: Jews – 43.5%; 28%, Poles – 50.15%; 65%, Russians – 1.46%; 3.8%, Belarusians – 1.36%; 0.9%, and other – 1%; 0.6%, in addition to Lithuanians who made up 2.6% of Vilnius residents according to the population census of 1916, and approximately 1% in the Polish census of 1931 (Macˇiulis and Staliu¯nas 87). The census on each of the ethnic groups is, however, problematic because of the historical circumstances. The 1916 census was carried out during World War I, when Lithuania, after having liberated itself from the 1795–1914 Russian occupation, had been under German rule since 1915. When the 1931 census was conducted, Vilnius was an issue of contention between Poland and Lithuania, and the Poles had an interest in increasing the size of the Polish population and reducing the number of non-Poles; the statistics is also affected by the fact that inhabitants were recorded on the basis of what they indicated as their native language rather than their nationality (Stravinskiene˙, “Ethnic-Demographic Changes” 140–142). 3 As Tomas Venclova states, the poem “Listen, the World, We Will Not Take It without Vilnius!” (Lith. “Ei, pasauli, mes be Vilniaus nenurimsim”) by poet and playwright, Petras Vaicˇiu¯nas, “played the role of a second national hymn for approximately twenty years” (49). 4 Sociological research has identified a still existing relationship between “the patterns of ethnic composition in Vilnius [and] distribution of the highest and lowest social status groups, indicating that there is an ethnic dimension in the socioeconomic segregation in Vilnius” (Valatka, Burneika, and Ubarevicˇiene˙ 316). 5 According to the official data of the population census of 1923, 58.9% Lithuanians, 27.1% Jews, 4.5% Poles, 3.54% Germans, 3.15% Russians, and other nationalities lived in Kaunas (“Lietuvos gyventojai”).

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also the political, economic and cultural centre of the newly independent country, and the only Lithuanian city undergoing a rapid urban growth, equalling that of other northern European cities at the time, such as Helsinki or Riga. During the first half of the twentieth century, according to literary scholar Viktorija Sˇeina, literary representations of Kaunas show a departure from the previous tradition that was characterised by attention to the origins of the city and by romanticising its past (Laikinoji sostine˙ 279). In the literature of the interwar period, in particular, attention shifts to changes in society and to the cityscape, which manifest themselves in the emergence of modern architecture and new city quarters, together with the formation of new administrative, academic, and artistic communities. As a result, the central part of Kaunas, with its regular street system, becomes frequently associated with artificiality and constructedness. The associations arise from contrasting the architecture of the urbanised provisional capital with the labyrinthine, mediaeval urban structure of Vilnius that in the national consciousness, for centuries, had embodied the concept of the city. The major social and cultural changes taking place in the provisional capital are frequently reflected in literary works as tensions between the urban and the rural consciousness. Along such lines, the city is portrayed as enmeshed in contradictions stemming from the processes involved in the transformation of the country into a modern industrial society (Racˇiu¯naite˙ 94–99). After World War II, when Lithuania lost its independence and Kaunas lost the status of the capital, the interwar years and the provisional capital were frequently depicted with somewhat sentimental overtones, suggesting nostalgia of an idealised past. This is especially characteristic of literature by Lithuanian émigré writers, who often associate the genius loci of Kaunas with the Old Town and the modern city core; examples are the fairy tale book Daktaras Kripsˇtukas pragare (1948 [Eng. Doctor Kripsˇtukas in Hell]) by Julius Kaupas or the novel Asˇtuoni lapai (1956 [Eng. Eight Leaves]) by Birute˙ Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙. With these introductory remarks the ground is prepared for an analysis of natural boundaries, specifically rivers and hills, and the urban fragmentation in the literary topographies of Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuanian literature and literary texts written in other languages, namely, Polish, German and Yiddish. Particularly in the case of Vilnius, it should be emphasised that after the Polish annexation of the capital, most Lithuanian authors left the city. Those who remained rarely wrote about it either because of their rural origins, lack of interest in urban themes, or because of the Polish censorship. The topography of Vilnius, on the other hand, has received considerable attention in the texts by Polish and Yiddish authors, whereas literary representations of Kaunas figure mostly in texts by Lithuanian authors. The literary texts analysed in this essay offer a glimpse into the two Lithuanian capital cities through the eyes of writers who lived in those cities or went there as visitors. The analysis focuses on nar-

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rative fiction describing natural, social, ethnical and cultural fragmentation of the complex city space in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the texts chosen for the analysis were published between 1920 and 1940. Some texts describe urban fragmentation in Vilnius and Kaunas of the first half of the twentieth century in retrospect. The analysis of the urban spaces of Vilnius and Kaunas as depicted in literary texts draws on the theoretical approaches of literary topography and geocriticism. Literary topography, as stated by Sigrid Weigel, is based on close reading of texts and focuses on literary representations of place regarded as “concrete, geographical identifiable” rather than a narrative figure or a topos (158).6 Similarly, Bertrand Westphal foregrounds that the focus of geocriticism is “the geographical locus itself” as a prototype of a fictionalised space; thereby, the main aim of the geocritical approach is “to understand the real and fictional spaces that we inhabit, cross through, imagine, survey, modify, celebrate, disparage, and on and on in an infinitive variety” (x). According to Robert Tally, geocriticism “maintains comportment towards the world that embraces the entirety of spatial and social relations, which in turn constitute the literary cartography produced in these multifarious ways of making sense of, or giving shape to, that world” (“Foreword” xv). Tally argues that “geocriticism approaches texts as literary maps that, regardless of the ostensible real or imagined spaces depicted, help us to understand our world” (xvi). Furthermore, taking into account representations of a particular place in a multitude of literary texts and studying multiple points of view in narration, what Westphal identifies as “principle of multifocalisation,” enable a complex, and usually heterogeneous and dynamic map of an area. The variety of textual representations of a place reveals how a specific geographical area features in its literary topography (Westphal 114). The advantage of literary topography lies in its emphasis on seeing spaces as dynamic, in which active movement takes place and dynamic spatial configurations or urban routes develop. However, using literary topography as an approach may pose a problem of how to treat “concrete, geographically identifiable” material references (Weigel 158). It may seem as if literary topography is focused exclusively on the representation of a given geographic space, which has provoked much criticism, especially from the field of human geography, which highlights that the topographical turn is nothing more than a return into traditional geodeterminism (Lippuner and Lossau 47–64). But rather than being geodeterminist, literary topography engages with the ideas of Henri Lefebvre as developed in his study La Production de l’espace (1974). Lefebvre’s main argument is that space is not a neutral background or “container” but a social product, a complex social con6 My translation from German into English.

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struction which is constituted by and also affects spatial practices and perceptions (26). Seen this way, space both structures social relations and interactions and, at the same time, it is also a product of these relations and interactions. Lefebvre argues that there are three different modes of production of space —from natural space to more complex social spaces—functioning as a threepart dialectic between everyday practices (perceived space), space as it is conceived through technocratic acts such as spatial planning (conceived space), and the symbolic meanings of space as created by its users (lived space) (40). Accordingly, there is a distinction between the city as a conceived space and the city as lived and experienced. The city, just as any other space, is thus to be viewed as dynamic, always diverse and fragmented, and Lefebvre holds that social and thereby spatial fragmentation is a result of the workings of political power (321). To clarify the understanding of fragmentation, it may be pertinent to refer to Enrico Michelutti categorisation of divisions within the urban space, embedded in “sociology, economics, geography and urban studies” (Michelutti 1). Michelutti describes five categories of urban fragmentation: the spatial one, where the city is thought as an ensemble of fragments with different socio-spatial characteristics and different uses of urban spaces; . . . the social one, where fragmentation is referred to splintering in social-technological networking, . . . and social ties between parts/fragments of the city . . . the economic one, where fragmentation refers to a kind of economic polarisation connected to the disparity in the access to the labour market . . . or consists in inequalities in resources and investments in different parts of the city; the cultural one, where fragmentation can refer to the copresence of different and conflictive identities in the city [or] to the development of distinct and unavoidable residential patterns, with consequent phenomena of segregation and ghettoisation . . . or to the relationships between behaviours and fear appearing from segregated urban contexts; the political one, where fragmentation is connected to exclusion dynamics and preservation of inequalities . . . or politicaladministrative divisions (and overlapping in competences) in the urban territory. (1–2)

The distinctions between these categories are not clear-cut because of “the multisemantic character of the phenomenon” (2). The production of urban space is thus a process whereby spatial elements, linked in many ways through movement of its users constitute new and overlapping spaces. Urban space is therefore to be regarded as composed of a variety of interconnected places: volatile places in networks, privileged places and peripheral places (Löw, Raumsoziologie 111). This dovetails with the argument by Jörg Dünne, a German literary scholar in the field of spatial studies, who claims that the methodological approach of literary topography is not limited to establishing references to geographical spaces and places. By contrast, he draws on the assumption that the topographical space is also a “produced” space, just as in Lefebvre’s definition. Space in this sense is not only the setting of a literary text but at the same time has its

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own story (Dünne, “Geschichten im Raum” 6). In this sense, the emphasis would be not so much on the topos, that is, the geographically determined entity, but also on the graphy (recording/media representation), with the help of which these geographical entities are constituted. This implies that moving within a space also plays an important role in its “production” because individual places and areas become interrelated and thereby reveal their differences, diversities, and non-simultaneities (Hallet and Neuman 14). Furthermore, the writers and literary characters moving in/through and perceiving space are often aware of their own symbolic pre-conditioning. As it will be discussed below, with reference to Arnold Zweig’s novel Die Einsetzung eines Königs (1937 [Eng. The Crowning of the King, 1937]), the characters (German officers) are aware that, inter alia, their perception of urban space (Vilnius and Kaunas) is shaped by military maps. According to Dünne, understanding of spaces is by nature premediated. Topographical perspective on space, as he claims, does not presuppose a geographic space that literature can only reproduce, but which understands literature itself as an effective practice of “production” of space (“Geschichten im Raum” 21). Diverging from the “geo-centred rather than ego-centred” approach to literary texts proposed by Westphal (xiv), this study gives particular importance to the subjects and their spatial awareness by analysing specific localities and urban fragmentation. As Martina Löw claims, “[s]paces come into being only by being actively connected by human beings. People connect not only things but also other people or groups of people. . . This means, secondly, that the constitution of spaces usually involves positioning” (“The Constitution of Space” 35). (Löw exemplifies such “positioning” as self-positioning of people in relation to other people, the construction of buildings, the surveying of national borders, to mention but a few). Spaces, including cityscapes, are first of all defined by the relations between the elements that constitute them (rivers, bridges, streets). As for places (city centres, suburbs and surroundings), they are much more strongly concerned with identities. In both cases, the natural and administrative boundaries, centres and peripheries as well as individual ordering of different spatial elements acquire a very important function in forming the topographical, as well as the social and cultural map of the city. For the purposes of the present analysis, the topographical approach acquires additional significance because during the first half of the twentieth century, which the texts under analysis represent, a frequent thematic focus is the interaction and tensions between the centre and the peripheries within the urban space as well as interactions between the urban and the rural.

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Natural Boundaries and Urban Fragmentation in the Literary Topography of Vilnius

The geographical objects that prevail in the literary representations of the capital city Vilnius are the confluence of two rivers, the Neris and the Vilnia,7 and the castle atop Gediminas Hill in the vicinity of the river Vingria, which at present flows underground. The foregrounding of the Neris and the Vilnia in the literary topography of Vilnius reveals attentiveness to the etymology of the place name, Vilnius, given that the city most likely took its name from the smaller of the two rivers, the Vilnia, which in the Lithuanian language connotes a rippling stream (Briedis 22). The historical and etymological focus is central in Algis Kale˙da’s unique literary analysis of narrative representation of Vilnius waters by Polish and Lithuanian writers, Adam Mickiewicz, Jurgis Kuncˇinas, and others. The study gives attention to a broad range of topoi, especially those related to the foundation of the city at the confluence of the Neris and the Vilnia. The analysis of waters as elements of the cityscape, however, overlooks the role of these topoi in the ethnic, linguistic and social fragmentation of the city. A similar tendency seems to be predominant in the retrospective look at Vilnius by Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish writer of Lithuanian descent, who frequently uses Vilnius as the setting for his works. When sharing his memories of Vilnius in a conversation with Polish literary scholar Alexander Fiut, Milosz refers to Vilnius waters, adopting a mythic view on the topographies of the cities. This is especially evident in his comparison of Vilnius and Krakow: “Krakow is also situated in the valley surrounded by hills, but in Vilnius, it is more obvious, because the hills are higher, and two rivers, the Neris and the Vilnia, come here together. There is also a third, mythical river, but I have never seen it; the river is called Kacˇerga and flows under the Cathedral” (Milosz 227).8 The most significant object, Gediminas Castle Tower, located in the vicinity of the Cathedral, near the confluence of the Neris and the Vilnia, is related to the foundation and the development of Vilnius city, as well as to the history of castles and fortifications in Lithuania. A legend says that Lithuania’s Grand Duke Gediminas had a prophetic dream about a howling iron wolf when he stopped 7 The multicultural history of Vilnius and Kaunas leads to the proliferation of names of the cities (Vilnius/Wilno/Vilne, Kaunas/Kowno/Kovne/Kauen), their suburbs (Uzˇupis/Zarcezce, Sˇnipisˇke˙s/S´nipiszki, etc.) and rivers (Nemunas/Nieman, Neris/Wilia/Wilya/Wilja, Vilnia/Wilenka); however, the names that are familiar for today’s English reading public, namely ‘Vilnius,’ ‘Kaunas,’ ‘Nemunas,’ ‘Neris,’ will be used in this chapter. Due to the administrative status of Vilnius as Polish province from 1920 to 1939, writing about the city of that time, Polish toponyms are put in brackets, and only in the quotations from literary texts are the toponyms preserved in the original languages. 8 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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overnight near the confluence of the Neris and the Vilnia. Gediminas’s soothsayer interpreted the dream as a call to build a city on a hilltop and as a prophesy that the city would become world-famous. The Grand Duke ordered to pour a mound at the location where he slept and to build a wooden castle, the predecessor of the present-day brick structure (Briedis 22). At the beginning of the twentieth century, associated with the upheaval of Lithuanian national revival, and especially after the annexation of Vilnius by Poland in 1920, Gediminas Hill and the castle became national symbols, or what Violeta Davoliu¯te˙ has called a “clearly visible remnant of the medieval state that attested the original Lithuanian identity of the town” (29). Such overtones reverberate in Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas’s three-volume novel Altoriu˛ ˇsesˇe˙ly (1933 [Eng. In the Shadow of Altars]), a literary landmark of the interwar period. The novel is regarded as “the first intellectual psychological novel in Lithuanian literature,” featuring “a seminary student and later a priest [who] writes poetry and cannot reconcile priest and poet in himself” (Vasiliauskiene˙ and Slocum). The quotation below describes some Kaunas Priest Seminary students’ visit to Vilnius shortly before World War I, when the city was part of the Russian Empire. They gaze in sadness at the landmarks of national identity, Gediminas Castle and the Cathedral: In the afternoon, they climbed up the hill to Gediminas Castle. Shrouded in despondency, its dilapidating and abandoned tower looked down on the roofs of the adjoining Cathedral and the city of Vilnius, an offspring of the saps of the Lithuanian soil. Wind was blowing and milky clouds were floating across the sky, remote fringes of the city were sinking in misty fog and factory smoke. So native, so Lithuanian did the city look – cloaked by a misty sky and surrounded by fields, hills and forests of the homeland! Here, on the hill, there were no strangers and no foreign languages. (Mykolaitis-Putinas, Altoriu˛ ˇsesˇe˙ly [In the Shadow of Altars] 153–154)9

The description of the seminarians’ response to the boundary space, Gediminas Hill and its vicinities, and to the city space outside the boundary space, the industrial “remote fringes of the city,” reveals two interrelated themes. One theme is the contemplation on the destructive effects of the over one-hundredyear-long rule of the Russian Empire in Lithuania. This thematic focus can be gleaned from the description of Gediminas Castle, a symbol of the origins of the state, as “[s]hrouded in despondency . . . dilapidating and abandoned.” Another 9 “Po pietu˛ jie ˛ilipo ˛i Gedimino kalna˛. Pilies boksˇtas, apleistas ir apgriuve˛s, liu¯de˙jo, zˇiu¯re˙damas ˛i apacˇioj prisiglaudusios Katedros stogus ir Lietuvos zˇeme˙s syvais isˇaugusi˛ Gedimino miesta˛. Buvo ve˙jas, dangum plauke˙ balksˇvi debesys, ir tolimi miesto pakrasˇcˇiai skendo u¯kanose ir fabriku˛ du¯muose. Koks savas ir lietuvisˇkas atrode˙ tas miesto vaizdas, padengtas u¯kanoto ˇ ia, ant sˇito kalno, nebuvo svetimu˛ dangaus, apsuptas savo krasˇto lauku˛, kalvu˛ ir misˇku˛! C zˇmoniu˛ ir svetimos kalbos.” Excerpts from Putinas’s novel are translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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theme is the fragmentation of the city not only along cultural but also along spatial and socioeconomic dimensions. The former is implied in the reference to the visitors on Gediminas Hill as Lithuanians speaking Lithuanian. The latter is suggested in the allusion to the negative outcomes of industrialisation invoked as “misty fog and factory smoke” hovering over the urban space described as distinct from the city centre. In detailing the seminarians’ tour of Vilnius, Mykolaitis-Putinas’s novel pays close attention to spatial, cultural and political fragmentations in the terms defined by Enrico Michelutti. The young Lithuanian seminarians limit their tourist routes to the places important to their national identity, aiming as it were to re-construct the characteristic Lithuanian cityscape. The peripheries seem to disappear “in misty fog and factory smoke.” The foregrounding of social and ethnic fragmentations may seem as a means to reclaim the national narratives of the historical capital of Lithuania, which had undergone obliteration during the Czarist and, at the time the novel was written, Polish rule. The following episodes from the novel describing touring the city illustrate similar points: It was late in the evening when they got to Vilnius. The nervousness of the railway station life and the feel of a big city initially caused some anxiety. Carrying their suitcases, they passed rows of cabs and shouting coachmen and walked towards the Gate of Dawn. . . . The next day they visited many cultural sights of Vilnius. None of the seminarists was able to evaluate the historical significance of the places to the Lithuanian nation, but their patriotism and understanding that they were visiting a cradle of their nation’s magnificence and the seedbed of national culture made up for the deficiency of theoretical knowledge and scholarly assessment. (Mykolaitis-Putinas, Altoriu˛ [Altars] 153–154)10

Another is: In the marvellous churches of Vilnius, they would see the presence of foreign scripts and hear strangers’ languages. . . . They visited the Cathedral, in the cellars of which there still were marks of an altar of a sanctuary that stood there centuries ago and whose crypts served as a resting place for the body of Vytautas the Great. (Mykolaitis-Putinas, Altoriu˛ [Altars] 154)11

The imprints of foreign cultures on the topography of the historical core of the city evoke Robert Tally’s statement that narratives make a “unique space” a place 10 “I˛ Vilniu˛ jie atvazˇiavo jau vakare. Nervisˇkas stoties gyvenimas ir didelio miesto u¯pas isˇ pat pradzˇiu˛ suke˙le˙ jiems nerimasties. Savo lagamine˙liais nesˇini, jie leidosi pro ˇsu¯kaujancˇias vezˇiku˛ eiles pe˙sti ˛i Ausˇros vartu˛ puse˛. . . . Kita˛diena˛jie aplanke˙ daug zˇymiu˛ Vilniaus vietu˛. Jie ne˙ vienas nesugebe˙jo tinkamai ˛ivertinti tu˛ vietu˛ reiksˇme˙s lietuviu˛ tautai, bet patriotinis jausmas ir nusimanymas, kad jie lanko savo tautos didybe˙s lopsˇ˛i, savo krasˇto kultu¯ros zˇidini˛, atstojo jiems teoriniu˛ zˇiniu˛ ir mokslinio ˛ivertinimo stoka˛.” 11 “Lankydami grazˇia˛sias Vilniaus bazˇnycˇias, jie visur mate˙ svetimus parasˇus ir girde˙jo svetima˛ kalba˛. . . . Aplanke˙ jie Katedra˛, kurios ru¯sy tebe˙ra dar priesˇ amzˇius cˇia stove˙jusios sˇventove˙s aukuro zˇyme˙s, kurios kriptose ilsisi Vytauto Didzˇiojo ku¯nas.”

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(“Introduction” 2). For Tally, “all spaces are necessarily embedded with narratives” (2). Narratives attempt to make sense of spaces and to provide them with social and symbolic meaning. In depicting the reading of the urban space by the seminarists, Putinas’s novel cautiously suggests that “theoretical knowledge and scholarly assessment” (154) are essential in interpreting the present-day face of the city to avoid simplistic us/them dualisms. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of the spatial character of each level in the Cathedral—the ground floor and the cellar—points to tensions between the cultures/narratives on display, “foreign scripts” and “foreign language,” and the cultures/narratives beneath the surface, the remnants of a pagan sanctuary and “the body of Vytautas the Great,” a Grand Duke of Lithuania in the fifteenth century. Given that narratives “mobilise and organise spaces,” as Tally has it (2), the implicit hierarchisation of narratives in the description of the Cathedral serves as a strong source of meaning, symbolising the relationship between the occupation of the country and its narrativisation, as well as the parallel process of cultural fragmentation and appropriation of the urban space by different authorities.12 Walking as re-visioning links In the Shadow of the Altars with the literary topography of Vilnius as inscribed in Urias Katzenelenbogen’s novel Vilniecˇio balsas (1922 [A Vilner]), which depicts a walk of a Jew and a Lithuanian through the multicultural Vilnius of the 1920s. The novel starts with the naming of the city to expose how narratives constitute its historical and affective significance to Lithuania and to Lithuanian Jews: The old Vilnius—the hearth of the Lithuanian land, the cradle of Lithuania. For Lithuanian Jews, the city is their Jerusalem, the city of their geniuses, a source of most pure light, a tower shining with our awakening. . . . Out of all cities in the world, you are a gushing spring of spiritual strength. . . . Lithuania without Vilnius is a spectre with a torn off head. (Katzenelenbogen, Vilniecˇio balsas [A Vilner] 1)13

Set in interwar, Poland-occupied Vilnius, Katzenelenbogen’s novel envisions Lithuania without its historical capital as “a spectre with a torn off head.” The novel entwines with the tradition to depict the annexed capital of Lithuania “as a captive, enslaved city” (Venclova 49). In this regard, the characters’ walk in the city acquires connotations of narrativisation of memory, embodied in places which map the history of Jews in Vilnius, called “Jerusalem of the North.” The novel does not depict individual urban places in detail but, by connecting dif12 The author is indebted to Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ for her suggestions regarding reading of Putinas’s novel along these lines. 13 “Senas senas Vilnius – Lietuvos zˇeme˙s zˇidinys, Lietuvos lopsˇys. Jis Lietuvos zˇydams – ju˛ Jeruzalimo miestas, ju˛ geniju˛ miestas, ju˛ tyriausias sˇviesos sˇaltinis, ju˛ pabudimu sˇviecˇia˛s boksˇtas . . . tu isˇ visu˛ miestu˛ miestas, isˇ kurio tryksˇta dvasios je˙gu˛ ˇsaltinis. . . . Lietuva be Vilniaus – tai nuple˙sˇta galva sˇme˙kla.” Excerpts from Katzenelenbogen’s novel are translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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ferent spatial fragments, it produces a discourse about the urban space and its history, quite according to the theses of recent literary topography (Dünne, “Geschichten im Raum” 6; Hallet and Neuman 14). The Jewish character, born in the Jewish quarter “at the intersection of Jewish and Butchers’ streets, in the backyard with high walls” (Katzenelenbogen, Vilniecˇio balsas [A Vilner] 2), shows his Lithuanian companion the Great Synagogue, the house of the Vilna Gaon and little dark inner yards in the Jewish quarter: We reach a long crooked inner yard in Jewish Street leading to Butchers’ Street. The yard was crammed with numberless stores that have been there since the times when Jews were not allowed to sell on streets. . . . Ruthless governments were squeezing the walls which surrounded the Jewish quarter (and it is only in this quarter, within these walls that the Jews were allowed to live). There was no free spot, even the size of the thumb finger. Unrelated Jewish families built houses on the existing ones. (Katzenelenbogen, Vilniecˇio balsas [A Vilner] 15–16)14

For his part, the Lithuanian companion, the editor of the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos zˇinios (Eng. The Lithuanian News) invites him to see some Catholic churches, Lithuanian Art Museum, the Cathedral, and Gediminas Castle. During their walk, they passionately discuss the multicultural history of the city and the repressive policies of the Polish against the Jews and the Lithuanians.15 The unification of both ethnic groups against polonisation is suggested in the following example from the novel: “From the valley, there comes moaning of Vilnius. The moaning is heard both by a Jew and a Lithuanian” (Katzenelenbogen, Vilniecˇio balsas [A Vilner] 2). On Gediminas Hill, the Jewish narrator directs his eye to the opposite shore of the river Neris to look at places just outside the city limits: “It is so wonderful to see, in the distance, the waters of the Neris carved out from their surroundings, the forests, and church after church, home after home, going down steeply like stairs” (17). In this context, one can speak about spatial fragmentation, whereby, as Michelutti puts it, the city appears to be composed of fragments “with different socio-spatial characteristics” (1), revealed in the character’s gaze moving from natural to religious/cultural and private zones. Furthermore, the character’s gaze turns the geographically mapped space of Vilnius into a lived space in Lefebvre’s sense. The narrative also includes some episodes when the Jewish protagonist leaves the city centre and comes to the suburbs. When speaking about different aspects of crossing boundaries, Bertrand Westphal uses the concept of ‘transgression’ 14 In the original: “Prieinam mes ilga˛ kreiva˛ kiema˛, kuris veda isˇ Zˇydu˛ gatve˙s ˛i Me˙sininku˛ gatve˛. Tas kiemas gru¯ste prigru¯stas krautuviu˛ dar tu˛ laiku˛, kai zˇydams buvo uzˇdrausta gatve˙se prekiauti. . . . Nezˇmonisˇka valdzˇia spaude˙ tas sienas, kurios apsupo zˇydu˛ kvartala˛ (o vien tik tame kvartale, tarp tu˛ sienu˛, zˇydai tegale˙jo gyventi). Nebuvo sprindzˇio didumo laisvo zˇeme˙s sklypelio. Svetimos zˇydu˛ ˇseimynos state˙ namus jau virsˇ pastatytu˛ namu˛.” 15 See also Solomonas Atamukas 176–178.

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and notes that “transgression is coextensive with mobility” (45). Crossing a river as a spatial boundary connotes an experience of change both in terms of space and in terms of the nature of relationships among people; these, in turn, affect the change of the character.16 The visit to one of the more remote urban areas, Sˇnipisˇke˙s, gives the narrator of A Vilner a new perspective on the city of Vilnius and on his own Jewish community. At the same time, it allows him to realise the ‘otherness’ of suburban life: I’m coming to the suburbs. Everything is moving more quickly here – it’s all better than before: there are other workers. I reach the bank of the Neris. I look at the sand falling from the old castle hill into the river. The old giant castle stands there sinking into the ground. I love the Jewish raft drivers who have sprouted up very much. They look like water people to me. (Katzenelenbogen, Vilniecˇio balsas [A Vilner] 7–8)17

The narrator is curious to talk to the Jewish people of Sˇnipisˇke˙s and “to get into their straw huts and to listen closely to what only they could tell him” (8). The motif of crossing the river—as an important border internal to the city—and entering the suburb foregrounds not only a specific location but also movement in urban space. At the same time, the place that the narrator visits tells its own story. He comes “to listen closely to what only they could tell him”; that is, he wants to listen to stories that are different from those the narrator had known (emphasis added). Katzenelenbogen’s realistic depiction of the everyday life both in the Jewish quarter and in the suburbs lends realism to the representation of the urban structure of Vilnius, considering the actual spatial distribution of the Jewish community in the city at the time and the different markers of distinct places according to socioeconomic status and ethnicity. The topography of Sˇnipisˇke˙s is also referred to in the famous Jewish writer Abraham Sutzkever’s collection of prose poems Green Aquarium and Other Stories, written in 1953–54 and published in 1975. Sutzkever, who is a Shoa survivor, lived there with his widowed mother in the 1930s. In 1947, he left for Israel (Kvietkauskas 178–87). The prevailing motif of his texts is the Jewish Vilnius during World War II and the Shoa, but the narrator also provides some glimpses of Jewish life before World War II and during the immediate post-war period. Sutzkever recalls and depicts the small wooden houses, old gardens, and several rows of brickyards in the immediate vicinity of Sˇnipisˇke˙s. In one of his

16 Jurij Lotman considers that plot is driven by events related to border crossing both in the sense of inner transformation and in the sense of moving through the world. For Lotman, an event occurs only when characters cross borders assigned to them (238). ˇ ia jau viskas smarkiau juda kruta – viskas geriau 17 In the original: “Ateinu ˛i priemiesti˛. C gyvuoja, negu pirma: jau kiti darbininkai. Prieinu prie Neries kranto. Zˇiu¯riu ˛i Nerin isˇ seno piliakalnio byrancˇias smiltis. Tas senas milzˇinas pilis stovi suslinke˛s. Asˇ labai pamilau sukere˙jusius zˇydu˛ sielininkus. Jie man rode˙si lyg vandens zˇmone˙s.”

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prose poems, he describes the topography of Sˇnipisˇke˙s, separated from the city centre by the river Neris (Wilia), as follows: The street where we both [the narrator and his girlfriend] grew up panted its way uphill, starting from the Green Bridge over the clay banks of the Wilia, ascending as far as the Sheskin Mountains, where the street became a trail going all the way to Vilkomir. (Sutzkever, “The Cleaver’s Daughter” 65)

The Green Bridge, destroyed and reconstructed several times over the centuries, has been an urban landmark and functioned as an important connection between the old city centre and the suburb of Sˇnipisˇke˙s; according to Kamile˙ Uzˇpalyte˙, even in the later soviet years, it still “served as a barrier precluding the inhabitants of Sˇnipisˇke˙s from perceiving themselves as full-fledged city dwellers” (205). The narrator of Sutzkever’s prose poem illustrates such a view. For him the city across the river is beyond reach. Conversely, his immediate surroundings, an area inhabited by the poor Jewish working-class, serve as a locus of his identity (Sutzkever, “The Cleaver’s Daughter” 68–69). The area is a very different world from that of the traditional Jewish quarter with the Great Synagogue in the city centre. In order to understand the geographic environment depicted in Katzenelenbogen’s and Sutzkever’s texts, it is pertinent to refer to their context to give meaning to the details in the description of the Jewish protagonists’ attitudes to the place. The history of Sˇnipisˇke˙s dates back to the sixteenth century. Vilnius was then surrounded by a defensive wall that defined the perimeter of the city, the area inside, and the area outside, which included suburbs and villages. A short time later, the walled city began to spread across the rivers, the Vilnia and the Neris. The first suburb to have become part of the city was Uzˇupis, located on the right bank of the Vilnia. Shortly after, the sprawl of the city from the historical centre across the river Neris incorporated Sˇnipisˇke˙s, a nearby village, populated by fishermen and raft drivers, numerous traders and craftsmen—brick and ceramic burners, in particular. One more suburb across the Neris, Zˇve˙rynas, gradually became part of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century (Tiuksˇiene˙ and Sisaite˙ 286). Spatial, socioeconomic and cultural separation of different population groups was a prevailing characteristic of the suburbs.18 The studies on the demographic composition of Vilnius in the interwar period point out that the inhabitants of

18 Many studies discuss the development of Vilnius in terms of composition. For example, Dalia Dijokiene˙ categorises the suburbs of Vilnius according to their proximity to the city core: 1) those closer to the city core (the area enclosed by the city wall), and 2) those further away from the city core (Zˇve˙rynas, Sˇnipisˇke˙s, Antakalnis) (79, 83). For the territorial expansion of Vilnius in the first half of the twentieth century, especially the period between 1919 and 1939, see Vitalija Stravinskiene˙, “The Territorial Expansion of Vilnius: Plans and Their Realisation (1916–1940)” 127–150.

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Vilnius had their preferential living areas according to their religion, ethnicity and native language (Stravinskiene˙, “The Territorial Expansion of Vilnius” 144). The greatest ethnic diversity characterised the “Major Vilnius,” which is the city centre. In 1939, about 40 per cent of the city population resided there; most of them, about 35 thousand, were Jews, who lived in the medieval Jewish quarter. The majority of Lithuanians and Belarusians also lived in this part of the city. Russians were concentrated in the Rasos and Liepkalnis districts, located to the southeast of the historical city centre. About 27.5 thousand people lived there, of whom 22.3 thousand were Poles, in addition to Jews, Russians, Belarusians, Tatars, and others. Two thirds of the Karaims lived on the other bank of the Neris, in the suburb Zˇve˙rynas. In Sˇnipisˇkes, most of the population was Polish (19.6 thousand) and Jewish (four thousand) (144). On the whole, the place was characterised as “plebeian,” “chaotic” and overcrowded (Laucˇkaite˙). Uzˇupis, Antakalnis and Zˇve˙rynas were the residence of about 21.9 thousand people, most of whom were Poles and Jews (Stravinskiene˙, “The Territorial Expansion of Vilnius” 145). The city’s elite and intelligentsia were dominant in the central part of the city. In the Old Town, alongside with socially stable members of the population, there were also economically disadvantaged people, mostly Jews (cf. Katzenelenbogen’s A Vilner). Most of the labourers and artisans lived in bad housing, in suburbs away from the city centre, on the opposite banks of the Vilnia and the Neris. Antakalnis, a suburb located in the eastern section of Vilnius, across the mouth of the Vilnia and along the left bank of the Neris, was mainly a residential sector, preferred by rich noblemen and the clergy (Stravinskiene˙, “The Territorial” 145). In the literary topography of Vilnius, the depiction of the suburbs located across the rivers, especially those across the river Neris, reflects on the fact that in the first half of the twentieth century some semiurban suburbs of Vilnius, like Antakalnis, were considered rural areas rather than parts of the city. For example, the rural character of the Antakalnis suburb is highlighted in Arnold Zweig’s novel The Crowning of the King. The novel chronicles events in Lithuania during the last years of the German occupation during World War I and shortly before the restoration of the Lithuanian state in February of 1918. Zweig depicts Vilnius as a multicultural city, inhabited by Poles, Jews, Russians, Lithuanians and other ethnicities, manipulated by German military authorities to play against each other in order to secure the German rule in Lithuania after the end of the war. In this sense, the novel does not only focus on the fragmentation of the city along ethnic, economic and social lines, but it also foregrounds territorial aspects of its structure and their links. The links between territorial/spatial and social/economic factors are suggested in Zweig’s character’s comment that more affluent people tend to move to “a villa or wooden house” in semiurban areas like Antakalnis, whereas in the city centre, particularly in the Jewish quarter, “the people

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survived in the conditions of unimaginable squalor and overcrowding” (Zweig, The Crowning of the King 197). The description of Antakalnis presents it as geographically and territorially distinct from the city. Such distinctiveness can be gleaned from descriptions of the place as a forest land. It is also obvious in characters’ references to the suburb of Antakalnis as a location near the city but not as an integral part of it. For example, when the central character, Paul Winfried, travels from Antakalnis to Vilnius, he notes that he will soon be in the city: “we shall soon be in Vilna” (Zweig, The Crowning 199). Another episode describes nurse Berbe walking “beside Winfried down the long tree-shaded street that connected Antokol with Vilna” (196–197). The description of the geographical position of “Antokol” (Antakalnis) and “Vilna” links the fictional world with a real-life context. At the time, Antakalnis was still regarded as not yet a city but more like a suburb (Stravinskiene˙, “The Territorial Expansion of Vilnius” 135–137). The “referentiality or experientiality” of spaces19 in Zweig’s novel can be read through the prism of J. Hillis Miller’s statement that “topographical setting connects literary works to a specific historical and geographical time. This establishes a cultural and historical setting within which the action can take place” (Miller qtd. in Pleßke 166). In Zweig’s The Crowning of the King, the detailing of setting alludes to historical context: occupation of the country, military repressions and machinations of the German military as regards the future of the Baltic region. As is the case with the majority of literary works written at the time, the literary mapping of Vilnius concentrates on the city’s centre. From the perspective of the German officer, Winfried, the city centre is frequently regarded as a reference point with respect to connections with important strategic places in the city: the railway station, military headquarters, or the Military Officers’ Club located “near the Green Bridge, between the Georgstrasse and the Vilya” (Zweig, The Crowning 271). Gediminas Hill and Gediminas castle are also mentioned in the novel several times. When Winfried views the city from the top of Gediminas Hill, he takes in a broad panorama of “the great city,” reflecting “all the stages of its growth”: Yonder lay the great city, outspread between two rivers, the Vilya and the Vileika, beneath some wooded hills on which stood the old town, revealing in its buildings all the stages of its growth. The wild confusion of the alleys and squares, barren building sites, and burnt-out districts was broken there and there by the natural orderliness of trees and shrubs in the hidden courtyards of the great houses, the gardens on the river banks, 19 I am drawing here on Nora Pleßke’s statement that literary topography is based on the assumption that “imaginary spaces of literature retain the referentiality or experientiality to the spaces of the lifeworld” (166).

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right out to the woods that marched gravely, tree by tree, down into the river landscape. (Zweig, The Crowning 196)

Two aspects are important in this quotation: on the one hand, it offers a broad topographical description of the city by, for instance, identifying its location “between two rivers” and “beneath some wooded hills,” but, on the other hand, it also foregrounds how particular spatial fragments (alleys, squares, courtyards, houses) are given specific interpretations by the protagonist, which add to the story of the city. An analysis of the city as a complex phenomenon both in terms of cartographical modelling (Westphal; Tally) and in terms of production of space (Lefebvre) has to take into consideration the circumstances and factors influencing the perspective of the character, which result in a specific view of the city. Martina Löw defines such factors as “positioning” (“The Constitution of Space” 26). It is important to emphasise that the view of the city offered in the quotation above is constructed by a German officer, who singles out “barren building sites, and burnt-out districts” and remarks on the “wild confusion” of the city. This suggests that during World War I the German military saw themselves as participating in a civilising mission by bringing order to chaotic and savage Eastern Europe, in this case, to the city of Vilnius (such attitude is particularly characteristic of the German texts published during the war years, for example, Paul Monty’s guidebook Wanderstunden in Wilna (1918 [Eng. Hours of Wandering through Vilnius]). During his first short stay in the city, Zweig’s protagonist Winfried behaves more like a tourist than an officer whose mission involves passing secret information to the authorities. He is surprised by the architecture of Vilnius and by the plenitude of churches, constituting the spiritual topography of the city. Later, stationed in Vilnius, he also notices tensions between different ethnic groups, evident even in places of worship. When he observes a festive procession on Corpus Christi Sunday, the attempts of the organisers to emphasise the Polishness of Vilnius and thus show the Poles’ superiority over Jews and Lithuanians do not go unnoticed: The procession was in the honour of the Body of Christ . . . In honour of that Body altars were erected in the streets of the city, and decorated with all manner of tinsel ornaments, with flowers and foliage and sacred images. Carpets were spread on the uneven timbered sidewalks, and even on the dusty street . . . In the sand before the high altar in the Stanislas Cathedral, unknown fingers drew a great Polish eagle. (Zweig, The Crowning 190)

Apart from being seen as an act of worship, the procession can also be understood as a symbolic appropriation of the urban space. The Polish intend it as a protest against the German military order which had promised Lithuanians that “the glorious city of Vilna” will be their “royal capital” (Zweig 193). The pro-

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cession has to show to the German government as well as to Lithuanians and Jews that Vilnius does not belong to them and that “the face of Vilna was Polish. There was no sign of Jewry except in the Ghetto” (192). Jews watch the procession “inscrutably or with uneasy eyes,” and Lithuanians claim: “the Poles . . . had used the Corpus Christi procession for the purpose of the great demonstration, an act of usurpation, which had nothing to do with the festival” (192–193). In this light, the route of the Polish-organised procession, winding “through the inner city from one church to the next” (191), from the Gate of Dawn to the Cathedral in the vicinity of the river Neris and bypassing the territory of the Jewish ghetto, can be read as reinscribing the lines of spatial, cultural and religious divisions in the city. The inclusion and exclusion of places into the route of the procession also point to the political fragmentation in the city in terms discussed by Enrico Michelutti, quoted at the beginning of this section (1–2). The cultural diversity and spatial fragmentation of Vilnius acquire different treatment in the works written in languages other than Lithuanian, because, as mentioned before, ethnically marked inhabitants of Vilnius concentrated in particular areas of residence. For example, a work of literary non-fiction in Polish Pejzaz˙ Wilna: We˛drówki fotografa w słowie i w obrazie (1936 [Eng. Vilnius Cityscape: Wanderings of the Photographer in Words and Pictures]) by Jan Bułhak, a famous Polish photographer and chronicler of Vilnius, provides topographical information about Vilnius and its peripheries, frequently foregrounding cultural diversity, related, among others, to the Polish population. One of such spaces is the oldest suburb of Vilnius, Uzˇupis, separated from the city centre by a small river Vilnia: And all this happens in Zarcezce [the Polish name for Uzˇupis], in a separate, small town behind the river Wilenka [the Polish name for Vilnia] with its own rectory, cemetery, and market, with the remains of the manor house and Honest’s Palace, and even with the inhabitants, who are a little bit different. (Bułhak, Vilniaus peizazˇas [The Cityscape of Vilnius] 36)20

The description underscores the autonomy of the suburb and the distinctness of its population. Historically, the suburb, first mentioned in written annals in the fifteenth century, was inhabited by the poor, who were predominantly craftsmen, many of whom worked in the local mills. Bułhak’s description of the pre-war Uzˇupis foregrounds the social cohesion of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, despite their ethnic diversity. On the other hand, the reference to the inhabitants of this suburb as “a little bit different” identifies them as urban others, which is to say, separate and different from the mainstream culture associated with the city. 20 In the original: “Ir visa tai Uzˇupyje – atskirame, mazˇame apskrities miestelyje uzˇ Vilnios, su savo klebonija, kapine˙mis, turgumi, su dvaro ir Honestu˛ ru¯mu˛ liekanomis ir net su kiek skirtingais gyventojais.” My translation from Lithuanian into English.

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A similar sense of otherness reverberates in the depiction of other peripheries of Vilnius, situated along the river Vilnia. One of such peripheries, Pu¯cˇkoriai, the area between Antakalnis and New Vilnia, provides the setting for novels by Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki, native to the region. His novel Dziura w niebie (1959 [Eng. A Hole in the Sky]) describes the life of poor Polish children wandering around the old Vilnia mills and observing the city of Vilnius from the high banks of the river Vilnia. By way of summary, it can be stated that in the works of Jewish, Polish, and Lithuanian writers suburbs figure as geographically and culturally peripheral to the historical city centre, although they are connected with it not only by bridges, public transportation, but also by characters’ attempts to establish links between the structural parts of the city. Through literary topography, one can learn more not only about the geographic/spatial constitution of the city, its natural and cultural borders, its social, economic and political fragmentation, but also about the production of urban spaces and places, their historical contexts as well as their symbolic meanings and representations.

3.

Natural Boundaries and Urban Fragmentation in the Literary Topography of Kaunas

Like in the literary topography of Vilnius, the confluence of two rivers, the Nemunas and the Neris, is a dominant landmark. In this context, mention should be made of the poem “Konrad Wallenrod” (1828) by Adam Mickiewicz, in which the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris is described as a romantic rendezvous between two lovers.21 A number of literary texts depict the confluence not only in affective terms, but also treat it as a major reference point in understanding the urban structure of Kaunas. According to the prevailing view, this structure is regarded as determined by the city’s rivers. Arnold Zweig’s novel The Crowning of the King, discussed in the previous section, serves as a case in point: The city of Kowno, to anyone approaching it from Krasny Dvor, stands forth like the prow of a ship. It repeats on a large scale the position of the blown-up chapel on the Neviatza estuary, at the angle between the rivers Vilya and Niemen, and erected by the same knightly and covetous founders. But this, the ancient heart of the city, has long since abdicated its importance to the younger quarters. Only after some weeks in Kovno can the significance of this fortress and centre of the timber trade be truly grasped,

21 In the original: “Wilija, thou flowest through Kowno’s faire vale. / Amid the gay tulips and narcissus pale. / . . . The Wilija despiseth the valley of lowers. / She seeks to the Niemen, her lover to rove. / . . . he presses his love to his bosom so cold, / They perish together in sea-depths unknown” (Mickiewicz, “Konrad Wallenrod” 16–17).

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hemmed in as it is between rivers and hills, so that it cannot expand except along Niemen. Hence the long main streets and short cross streets, the newer being always farthest from the river, until the point where a Russian cathedral blocks the main street like the hilt of a sword. (Zweig, The Crowning 51)

The passage quoted above describes the arrival of the protagonist Paul Winfried from Krasny Dvor (Lith. Raudondvaris), a location near Kaunas, to the city where his military unit is stationed. The confluence is an important geographical element which enables him to understand the urban and social structure of the town by establishing links between its geospace and its political reality, as outlined in recent studies of literary topography (e. g., Weigel; Westphal; Tally, to mention but a few). In several literary texts, the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris can be regarded as a landmark which stands out on the literary map of Kaunas because of its extreme ‘density,’ that is, the frequency of the literary plots taking place here or the relevance of the place to literary characters (Eidukevicˇiene˙ and Sakalavicˇiu¯te˙ 156–159). The confluence and the Nemunas pier become the first elements noticed by the visitors entering Kaunas. In this context, the journey with a steamboat and the entrance into the city space on the waterway can be regarded as a variation of a very popular motif of the journey from the province to the capital, especially in the literary works by Lithuanian writers, Pranas Masˇiotas, Petras Cvirka, Vytautas Sirijos Gira, Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, among others (158). For example, the confluence as a point of entry into Kaunas also appears in the novel Zˇeme˙ maitintoja (1937 [Eng. Mother Earth]) by Petras Cvirka. Written in the tradition of social realism, Cvirka’s novel describes a couple from the countryside who work hard for a better future. When the young woman becomes ill, they travel on a steamboat to Kaunas, then the provisional capital of the country, to visit a doctor. The Nemunas pier is a place where they enter a strange urban space. As the steamboat approaches the town, the countrywoman gazes in wonder at the urban panorama unfolding before her eyes: Monika saw the city from afar. The still river reflected the church towers, and high chimneys were visible everywhere. As far as she could see, there were white and red brick walls. . . . Juras moved his arm across the horizon and showed Monika the bridge, the Town Hall and the Priests’ Seminary Church. (Cvirka, Zˇeme˙ maitintoja, [Mother Earth] 50)22

When they are in the city, the husband takes Monika around and shows her the sights of the provisional capital—the Parliament, the Presidential Palace and the 22 In the original: “Ir tikrai Monika isˇ tolo pamate˙ miesta˛. Ramiame vandenyje atsispinde˙jo bazˇnycˇiu˛ boksˇtai, buvo matyti auksˇti kaminai visur, kur tik akis sieke˙, baltavo, raudonavo mu¯rai, . . . Juras placˇiai vedzˇiojo ranka ir rode˙ tilta˛, rotusˇe˛, seminarijos bazˇnycˇia˛.” Excerpts from Cvirka’s novel are translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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Musical Theatre. They stroll along the main streets in the old and the new parts of the town, observe cars, window shop, and are impressed by the stylish urbanites. However, the woman’s initial admiration of the city with “so many people, so many streets, so many shops” (51) turns into disappointment. The description of the movement in spatial terms (urban routes) turns into a broader reflection of implicit social configurations, which is important with regard to complex spatial ordering of “social positioning and classification,” as explained by Dünne (41–42). The characters become aware not only of the confusing nature of the city’s street network but also of social divisions in the urban space. As a result, the city begins to seem “hostile and distant” (Cvirka, Zˇeme˙ maitintoja [Mother Earth] 59). This feeling is especially strong when the couple wanders through the central part of Kaunas, described as turning into a big city which is no different from other European cities. A major change occurs when the couple “leave the broad streets” and come to the suburbs, where “they can feel the wind and see the fields,” which makes them “feel so good” (58). The characters’ affinity with the atmosphere of the suburbs reflects a frequent tendency in Lithuanian literature of the time: to dwell on the opposition between the countryside and the city and thus to explore the change of tradition in a society undergoing a shift from agrarian to industrial economy. Literary representations of the urban morphology of interwar Vilnius and Kaunas reveal distinct differences. The suburbs, located close to the centre of Kaunas, seem to be more tightly integrated with the city than similarly situated suburbs of Vilnius, at least concerning the frequent description by literary figures moving between the city core and the suburbs. We can assume that literary interest in the suburbs is also related to the process of creating a modern capital city—a kind of metropolis, and a product of socio-spatial politics. According to Lefebvre, such is the action of political power, which, on the one hand, creates fragmentation and separation, but on the other hand, homogenises space and so controls it producing a space, “that is homogeneous yet at the same time broken up into fragments” (342; emphasis in the original). For example, the literary characters, modelled on the trope of the voyeur, standing at the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris—which is part of the city core—perceive two nearby suburbs, Aleksotas on the left bank of the Nemunas, and the suburb of Vilijampole˙ on the right bank of the Neris, as parts of the city that can be easily accessed by bridges. The characters often cross the bridges to experience the distinctness of the city by moving between the city core and the suburbs. Their reading of the urban morphology can be related to contextual factors. The suburbs of Aleksotas and Vilijampole˙ were officially connected to the city in 1919, just as the suburb of Lower Sˇancˇiai, located to the south of the city centre. Despite the change of the official status of the suburbs in the city plan, residents

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and visitors of Kaunas continued to consider the suburbs as rural areas adjacent to the city rather than urban ones (Lukminaite˙ 263). Aleksotas Bridge, linking the suburb of Aleksotas with the Old Town, is a symbolically dense place in the literary map of Kaunas. In the nineteenth century, during the rule of tsarist Russia, Aleksotas and Kaunas were under different laws—Kaunas was then part of the Russian North-western region, while Aleksotas and the whole region on the other bank of the Nemunas belonged to the Kingdom of Poland, where the Napoleonic Code and even different calendars were used (Rada 120). The influence of tsarist Russia on the urban structure of Kaunas is mentioned in Arnold Zweig’s novel The Crowning of the King. Against the backdrop of the events at the end of World War I, the Town Hall square impresses the principal characters, Captain Winfried and General Clauss, as “Slavic” (Zweig, The Crowning 141). When they cross the bridge from the old town into Aleksotas, they notice a vast expanse of a valley spreading before their eyes. There, “General Clauss’s metallic eyes looked out from beneath their narrow lids across at the snow, the sky, the heathland, and the village of Alexota” (142). During the interwar period, Aleksotas was no longer a “village” and became an integrated suburb inhabited by the poor, with Aleksotas Bridge serving as a reference point between two socially different urban areas. The spatial fragmentation of the city provides a major source of themes in Justas Piliponis’s novel Amzˇinasis zˇydas Kaune (1934 [Eng. The Eternal Jew in Kaunas]). The protagonist of the novel is a reporter working for the Lithuanian daily newspaper Lietuvos aidas (Eng. The Echo of Lithuania). Seeking scandals and sensational news, he invites his readers to Aleksotas Bridge, where they would supposedly meet the biblical figure Ahasver coming to the city. The sensational news is not published in the newspaper. Nevertheless, the word is spread, and crowds gather at Aleksotas Bridge and on the bank of the Nemunas—then regarded to be on the fringes of the city—to witness the special wanderer coming to Kaunas: There were groups of policemen forming living walls. People were not allowed into the area between Vytautas Church and Aleksotas Bridge. . . . The strange man crossed the bridge and approached the line created by the police. . . . The Eternal Jew—as he was called by the reporter—continued walking along a street on the bank of the Nemunas, followed by a huge crowd turning into a mob despite the efforts of the deployed police force. (Piliponis, Amzˇinasis zˇydas Kaune [The Eternal Jew in Kaunas] 154)23

23 In the original: “Policija sˇpaleriais sustojo. Nuo Vytauto bazˇnycˇios ir nuo Aleksoto tilto visus zˇmones pasˇalina. . . . Tas keistas zˇmogus perzˇenge˙ tilta˛ir susitiko su policijos kru¯tine˙mis. . . . Amzˇinasis zˇydas, kaip ji˛ reporteris pavadino, e˙jo toliau Nemuno kranto gatve, lydimas gausingos minios, kuri dabar ir stipriu˛ policijos bu¯riu˛ buvo nesuvaldoma.” Translation from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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The arrival of the mythical immortal man adds value to the provisional capital and makes it stand out from the rest of Lithuania. Multiple references to what Sigrid Weigel calls “concrete, geographically identifiable” urban elements (158),24 such as city districts, Aleksotas, Senamiestis, Sˇancˇiai, Vilijampole˙ and Zˇaliakalnis, and street names, Laisves Boulevard and Nemuno kranto Street, endow the mythical content of the novel with convincing realism. In turn, the mythical character of the Eternal Jew is marked by as much surface realism as is the rest of the cast of characters, namely, the reporter, the dames of Kaunas, the clerks, and the criminals. The closure of the novel demystifies the mythical wanderer. He turns out to be a common criminal, who wanted to profit from the naïveté of his fellow townsfolk. The unexpected twist in the plot underscores the profusion of the profane and the sinful in the city space. In describing the evils of city life, Piliponis’s novel does not differentiate between the city core and the suburbs. Yet, the scarce references to the suburbs are significant as they convey the general atmosphere of the provisional capital. Important in this regard are scenes depicting the reporter’s search for his accomplice in different parts of the city. His traveling through the city, on the other hand, reveals the topography of crime, of which the suburbs are an important part. The novel names locales at the core of the city and in the suburbs where the nightlife is most intense. Most frequently, these locales are also gathering places for criminals and outcasts. The movement of the literary characters, which set and follow specific routes in the city, helps the reader to differentiate between distinct urban spaces, which otherwise become blurred in the narrative. Yet, the panorama of the urban space constructed in the novel does not reveal considerable differences in the social or economic composition and even less so in the ethnic composition of the population between different areas of the city. Conversely, the social and ethnic fragmentation of the city space is central in the literary mapping of the suburb Vilijampole˙, located on the bank of the river Neris.25 Similarly to the case of Aleksotas, Arnold Zweig’s novel The Crowning of the King refers to the suburb of Vilijampole˙ as a “village,” significantly different from the city on the opposite bank of the river Neris: “Until 1905, in the little village of Slabodka [the Yiddish name of Vilijampole˙], close to the fortress of Kovno, medievalism still prevailed with all its taboos and all its insistence on a heavenly realm made manifest” (Zweig, The Crowning 89). Until World War Two, the suburb was inhabited predominantly by poor and devout Jews and a minority of Russians and Poles, with Lithuanians being in the absolute minority (Racˇiu¯naite˙-Pauzˇuoliene˙ 37–45). A major Jewish educational institution, Yeshiva, was 24 My translation from German into English. 25 The name “Vilijampole˙” derives from the Slavic name of the river “Wilia”: it is a combination of “Wilia” and “pol” (polis in Greek), meaning “the city at the Wilia” (Vanagas 144).

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also located in this suburb. In 1941, Vilijampole˙ became the place of the Jewish ghetto. In the novel Derner (1939 [Eng. Thorns]) by the Jewish writer David Umru, the distinctness of the suburb is described in terms of its economic backwardness: I wouldn’t be jealous of the way people live there! In Vilyampole by street, in the yard… The cattle-shed like a dog kennel… I didn’t notice the windows. You could see the sky through the roof in the hallway; I saw the loft of the ‘room’ without having to lean. To come inside, I had to bend threefold. (Umru, Derner [Thorns] 24–25)26

Umru uses the Lithuanian version of the place’s name, “Vilijampole˙” (“Viliyampole”), rather than the Yiddish name “Slabodke” (Volbikaite˙ 200). This may be influenced by the fact that Lithuanian authorities required the Jewish press and other Jewish bodies, “in their Yiddish and Hebrew publications, to use a transliteration of the Lithuanian forms of place names, rather than the ancient Yiddish versions (i. e., they had to write “Kaunas” in Hebrew letters instead of the accepted form “Kovne” or “Kovna”)” (Levin 184). This also shows the attempts of the Lithuanian government to make the capital Kaunas more “Lithuanian” and hence more homogeneous in the ethnic and linguistic senses. In the novel Avrom Mapu (1937), Jewish writer Eliezer Heyman textualises the suburb of Vilijampole˙, foregrounding cultural-spatial aspects, such as religious attitudes and identities of different Jewish communities of Kaunas, and providing what German literary scholar Pleßke has called “literary representations of space within the context of the history of mentalities” (165). Pleßke emphasises the role of literary topography for an analysis of the mentalities reflected in urban fiction because “it is significant to see which spaces initiate particular stimuli causing a transgression of a border, and which spaces are characteristically semantisised to define specific grammars of behaviour” (167). The novel Avrom Mapu portrays an important historical figure, Avrom Mapu, a Lithuanian Jewish novelist who lived in Kaunas during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a supporter of the Haskala movement, also called the Jewish Enlightenment, “a late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual movement among the Jews of central and eastern Europe that attempted to acquaint Jews with the European and Hebrew languages and with secular education and culture as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies” (Haskala). Heyman’s

26 In the original: “Kh’volt dir fargunen a kuk ton, vi mentshn lebn! In a hinter-gesl fun Viliyampole. Af a hoyf… A shtelkhl, tsi a hintnishe bude… Keyn fenster hob ikh nit bamerkt… In firhoyz hob ikh durkh’n dakh gezen dem himl, nit unterheybndik zikh hon ikh aroyfgekukt afn boydim fun der ‘dire’… In drayen hob ikh mikh gemuzt eynboygn kedey areyntsugeyn ineveynik.” The Yiddish text and the Lithuanian translation quoted in Goda Volbikaite˙ (199–200). Translation of Umru’s text from Lithuanian into English by Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙.

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protagonist Mapu emphasises differences between orthodox Judaism and the ideology of Haskala when looking at the suburb Vilijampole˙ from the city core on the opposite bank of the river Neris. He sees Vilijampole˙ as a dark, archaic place, shrouded in superstitions. There, “houses and streets were covered in the dark. Glass lights on low, painted poles at the crossroads stood forgotten and blind as if the night had strangled all the lights” (Heyman, Avrom Mapu 7).27 The character speaks about the dark and narrow streets that “run and connect on the narrow island at the banks of Nyeman and Viliye” (13). The rivers as natural borders affecting geographical and social divisions symbolise the schism between the enlightened Jewish community of the city and the Jews of Vilijampole˙, followers of traditional Talmudic Judaism. The protagonist, Mapu, looks at the Yeshiva on the opposite bank of the river and notes that it is located “behind the borders of his world” (22). Such examples show that, in literary texts, characters’ perceptions of space include not only registering physical boundaries; they also “reveal structures of meaning and uncover dispositions of thinking, imagining, feeling, and acting” (Pleßke 167). From the various analytical categories identified by scholars working in the field of literary topography, such as Weigel, Dennerlein and Pleßke, the narrator’s or a character’s perspective (gaze) must be considered as crucial for the construction, description, and representation of spatial perceptions. Pleßke refers to Katrin Dennerlein, who has stated that space as narrated or constructed, conceived and described, or perceived and reflected always emphasises the subjective formation of space (Dennerlein qtd. in Pleßke 167). The latter aspect becomes especially pronounced when comparing the spatial perceptions of characters in Jewish writer Eliezer Heyman’s novel Avrom Mapu and Lithuanian writer Birute˙ Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙’s novel Asˇtuoni lapai. Devintas lapas (2003 [Eng. Eight Leaves. The Ninth Leaf]). While the gaze of Heyman’s protagonist toward the suburb of Vilijampole˙ focuses on social and religious fragmentation within the Jewish community of Kaunas, Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙’s female protagonist, when looking across the river at Vilijampole˙, singles out its rustic idyll, thus showing a rural embeddedness of the Lithuanian mindset and culture: “In the afternoon sun, the waves strike to the other shore. Somebody drinks cows there” (Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙, Asˇtuoni lapai. Devintas lapas [Eight Leaves. The Ninth Leaf] 40)28 Looking at Vilijampole˙, Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙’s protagonist relishes in the rural idyll, familiar and dear to the Lithuanian viewer, but fails to acknowledge

27 In the original: “Di hayzer, di gasn zaynen geven eyngehilt in finsternish. Di glezerne lamternes oyf di niderike, farbike slopes zaynen geshtanen fargesene, blinde bay di rogn, punkt vi di nakht volt oysgevorgn ale fayern.” The Yiddish text and the Lithuanian translation quoted in Goda Volbikaite˙ (203). Translation from Lithuanian into English by Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙. 28 In the original: “Popiecˇio saule˙j bangele˙s nuraibuliuoja iki kito Nries kranto. Ten girdo karves.” Translation from Lithuanian into English by Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙.

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the small Jewish houses and the Yeshiva, which are a major focus of the characters in Jewish writing, for instance, Heyman’s Avrom Mapu. In other literary works by Lithuanian authors, for instance Vytautas Sirijos Gira’s novel Raudonmedzˇio rojus (1972 [Eng. Mahogany Paradise]), Vilijampole˙ features not so much as a distinctly rural area but as part of the city. By most accounts, the novel provides the most detailed literary portrayal of interwar Kaunas (Sˇeina, “Laikinosios sostine˙s refleksija” 185). The protagonist of the novel sees the provisional capital as a totality of spatially and socially distinct separate urban fragments. He describes the distinction between Vilijampole˙ and the rest of Kaunas not so much in terms of a rural/urban dichotomy but in terms of architectural distinctness, indicative of the socioeconomic class levels. An instance of such assessment is suggested in the scene when the protagonist’s view from Zˇaliakalnis Hill passes over the Neris and Vilijampole˙, located beyond. He glances at “the steep slopes down to the Neris” and sees “very small houses of Vilijampole˙” (Sirijos Gira, Raudonmedzˇio rojus [Mahogany Paradise] 178).29 Different from Sirijos Gira, Jewish authors provide more detailed description of the everyday in Vilijampole˙ during the interwar period. They refer to the suburb as “mayn libe Heymat-shtot Slabodke”30 (Grinblat 242). The comparison of foci in depicting a suburb reminds us of the importance that Bertrand Westphal assigns to the “plurality of viewpoints” as a guiding principle in geocriticism and literary topography (113–114). Jewish writers limit their description of Vilijampole˙ to their immediate neighbourhood. In the texts by Lithuanian authors, depictions of Vilijampole˙ as somewhat alien prevail, suggesting the marginal status of the suburb within the city space and within the consciousness of the city residents. Because of the rivers, the suburbs are also associated with a sense of the pristine and the spiritual as opposed to the city centre, which is pervaded by materiality and moral decline. Mykolaitis-Putinas’s novel In the Shadows of the Altars, discussed in the previous section focusing on the literary topographies of Vilnius, includes a scene in which the male protagonist, priest Liudas Vasaris, after a painful separation from his beloved, wanders off to the green spots of Aleksotas across Aleksotas Bridge. The withdrawal from the urban to what was then regarded as (semi)rural/nature aligns the priest with the Romantic hero. Reading the scene against the backdrop of Romanticism evokes the themes of non-conformism and privileging of emotion over reason, whence the character needs the rural ambience of the suburb to resolve the dilemma between priest29 In the original: “zˇemyn, iki pat Neries, stacˇiai leidosi sˇlaitas. Pro sniega˛, kuris dabar krito retas ir smulkutis, buvo matyti mazˇi Vilijampole˙s nameliukai.” Translation from Lithuanian into English by Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙. 30 Eng. “my dear hometown Slabodke.”

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hood and love. When he looks at the city on the opposite bank of the river Nemunas, his gaze falls upon the towers of churches—the ancient Vytautas Church, the lean towers of Jesuit Church and the Town Hall, and the bright dome of Saint Michael the Archangel Church—forming the spiritual topography of the city. However, he also observes industrialisation (“sooty factory chimneys”), intruding into this topography and turning the city into “a demon of civilisation” (Putinas, Altoriu˛ [Altars] 613–615). Given that the concept of literary topography engages with the assumption that representations of urban space derive from a variety of interconnected spaces, organised through movement and the spatial awareness of literary characters, it is interesting to note that the gaze from peripheries of the city or across rivers offers yet another view of Kaunas as explored from the city centre. An example will be provided with reference to a view of the city from Zˇaliakalnis Hill, a residential area adjacent to the central part of the city where the wealthy bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia and the officials of the temporary capital lived. Such an image of Zˇaliakalnis as a prestigious area is dominant in the Lithuanian texts whose topography is limited to the city centre, and the gaze of the observer rises towards Zˇaliakalnis Hill from Laisve˙s ale˙ja (Eng. Laisves Boulevard), the main street of the city. The most detailed description of Zˇaliakalnis is provided in Birute˙ Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙’s autobiographic novel Asˇtuoni lapai. Devintas lapas, mentioned above. The narrator is born in this part of the city and spends her childhood there before leaving Lithuania at the end of the World War II. In the novel, the narrator describes her daily routes and creates an idyllic picture of the city core, including both the villas and green parks at the top of the hill: What wonderful things we saw once we descended the hill! Laisves aleja was waiting for us. In the summer it was warmed by the early afternoon sun, full of the sweet smell of linden blossoms, glittering in the thick shadows of the trees; while in winter it was lazy and sleepy, immersed in the light blue twilight, echoing with sleigh bells, stretching through frosty branches to the snow-covered steps of the Igula Church and its whitecapped cupola. Laisves aleja—the pulsing vein of the city… ... And, at the foot of Zˇaliakalnis, Kaunas glittered: the streetlamps and the lit-up roads on the bridges, like a constellation of stars fallen into two river valleys. ... I lean on the side of the stairs. Below me stretches Kaunas. My city of birth: my bright green Kaunas… (Pukelevicˇiu¯te˙, Asˇtuoni lapai [Eight Leaves] 177–178, 189–190, 296; ellipses within paragraphs in the original)31

31 In the original: “Kiek nuostabiu˛ dalyku˛ mu¯su˛ laukia, nusileidus pakalne˙n! Laukia Laisve˙s ale˙ja. Vasara˛ ˛ikaitusi ankstyvo popiecˇio saule˙j, pilna saldaus liepzˇiedzˇiu˛ kvapo, mirganti tirsˇtais medzˇiu˛ ˇsesˇe˙liais; zˇiema˛ tingi ir mieguista, nugrimzdusi ˛i sˇviesiai me˙lyna˛ prieblanda˛, aidinti didzˇiu˛ju˛ rogiu˛ skambalais, nusidriekianti per sˇarmotas sˇakas iki apsnigtu˛ ˛Igulos

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That Zˇaliakalnis and Laisves Boulevard appear frequently in the literary representations of Kaunas, as illustrated in Birute˙ Pukelevicˇiu¯te˙’s writing as well as in Justas Piliponis’ novel The Eternal Jew in Kaunas, Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas’s In the Shadow of the Altars, and other literary works discussed above, resonates with Martina Löw’s statement that spaces occupied by the privileged receive increased attention and are symbolically over-represented (260). However, if one looks at Zˇaliakalnis from the river Neris or from the suburb Vilijampole˙, she or he will see “Brasilka,” a steep slope with densely situated huts of the poor. During the interwar period, the place was frequently inhabited by proletarian activists, as depicted in the texts by the left-wing Lithuanian authors, for instance Halina Korsakiene˙. The protagonist of Korsakiene˙’s novel Laikinoji sostine˙ (1961 [Eng. The Provisional Capital), Petras Grigas, calls his neighbours in “Brasilka” to revolutionary action. When contemplating his activities Petras casts his glance across the river Neris to Vilijampole˙, where poor Jewish people live, including his like-minded poor Jewish proletarian, Dovid Meyer. In Petras’s mind, “Brasilka” stands in stark contrast to the immediate vicinity of Zˇaliakalnis’s villas, but, because of similar socioeconomic conditions and the revolutionary aspirations of its residents, it becomes one with the more distant Vilijampole˙: Beneath my feet flows the dark stream of the Neris. At the bottom of the slope, giving off occasional flashes, there is Jonava Street. His street. Dusty, strewn with trash which no one sweeps up—just the spring floods that wash it. . . . Beyond the Neris, up to the starless arch of the sky, Vilijampole˙’s lights glimmer, like a raked-out fireplace, still alive with smouldering embers. (Korsakiene˙, Laikinoji sostine˙ [The Provisional Capital] 252)32

In this case, the political ideology becomes an instrument for linking the two areas divided by the river, and these literary texts come to exemplify Henri Lefebvre’s argument that ideology homogenises spaces. One more space of Kaunas encoded with the working-class ideology is the suburb Lower Sˇancˇiai, the largest industrial area of the city during the first half of the twentieth century, which is surrounded by a large loop of the Nemunas and separated from the city centre by the brook Girstupis (Lukminaite˙ 262). bazˇnycˇios laiptu˛ ir baltakepuriu˛ jos kupolu˛. Laisve˙s ale˙ja – tvinkcˇiojanti miesto gysla. . . . . . O Zˇaliakalnio pape˙de˙j mirge˙jo Kaunas: gatviu˛ zˇibintais ir nusˇviestais tiltu˛ takais, lyg dvieju˛ upiu˛ klonin nukrite˛s zˇvaigzˇdynas. . . . Uzˇsiremiu ant laiptu˛ atbrailos. Apacˇioj driekiasi Kaunas. Mano gimtas miestas: sˇviesiai zˇalias mano Kaunas…” Excerpts from Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙’s novel are translated from Lithuanian into English by Milda Danyte˙. 32 In the original: “Po koju˛ – juoda Neries vaga. Sˇlaito pape˙de˙je, blykcˇiodama retais zˇibure˙liais, prisiglaude˙ Jonavos gatve˙. Jo gatve˙. Dulkina, prisˇiuksˇlinta, niekieno nesˇluojama – tik pavasario potvyniu˛ plaunama. . . . Uzˇ Neries – ligi pat bezˇvaigzˇdzˇio skliauto – mirkcˇioja Vilijampole˙s sˇviesos, panasˇios ˛i isˇdraikyta˛ugniakura˛, knibzˇdanti˛ rusenancˇiu˛ zˇariju˛.” Translation from Lithuanian into English by Milda Danyte˙.

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The setting of Lower Sˇancˇiai is described in great detail in Vytautas Petkeviˇcius’s novels, such as Priemiescˇio zˇmone˙s (1959 [Eng. Suburban People]) and Paskutinis atgailos amzˇius (1986 [Eng. The Last Era of Penance]). Greatly acclaimed during the soviet period, Petkevicˇius’s works are now generally considered to be propaganda literature. According to the principles of literary topography, based on the interconnection between real and fictional spaces, as well as the subjective dimension of space formation, one can see a close link between places along which the characters move and their ideological meanings. In Suburban People, describing the life of the working-class during the last years of the independent state, and in The Last Era of Penance, depicting the situation of lower classes within a broader context of the country’s history, settings and routes are almost exclusively limited to factories, secret apartments, prisons, and other places frequented by left-wing working-class characters, thus foregrounding the ideological subtext of the novels. The topography of Lower Sˇancˇiai and the distinction of the suburb from “the city itself” become evident in the introductory sentences of the novel Suburban People: No matter from what side you drive into Kaunas, its abundant outskirts already appear before you in the distance, with their long rows of buildings, houses and shacks, tangled among themselves on narrow and dirty little streets. For a considerable time, they accompany you on both sides until, at long last, the city itself rises up. (Petkevicˇius, Priemiescˇio zˇmone˙s [Suburban People] 6)33

The examples of spatial and social fragmentation of interwar Kaunas are provided, where actions of the wealthy bourgeoisie, associated with the core of the city, are treated as the reason for the dire conditions of the working-class, associated with the suburbs, as well as the reason for the very slow integration of the two parts of the city: And despite yourself you begin to feel, when you compare these two scenes [the city and the outskirts], that every day, over many years, the city takes from the outskirts only one lamp, only one stone or brick from the pavement, and leaves them dirty, wooden and dark, just here and there decorated by tall factory chimneys that toss heavy black clouds of smoke into the air. (Petkevicˇius, Priemiescˇio zˇmone˙s [Suburban People] 6)34

33 In the original: “Pro kur bei˛vazˇiuotum ˛i Kauna˛, tave jau isˇ tolo pasitinka gausu¯s jo priemiescˇiai, isˇbarste˛ savo ilgas namu˛, nameliu˛ ir namuku˛ virtines, susipynusias tarpusavy siauromis purvinomis gatvike˙mis. Dar ilga˛kelio gala˛ jie lydi tave isˇ abieju˛ pusiu˛, kol galu˛ gale priesˇ akis isˇnyra pats miestas.” Translation of Petkevicˇius’s novel Suburban People from Lithuanian into English by Milda Danyte˙. 34 In the original: “Ir nenoromis, sulygine˛s sˇiuos abu vaizdus [miesto ir priemiescˇiu˛] imi galvoti, kad per daugeli˛ metu˛ miestas isˇ priemiescˇiu˛ kasdien paimdavo tik po viena˛ lempa˛, tik po viena˛grindinio akmeni˛ ar plyta˛, o jie paliko purvini, mediniai ir tamsu¯s, kur ne kur pagrazˇinti stypsancˇiais gamyklu˛ kaminais, isˇmetancˇiais ˛i ora˛ sunkiu˛ juodu˛ du¯mu˛ debesis.”

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The novel The Last Era of Penance reverberates with similar overtones of class consciousness, revealing the “spatial fragmentation” of the city, which differentiates its “socio-spatial characteristics” and “uses,” to borrow Michelutti’s phrasing (1). The fragmentation frequently derives from the distinctness of the multiethnic working-class living and working in the suburbs. Filtered through the perspective of two members of the working-class, brothers Kazys and Vincas, the novel pays much attention to the topography of Lower Sˇancˇiai, particularly the irritating street network, the local distribution of factories, barracks, and small Jewish shops, presenting it as a typical suburban area—industrial and multiethnic: In Sˇancˇiai he [Kazys’s adopted son] passed his time with Poles, Jews, and even with the Gypsy Lukas, all of whom he considered close friends, since in the outskirts people were judged not by what language they spoke at home but by how they worked and what kind of work they did, how they behaved with their family and friends, how they kept their word. Working-class people valued good behaviour and honesty more than what you considered yourself—a Pole or a German. (Petkevicˇius, Paskutinis atgailos amzˇius [The Last Era of Penance] 63)35

Within the overall context of the novel, the positive, ideological bias, implied in the description of the suburban values, is implicitly linked with a negative assessment of policies directed towards the creation of a national, that is, Lithuanian character of the city, which was promoted by state institutions, located in the city core. To take the analysis one step further, one may say that the novel, spanning the period from the fourteenth century to World War II, presents the subjectively perceived spaces and the multiethnic relations within those spaces to point to changes in the relationships among ethnic groups occasioned by the war and the soviet occupation following it. The idea of peaceful coexistence of different ethnic groups—albeit limited to the suburbs—is epitomised in a young Lithuanian character’s act of taking his Jewish wife across the river to gypsies who settle on the bank of the river Nemunas (Petkevicˇius, Paskutinis atgailos amzˇius [The Last Era of Penance] 177–79).

35 In the original: “Sˇancˇiuose jis [Kazio ˛isu¯nis] draugavo su lenkais, zˇydais ir net su cˇigoniuku Luka, kuri˛ laike˙ savo mirtinu draugu, nes priemiestyje zˇmone˙s buvo vertinami ne pagal tai, kokia kalba sˇneka namuose, bet kaip ir koki˛ dirba darba˛, kaip elgiasi su savo artimaisiais ir bicˇiuliais, kaip te˛si duota˛zˇodi˛. Darbininkai padoruma˛ir sa˛zˇininguma˛vertino labiau negu tai, kuo tu save laikysi, lenku ar vokiecˇiu.”

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Conclusion

The interwar period is particularly fascinating as we can see the cultural and social diversity of Lithuanian cities clearly expressed, especially Vilnius and Kaunas, emphasised by the hills and rivers as the main boundary markers of their urban topography. One of the main characteristics of Vilnius as a modern cityscape is a clear fragmentation of different areas: the city centre with several markers of a historic metropolis on the one hand, and the semiurban suburbs behind the rivers on the other hand. The large historical city core of Vilnius seems to have enough mental power; thus, there is no need to expand the view onto the periphery. In the case of Kaunas, the rivers, first of all navigable rivers, are important for the expansion of the urban space, both physically and symbolically. As they flow through Kaunas, the rivers separate and bring together different areas; furthermore, they also mark topographic, social, and cultural borders: the rural versus the urban population, Lithuanians versus Jews, wealth versus slums. The literature reflects the authors’ attempts to create a modern urban area of the new capital city by including natural boundaries and suburbs. In various literary texts, changing perspectives reveal complex topographical connections; however, despite the natural boundaries, the city centre is not as neatly isolated from the semiurban/rural peripheries as Vilnius’ centre is. The above discussed literary topographies, provide insight into fragmentation and constitution of urban space in the two cities and in a wider context, including urban self-conceptions and external views of visitors on the cityscape as a whole and on its individual areas.

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Lukminaite˙, Solveiga. “Sˇancˇiu˛ ˛ivaizdis Lietuvos spaudoje XX a. 3–4 desˇimt.” Kauno istorijos metrasˇtis 16 (2016): 257–275. Print. Macˇiulis, Dangiras, and Darius Staliu¯nas. Vilnius – Lietuvos sostine˙. Problema tautine˙s valstybe˙s projekte (XIX a. pabaiga – 1940 m.). Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos institutas, 2015. Print. Michelutti, Enrico. “An Analytical Framework for Urban Fragmentation Analysis in the Global South City: Questioning Urban Planning Practices through an Institutional Approach.” N-Aerus XI. Urban Knowledge: Cities of the South, Conference Proceedings (2010): 1–15. Web. 5. Jan. 2019. Mickiewicz, Adam. Konrad Wallenrod. Trans. Maude Ashurst Biggs. London: Trubner & Co., 1882. Print. Miłosz, Czesław. Maisˇtingas Czesławo Miłoszo autoportretas: Pokalbiai su Aleksandru Fiutu. Trans. Birute˙ Jonusˇkaite˙. Vilnius: Alma littera, 1997. Print. Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas. Rasˇtai. Vol. 4. Vilnius: Vaga, 1992. Print. Petkevicˇius, Vytautas. Priemiescˇio zˇmone˙s. Vilnius: Vaga, 1983. Print. –. Paskutinis atgailos amzˇius. Vol. 1. Vilnius: Vaga, 1986. Print. Piatti, Barbara, et. al. “Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction.” Cartography and Art. Ed. William Cartwright, Georg F. Gartner, and Antje Lehn. Berlin: Springer, 2009. 177–192. Print. Piliponis, Justas. Kelione˙ aplink Lietuva˛ per 80 dienu˛. Amzˇinas zˇydas Kaune. Kaunas: Sˇviesa, 1991. Print. Pleßke, Nora. The Intelligible Metropolis: Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014. Print. Pu¯kelevicˇiu¯te˙ Birute˙. Asˇtuoni lapai. Devintas lapas. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ sa˛jungos leidykla, 2003. Print. Racˇiu¯naite˙-Pauzˇuoliene˙, Rasa. “Regionine˙s kultu¯ros savitumai tarpukario Kaune.” Liaudies kultu¯ra 3 (2009): 37–45. Print. Racˇiu¯naite˙, Vaiva. “Miestietisˇkojo romano proverzˇis (sociologiniu zˇvilgsniu).” Darbai ir dienos 36 (2003): 91–105. Print. Rada, Uwe. Die Memel. Kulturgeschichte eines europäischen Stromes. Berlin: Siedler, 2010. Print. Sirijos Gira, Vytautas. Raudonmedzˇio rojus. Kanare˙le˙s. Vilnius: Vaga, 1987. Print. Stravinskiene˙, Vitalija. “Ethnic-Demographic Changes in the Data of the Statistical Sources of the City of Vilnius (1920–1939).” Lithuanian Historical Studies 17 (2012): 125–146. Print. –. “The Territorial Expansion of Vilnius: Plans and their Realisation (1916–1940).” Lithuanian Historical Studies 20 (2015): 127–150. Print. Sutzkever, Abraham. “The Cleaver’s Daughter.” Essential Prose. Trans. Zackary Sholem Berger. Amherst, Massachusetts: White Goat Press, 2020. Print. Sˇeina, Viktorija. “Laikinosios sostine˙s refleksija Vytauto Sirijos Giros romane Raudonmedzˇio rojus.” Lituanistica 3 (2013): 185–199. Print. –. Laikinoji sostine˙ lietuviu˛ literatu¯roje. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014. Print. Tally Jr., Robert T. “Foreword: A Geocriticism of the Worldly World.” The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place, and Maps. By Bertrand Westphal. Trans. Amy D. Wells. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xi–xvi. Print.

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–. “Mapping Narratives.” Introduction. Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative. Ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 1–12. Print. Tiuksˇiene˙, Zita, and Nijole˙ Sisaite˙, eds. Pasizˇvalgymai po Vilniu˛. Vilniaus mikrorajonai. Vilnius: Vilniaus apskrities Adomo Mickevicˇiaus viesˇoji biblioteka, 2015. Web. 2. Nov. 2021. . Umru, Dovid. Derner. Kaunas: Libhober fun visn, 1939. Print. Uzˇpalyte˙, Kamile˙. “A Short History of Everyday Life in Kalvariju˛ Street in the 20th Century.” Mapping Vilnius. Transitions of Post-socialist Urban Spaces. Ed. Felix Ackermann, Benjamin Cope, and Miodrag Kucˇ. Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2016. 201–210. Print. Valatka, Vytautas, Donatas Burneika, and Ru¯ta Ubarevicˇiene˙. “Large Social Inequalities and Low Levels of Socio-ecomic Segregation in Vilnius.” Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities: East Meets West. Ed. Tiit Tammaru, et. al. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 313–332. Print. Vanagas, Aleksandras. Lietuvos miestu˛ vardai. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopediju˛ leidykla, 1996. Print. Vasiliauskiene˙, Virginija, and Jonathan Slocum. Baltic Online Lesson 3: Lithuanian. Early Indo-Euroepean Online. Web. 2 Nov. 2021. . Venclova, Tomas. “The ‘Text of Vilnius’ and the ‘Text of Tallin’. A Comparison.” Urban Semiotics: The City as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon. Ed. Igor Pilshchov. Tallinn: TLU Press, 2015. 39–64. Print. Volbikaite˙, Goda. “Mazˇa pakrasˇcˇio sˇalies sostine˙: Kaunas tarpukario jidisˇ literatu¯roje.” Sostine˙ kaip tapatumo simbolis. Vilnius ir Kaunas tarpukario kultu¯roje. Ed. Alma Lapinskiene˙ and Viktorija Sˇeina. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 2014. 185–214. Print. Weigel, Sigrid. “Zum topographical turn: Kartographie, Topographie und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaften.” Kultur Poetik 2.2 (2002): 151–165. Print. Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Trans. Robert T. Tally. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Zweig, Arnold. The Crowning of the King. Trans. Eric Sutton. New York: The Viking Press, 1938. Print. Zˇemaitis, Augustinas. “History of Vilnius.” TrueLithuania.com, n.d. Web. 2. Nov. 2021. . –. “History of Kaunas.” TrueLithuania.com, n.d. Web. 2. Nov. 2021. .

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Chapter 5 – In Search of Cultural Exoticism in Some Lithuanian Travel Writing

1.

Introduction

The inspiration for this chapter fuels on three distinct but related observations regarding the current literary landscape. First, while travel narratives have existed for a long time, travel literature only recently has become a considerable part of popular fiction, as Peter Hulme and Tom Youngs assert in their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (1–11). Paralleling the increased popularity of travel fiction, the formal study of travel literature has also gained momentum during the past few decades. For a long time, literary scholars treated travel literature, in Mary Baine Campbell’s words, as a “subliterary genre” (261). The same scholar states (in the same essay) that travel literature as a genre and as an object of literary research became prominent in the 1980s. Hulme and Youngs confirm that “travel has recently emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences,” and that, importantly, “the amount of scholarly work on travel writing has reached unprecedented levels” (1). Second, it is probable that globalisation, on the one hand, and recent trends in fiction, on the other hand, are complementing each other in ways that foster both the proliferation of travel literature and its scholarly study. In the past, travel writings were most frequently accounts by adventurers, writers and researchers (“Travel Literature”). In other words, travel writing seems to have been the purview of exceptional individuals in unique or unusual circumstances and, generally, offered the reader (new) factual, scientific, or geographic insights. In the globalised world, the number of individuals who move around has proliferated—whether they do so voluntarily (as travellers) or not (refugees, im/migrants). Contemporary travel writing does not centre on sharing (new) knowledge with its readers, but rather emphasises the narrator’s thoughts, and feelings that are experienced in a new environment. According to Alain de Botton, the writer starts with scattered impressions, and these experiences gradually turn into “a compact and well-defined narrative” (15). Personalised experiences, indeed, constitute a distinct feature of contemporary travel narratives. The per-

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sonalisation, in turn, situates contemporary travel narratives into the larger context of postmodern literature which, as Nick Bruner contends, is characterised by “blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality” (4). Contemporary travel narratives construct personal experiences in a particular (cultural) environment and thusly blend fiction (the ‘well-defined’ narrative, a construct) and reality (an actual location or locations). Finally, with travel narratives popular around the globe, one also wonders about what particular travel writing is available to what types of readers; availability is, of course, a question of translation. Alternatively, one can ask, with Tim Youngs, how research on travel writing is possible for scholars who “work . . . in languages other than English, or other than the major European [languages]” (168). Most of the texts under consideration in this chapter have not been translated and remain inaccessible to readers who do not know Lithuanian. My goals are to analyse (contemporary) Lithuanian travel writing in the context of recent scholarship on the genre and, while doing this critical reading, to give the reader access to literature that is not well-known outside of its linguistic (Lithuanian) iteration. For the discussion of the ‘exotic,’ the analysis of Lithuanian travel writing draws on Alain de Botton’s ideas on travel delineated in his book The Art of Travel (2003). In particular, he suggests a variety of motivations for travel: (1) exoticism, (2) curiosity, (3) joy (the loveliness of nature, for instance, might encourage us to locate the good in ourselves), (4) the sense of the sublime, or (5) visualisation through the prism of art (“works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to” [De Botton 187]). De Botton observes the inward benefit of travelling, stating that “[ j]ourneys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train” (57). It is there that we can reflect upon our lives from a height we could not have reached in the midst of everyday business—subtly assisted in this by the unfamiliar world around us: by the small wrapped soaps on the edge of the basin, by the gallery of miniature bottles in the mini-bar, by the room-service menu with its promises of all-night dining and the view on to an unknown city stirring silently twenty-floors below us. (De Botton 59)

Alain de Botton relates exoticism to “a symbol of abroad,” and regards this concept as including happiness (59). Among different kinds of travellers, he also finds those “who might return from [their] journeys with a collection of small, unfe`ˆted but life-enhancing thoughts” (78). “Sublime places,” De Botton observes, “gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events” (113). De Botton’s philosophical insights about the exoticism of travel are the foundation for a discussion of how this concept functions in Lithuanian travel writing.

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Travelling may be interpreted as a symbol for a changed surrounding (a different place, people, food, or language), or a disrupted routine that raise expectations about exoticism.

2.

The Development of Lithuanian Travel Literature: An Overview of Exoticism

In her pioneering study Kelione˙. Keliautojas. Literatu¯ra (2010 [Travel. Traveller. Literature]), Imelda Vedrickaite˙ states that the first written documentations of Lithuanian travellers date back to the second half of the sixteenth century, when pilgrim travelling was popular (39). Although not of equal significance, Kelione˙ ˛i Italija˛ (1575 [Travel to Italy]) by Jurgis Radvila, and Kelione˙ ˛i Jeruzale˛, 1590–1591, (Travel to Jerusalem) by Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila Nasˇlaite˙lis, are, according to Vedrickaite˙, the first texts to introduce this genre in Lithuania (41). Vedrickaite˙’s study, which is the first significant scholarly research about travel writing in Lithuania, presents an in-depth analysis of these relatively early texts and considers works of many travel writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this chapter, however, my focus is on one of the most distinct features in contemporary (not only) travel writing—the search and sense of exoticism. The classification of the periods of Lithuanian travel literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is grounded in Alain De Botton’s insights into the philosophy of an aspiration to search for exoticism. Following the logic of De Botton’s philosophy, it is useful to group travel writing in Lithuania in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries into four distinct phases. In each of the following, historical and political contingencies shape the writers’ approach to an aspiration to search for exoticism: (1) The period of 1910–1940: intellectual and aesthetic travels; (2) The period of soviet occupation (1940–1990): limited trajectories of travel and involuntary travels (deportation or flight from the homeland in fear of political repressions; (3) Travels (after 1990): filling a gap and dealing with yearning for travel; (4) Travels in the twenty-first century: from im/ migrant experience to sophisticated impressions of travel. The above classification is based on tracing larger or smaller degree of aspiration to exoticism. For contemporary travel writing, it needs to be pointed out that the majority of contemporary travel texts in Lithuanian appeared—with some exceptions—only after 1990. The writer who is also a traveller and whose written works are devoted only to travels is still not a common phenomenon in Lithuanian literature. A travel writer generally produces many other types of texts in a variety of genres. Indeed, most writers combine fiction, poetry, documentary prose, travel sketches, memoirs, and more. Some of them merely insert

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elements of travel writing in their memoirs or fiction. Due to historically and politically determined situations, most Lithuanian travel authors are either novelists or poets; only when they travel and are struck by new surroundings do they record their impressions and include facts in their narrative by taking on informational and/or aesthetic approaches. Banning of the Lithuanian press from 1865 to 1904 (the time of annexation by Czarist Russia) has affected the re-birth of travel writing in Lithuania at the time. Writers involved in the national revival try to depict Lithuania as part of Europe and thus introduce travelling characters, foreign locations and foreign culture(s). ˇ iurlioniene˙ (1886–1958), a Lithuanian writer, For example, Sofija Kymantaite˙-C playwright, poet, literature and art critic (and one of the activists of Lithuanian national rebirth movement), creates circumstances to express her particular interest in the exoticism of contrast of cultures in her novel Bundanti zˇeme˙, 1913– 1934, (Awakening Land). In addition, it has to be stated that during the period when literature in Lithuanian was scarce (due to various reasons), literature in the languages of neighbouring countries (especially Poland and Russia) was accessible to many Lithuanians. Therefore, texts about travels abroad could have been read in Polish, Russian or other languages. Moreover, many writers of the period had either completed their studies in Russian and Polish universities or lived in either Russia or Poland. Philosophical and symbolic considerations of the process of travel can be found in the work by Jonas Biliu¯nas (1879–1907), who studied in Germany and Switzerland. The writer’s short stories from 1903 to 1904 illustrate his sense of exoticism, which can be understood as liberation of the mind through the description of fantastic and allegoric travels. As mentioned above, in my analysis I focus on the search for the exotic in real travels and their records. I am only considering foreign travelling (although accounts of domestic travel could also address a search for the exotic and could well be interesting for readers of translations of these accounts). The first true ‛modern’ Lithuanian writer and traveller, Matas Sˇalcˇius (1890– 1940) journeyed to China, Japan, and the United States of America, where he worked as a journalist (Suzˇiede˙lis and Kucˇas 33–34). After Lithuania gains independence in 1918, Sˇalcˇius returns to Lithuania but continues to travel extensively throughout Europe. In 1929, together with famous traveller Antanas Posˇka, he voyages through the Balkans, Greece, Egypt, and East Asian countries to India. After this travel, he publishes a six-volume series Svecˇiuose pas 40 tautu˛: ketveriu˛ metu˛ kelione˙s po Europa˛, Azija˛ ir Afrika˛ aprasˇymas (1935 [Visiting 40 Nations: Four Years of Travel in Europe, Asia, and Africa]). The book provides detailed information about geography, history, culture, and current political events in the countries visited. Moreover, the book describes Sˇalcˇius’s lectures

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that he gave as a way of earning income for the journey. For example, he describes his lecture in Haifa: In the evening, I gave a talk at the Technical College. The Jewish Community of Haifa impressed me as highly intellectual. Despite the beautiful weather and the fact that the audience had to pay entrance fee, over 300 people came for the lecture. Such a numerous audience is a pleasure to have. I told them about Lithuania, the special developments in its economy in recent years and tasks for the future. I also briefly described the countries that I had crossed on my way. I pointed to the issue of distorted boundaries between countries in Eastern and Central Europe and referred to my experiences in Arab-Jewish Palestine. The organisers and the audience thanked me for the talk. (Sˇalcˇius, Svecˇiuose pas 40 tautu˛ [Visiting 40 Nations] 228)1

Regina Rudaityte˙ states that Sˇalcˇius acts as an ambassador of Lithuania, forming its image and describing its place among other nations (9) On the other hand, his descriptions of the cultural particularities of the countries that he visited can be regarded as invocation of an intercultural dialogue, implicitly intended to solve tensions related to the history of, as Sˇalcˇius has it, “distorted boundaries between countries in Eastern and Central Europe” (228).2 Aims associated with promoting constructive intercultural dialogue can also be gleaned in Sˇalcˇius’s foregrounding education of his countrymen. His writing style is factual, devoid of exoticising cultural differences, that is, seeing the foreign as ‘other’ or “uncivilised.”3 For example, his description of rural settlements of Egypt in the 1930s focus on providing knowledge about elements constituting culture, such as clothing, food, work, the relationship with nature and God, and education: Egyptian villagers impressed me as poor people. . . . Their children run naked as the day they were born until they are six to eight years old. Grown men wear long dresses, most often white and grayish, and they wear cotton wraps around their heads. Their daily meal includes Aish, the Egyptian bread, a bunch of radish, beans, or sorrel leaves; sometimes boiled or mashed beans or mashed lentil dish, similar to our kissel, a piece of buffalo or sheep cheese, sometimes tomato, lettuce or other vegetable, sometimes fish from the Nile or the Canal—and that is about it. On such nourishment, an Egyptian farmer stays outside from sunrise to sunset: during

1 Unless otherwise noted, translations from Lithuanian are my own. The original is: “Vakare ˛ivyko mano paskaita Technikume. Haifos zˇydu˛ visuomene pasirode˙ ir auksˇtai intelektuali. Nors buvo grazˇus oras ir mokama uzˇ ˛ie˙jima˛, susirinko per 300 zˇmoniu˛. Tiekui maloniau ir kalbe˙ti. Papasakojau jiems apie Lietuva˛, ypatinga˛ paskutiniu˛ju˛ metu˛ u¯kisˇka˛ ku¯ryba˛ ir uzˇdavinius ateity. Trumpai nuvaizdavau pervazˇiuotu˛ Europos sˇaliu˛ bu¯ti˛. Pabre˙zˇiau Rytu˛ ir Viduriniosios Europos dabartiniu˛ sienu˛ netikslumas [sic]. Keletu zˇodzˇiu˛ pamine˙jau savo patyrimus arabu˛ ir zˇydu˛ Palestinoje. Ruosˇe˙jai ir klausytojai pade˙kojo man uzˇ paskaita˛.” 2 Cf. the goals of intercultural dialogue in the contemporary globalised world as outlined in “Intercultural Dialogue,” White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue, Council of Europe, May 2008. 3 For a discussion of the ‘exotic’ as ‘uncivilised,’ see, e. g., Mieke Neyens 146.

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the tide time—ploughing a field with a camel, buffalo or donkey team, or a combination of these animals pulling the plough, sitting, reaping with a moon sickle, hand threshing or cleaning grain, sprinkling fields with water from irrigation located along the furrows . . . , tending grazing cattle, fighting locusts and other insects. . . . In the company of the farmers, one can see white long-legged, long-billed birds resembling both the crow and the stork. . . . These birds are farmers’ friends and helpers. They are called the ibis. Ancient Egyptians considered them to be sacred. Egyptian villagers—pious people. In the middle of the day, at prayer time, they would kneel in the field, on the road or wherever their mullah’s (priest’s) call for prayer would reach them. They would turn east, to the holy city of Mecca and, kneeling on a piece of clothing . . . piously nod their heads while praying to Allah. Schools in Egyptian villages are still scarce; hence there are many illiterate people among the villagers. (Sˇalcˇius, Svecˇiuose [Visiting] 152–153)4

Similar cultural categories feature in the description of other nations. In 1936, Sˇalcˇius travels to Latin America, visits with some Lithuanian diaspora groups, becomes sick with malaria, and eventually dies in Bolivia. As Simas Suzˇiede˙lis and Antanas Kucˇas state, “[b]eside travel accounts, Sˇalcˇius left a large number of popular biographies, history, nature, and story books, as well as a valuable archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts” (34). The life of his co-traveller, Antanas Posˇka’s, (his real name is Antanas Pasˇkevicˇius; 1929–1992) is no less dramatic than that of Sˇalcˇius. Posˇka’s interest in travel begins in childhood and, probably, inspires him to study other languages. He participates in the 1923 Congress of Esperanto Users in Nurnberg, Germany, visits Italy in 1924, and receives a diploma to teach Esperanto, which is approved by the Lithuanian Ministry of Education in the same year. In 1926, he works for Kaunas Radio Agency and has a special program dedicated to Esperanto. From 4 The original text is: “Felachai dare ˛ispu¯di˛ vargingu˛ zˇmoneliu˛. . . . Felachu˛ vaikai iki 6–8 metu˛ be˙gine˙ja su Adomo apdarais. Suauge˛ felachai de˙vi ilgas jupas, jos dazˇniausiai baltos ir murzinos spalvos, galvos apvyturiuotos medvilniniais sˇaliais. Felachu˛ valgis –‘ae˙sˇ,’ pluosˇtas ridiku˛, pupu˛ ar ru¯gsˇte˙liu˛ lapu˛; kartais virtu˛ ar trintu˛ pupu˛ ar le˛ˇsiu˛ rauginta tyre˙, primenanti mu¯su˛ kisieliu˛, gabalas buivolo ar avies su¯rio, kartais pomidorai, salotos ir kitokia darzˇove˙, kartais zˇuvele˙ isˇ Nilo ar jo perkaso – tai ir visa. Taip pavalge˛s felachas nuo saule˙s iki saule˙s praleidzˇia visa diena˛lauke: cˇia ardamas tvano metu zˇambiu, pasikinke˛s kupranugari˛, buivola˛, asila˛ ar pora˛ tu˛ misˇriu˛ gyvuliu˛, cˇia se˙damas, cˇia pjaudamas pjautuvais, cˇia kuldamas cˇia valydamas rankomis javus, cˇia dre˙kindamas laukus vandeniu, kuri˛ isˇvedzˇioja po lauka˛ vagomis . . . cˇia ganydamas laukuose savo gyvulius, cˇia kovodamas su ske˙riais ir kitokiais vabzdzˇiais. . . . Laukuose su felachais galima matyti baltu˛ auksˇtakoju˛, ilgasnapiu˛ pauksˇcˇiu˛, panasˇiu˛ drauge ˛i varna˛ ir ˛i gandra˛. . . . Tie pauksˇcˇiai yra felacho draugai ir pade˙je˙jai. Jie vadinami ibiais. Senove˙s egiptiecˇiai juos laike˙ ˇsventais. Felachai–maldingi zˇmone˙s. Vidudieni˛, kai atidavo maldos metas, jie klaupdavo lauke, ant kelio, kieme ar kitur, kur juos uzˇklupdavo mulos (kunigo) sˇu¯kis melstis, asigre˛zˇdavo ˛i pietu˛ rytu˛ puse˛, kur buvo sˇventasai miestas Meka ir, pasitese˛ koki˛ ru¯ba˛ po koju˛, sude˙je˛ rankas, dievobaimingai lingavo malda˛ Visagaliui Alachui. Mokyklu˛ Egipto kaimuose dar mazˇa, tai felachu˛ tarpe daug berasˇcˇiu˛.”

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1926 to1929, he studies medicine in Kaunas. During childhood, he travels across Lithuania and later organises a trip around the coast of the Baltic Sea. He then decides to travel to India on a motorcycle. At this point, he hears of Matas Sˇalcˇius, who invites him to travel together. They travel to East Asia, where Posˇka becomes sick with malaria and must spend half a year in Teheran, Iran, reaching India in 1931. Interestingly, during this trip Posˇka uses his knowledge of Esperanto and his connections with local Esperanto clubs. During the period from 1931 to 1933, he studies anthropology at Bombay University, where he also learns some Sanskrit. During the same years, he also travels to China. Later, in 1934, he travels to Nepal. He completes writing his dissertation (in the field of anthropology), then travels extensively in South-East Asia and visits many islands. He is especially interested in local languages. Therefore, in his life experience we see this search for exoticism not only for new places, but also for the so-called linguistic exoticism. On his way home, he travels through Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. In Turkey, he is arrested by the police and accused as a British spy. Back in Lithuania, he writes to a number of journals and publishes a set of eight volumes: Nuo Baltijos iki Bengalijos: asˇtuoneriu˛ metu˛ kelione˙ po Europa˛, Afrika˛ ir Azija˛ (1939 [From the Baltic to Bengal: Eight Years of Travel in Europe, Asia, and Africa]) (Suzˇiede˙lis and Jaksˇtas 325).5 The first volume, which details the journey from Kaunas to the Mediterranean Sea, includes an address to the reader, in which Posˇka explains the genesis and the scope of the book, and stresses its educational purpose: During my travels, I kept a detailed diary and intended to publish it, but, learning that my fellow traveller, [Matas] Sˇalcˇius, published his book made me give up the idea. However, having read my fellow traveller’s books and having been reproached that by not publicising my travel experiences and by not sharing them with the public I am causing irreparable harm, I started writing. The manner of my writing differs from that used by most of travellers. In my writing, I am going to describe travel in the stark reality by giving a truthful account without any omissions. (Posˇka, Nuo Baltijos iki Bengalijos [From the Baltic to Bengal] 16)6

Posˇka not only presents himself as an objective ethnographer who translates foreign cultures for his fellow countrymen, but he also stresses that travel allows 5 For biographical facts about Antanas Posˇka, see also Jonas Puzinas 343. The English translation of the part of the title From the Baltic to Bengal is from Regina Rudaityte˙’s essay “Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing” (9). 6 In the original: “Keliaudamas rasˇiau platu˛ dienorasˇti˛ ir ketinau ji˛ spausdinti, bet suzˇinoje˛s, kad mano bendrakeleivis [Matas] Sˇalcˇius isˇleido savo knyga˛, asˇ buvau atsisake˛s savo sumanymo. Bet dabar, perskaite˛s savo bendrakeleivio knygas ir prisiklause˛s priekaisˇtu˛, kad asˇ, nepasidalindamas per spauda˛ savo kelione˙s patyrimais su visuomene, padarycˇiau nepataisoma˛ nuostoli˛, e˙miau rasˇyti. Rasˇiau ne taip, kaip paprastai keliautojai rasˇo. Asˇ savo aprasˇymuose isˇkelsiu viska˛ nuogoj kelione˙s realybe˙j, nieko nenusle˙pdamas ir nenutyle˙damas.”

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him to explore ‘blind spots’ in his own culture. Two of these are the connections between the Lithuanian language and Sanskrit and the ancestral links between India and Lithuania: The fact that Lithuanians had not shown any interest in this question and had not done any significant work in this field seemed to me an unforgivable neglect. I made a commitment to do something that none of my countrymen did: to go to India and to investigate the matter on site, despite the fact that I did not have the possibilities, the knowledge, and the authority that hundreds of my countrymen did. I was determined not to find answers to the question, but to draw the attention of those who care about this. These people neither had to be adventurers nor vagrants but, equipped with academic qualifications and titles, they could have their say in this matter so that we don’t have to acknowledge, shamefully, that we have not done anything to seek answers to this question. Nobody sent me anywhere, and I have not even asked anything from anybody. I wanted to do something useful for my country and to contribute at least a little bit to finding out about the origins of Lithuanians or, to be more specific, to stir up the question of links between Indians and Lithuanians. (Posˇka, Nuo Baltijos [From the Baltic] 16) 7

The question of origins as the core of national identity became especially acute at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was a time of national revival and the formation of the Lithuanian state. In this context, it was important to turn to the question of links with Indo-European languages, discovered in the nineteenth century, and to the discourse on commonalities between Indian and Lithuanian language and culture. These links had a significant impact on the formation of national consciousness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this topic was frequently discussed in popular and academic publications in Lithuania.8 After the soviet occupation of Lithuania, Posˇka is arrested in 1945 and sentenced first to long-time imprisonment and then deportation. In 1959 he is allowed to return to Lithuania. After his return he collects and edits his memoirs. However, the soviet government does not allow their publication. In 2014, the University of Calcutta awards him (posthumously) the title of honorary doctorate (Suzˇiede˙lis and Jaksˇtas 325). 7 In the original: “Man atrode˙ nedovanotinas apsileidimas, kad lietuviai tuo klausimu nesidome˙jo ir patys nieko dar ne˙ra cˇia padare˛. Asˇ pasiryzˇau padaryti tai, ko niekas isˇ mu¯su˛ tautiecˇiu˛ nedare˙: nuvykti ˛i Indija˛ ir isˇtirti dalyka˛ vietoje, nepaisant, kad sˇimtai tautiecˇiu˛ ture˙jo geresnes sa˛lygas, mokslini˛ pasiruosˇima˛ ir autoriteta˛, ko man kaip tik tru¯ko. Asˇ pasiryzˇau ne pats ta˛ klausima˛ isˇspre˛sti, bet nors atreipti de˙mesi˛ tu˛ zˇmoniu˛, kuriems tas klausimas ture˙jo ru¯pe˙ti ir kurie, nebu¯dami nei nuotykiu˛ iesˇkotojai, nei valkatos, bet ture˙dami mokslo census bei titulus, tartu˛ savo reiksˇminga˛ zˇodi˛, kad mums nebebu¯tu˛ ge˙da prisipazˇinti, jog mes tam klausimui isˇsiaisˇkinti nieko nesame padare˛. Niekas manes nesiunte˙, asˇ nieko isˇ niekur ne˙ neprasˇiau. Asˇ nore˙jau bu¯ti savo krasˇtui naudingas ir nors trupute˙li˛ priside˙ti prie lietuviu˛ kilme˙s isˇaisˇkinimo arba, teisingiau pasakius, lietuviu˛ ir indu˛ giminyste˙s klausimo isˇjudinimo.” 8 See, for example, Vytis Vidu¯nas, “Didzˇioji Antano Posˇkos kelione˙.”

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An equally enthusiastic traveller is Kazys Paksˇtas (1893–1960), for whom the exotic becomes the search for scholarly research. He studies in Switzerland, travels between the United States of America and Lithuania, and contributes significantly to the start of the Baltic-Scandinavian cooperation. In 1939, he returns to the United States and becomes a very active member of the Lithuanian diaspora. However, Paksˇtas is first of all a professional geographer, a geopolitist, and a scholar, “noted for his contributions to the study of Lithuanian culture” (Suzˇiede˙lis and Jaksˇtas 157). Therefore, he can hardly be studied only in his role as a travel writer. Yet it is possible to observe that his activity and insight might have inspired others to search for exoticism. I label this first period, from 1910 to 1940, of travel writing in Lithuania the period of quality and education, intellectual and aesthetic travels. Many Lithuanian authors of the period study abroad (mostly in Western European countries), travel extensively in Europe (some of them to the United States of America and other parts of the world), or stay in health resorts. Not surprisingly, episodes of their travels and records of still unknown or different people, languages, customs, and lifestyles find a place in their works: letters back home, memoirs, lectures, or scholarly works. In the writing of this period, exoticism is understood as a search for knowledge, for an understanding of the other, and as bringing this newly acquired comprehension home. For some of the writers, exoticism results in a completely different mode of life in foreign countries. Especially during the period of independence, from 1918 to1939, it is considered both a privilege and a necessity to study, travel, or live for some time in foreign countries and then bring this experience back. Such travellers consider it their duty to convey the feature of exoticism to their countrymen. While studying in Switzerland, for example, Stasys Sˇalkauskis (1886–1941), a famous Lithuanian educator and philosopher, writes and publishes in French a seminal work of comparative study: Dvieju˛ pasauliu˛ takoskyroje. Sintetinis ese˙ apie Lietuvos tautine˙s civilizacijos problema˛ (1919 [At the Boundaries of Two Worlds]).9 This work is significant from a crosscultural perspective because of its emphasis on the inevitable hybridity of cultures and the necessity to develop national culture for the improvement of individuals and society (Suzˇiede˙lis and Kucˇas 39–41). Moreover, many writers of the period write articles for Lithuanian periodicals, a fact which must have contributed to their texts’ proximity to journalistic or documentary prose. For example, Juozas Keliuotis (1902–1983), who studies philosophy, literature, journalism, art, and sociology at the Sorbonne from 1926 to 1929, likely found his ideas about exoticism in Henri-Louis Bergson’s works, and, naturally, promotes democratic values of the Western world. Thus, his 9 For the translation of the title into English, see Saulius Sˇimoliu¯nas, “At the Boundaries of Two Worlds.”

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aesthetic travel writings are intertwined with philosophical considerations about art, culture, and political ideology. The second period is that of the soviet occupation, that is, the years from 1940 to 1990: the limited space, getting to know the Other and involuntary travels (soviet deportations and emigration, that is, flight from the homeland in fear of political repressions). The thematic core of considering ‘exoticism’ is clearly compromised when one deals with this particular period. To look for exoticism in the travels to sites of exile or deportation may rightly appear as disrespectful and insensitive. However, a minimal degree of exoticism can still be traced in numerous memoirs and reminiscences of the exiled people—especially those who voluntarily left Lithuania. Those who choose exile in western countries become observers of foreign surroundings and customs. These observations appear in the form of memoirs, or they are part of fictional or documentary prose. The other group, the victims of forced deportations, must have experienced ‘reversed exoticism.’ In other words, for those who were forced to leave Lithuania, the object of ‘yearning for the exotic’ becomes the one place that has become unavailable: home. However, even in their sad and shocking memoirs and some very few works of fiction, elements of exoticism can be traced: Ahead of us and in back is a caravan of carts with old folks and pale-faced children shivering from the cold, and beside them, women trudging, barely dragging their feet. It seems that road will never end, and we will be travelling on it forever. . . . For some reason it occurs to me that we may all die on this road in the woods. . . . While many things and events have escaped my memory, that dim, lowering Siberian sun returns to my mind. Even now, when it’s freezing cold, the winter sun reminds me of that journey, sending chills down my spine. (Tamosˇiu¯naite˙-Urboniene˙, Children of Siberia 76–77)

Tragic moments become intertwined with more detailed information on the harsh surroundings. Amidst direct references to a specific time, region, or mode of transportation, the meaning of the exotic that would be associated with travel acquires connotations of the abject:10 As we were beginning to settle in Altai, in the summer of 1942, we were deported for the second time, somewhere further. At first we rode by train and then sailed by boat on the Angara River. We were driven by truck from Zayarsk to Ust-Kut, and then we travelled by steamboat on the Lena River as far as Yakutsk. . . . The journey lasted almost all summer. At its source, the Lena River is scenic, with mountainous shores. (Milaknyte˙, Children of Siberia 195–196)

The ability of deported people to remain human under inhuman circumstances points to the inner strength and endurance of the deportees. All the more tragic is the fact that the events are rendered from the perspective of deported children. 10 For the discussion of the exotic as abject, see Maxime Bey-Rozet 11–18.

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There are also writers who, while working in Western countries, record travelling impressions. For example, in his travel sketches Nuo Siraku¯zu˛ lig ˇsiaure˙s elnio, 1937, (From Syracuse to the Deer of the North) and Italijos vaizdai (Views of Italy), Antanas Vaicˇiulaitis (1906–1992), a Lithuanian author of the diaspora, certainly finds exoticism in aesthetic values. The major contribution of another writer, Jurgis Savickis (1890–1952), includes a travel writing book Kelione˙s (1938 [Travel Sketches]) and his work Zˇeme˙ dega (1956 [The Earth Is Burning]).11 Jurgis Savickis’s “dynamics of Travel Sketches,” as Imelda Vedrickaite˙ writes, “turn into stasis in The Earth Is Burning,” written between 1939 and 1948 (Kelione˙ 93). Vedrickaite˙ states that “Savickis foregrounded the traveller’s dissociation from the observable world” (Kelione˙ 91). It is possible to state that the exoticism of Savickis’s travel writing lies in “freedom from the stereotypes, enjoyment of life, vitality, action, and the change experienced in travelling” (Vedrickaite˙, Kelione˙ 91). In Lithuania, however, creative writing is suffering severely during this period: some writers are deported, while others comply with the soviet regime and its hostile communist censorship. They endure the absence of freedom, the inability to voice one’s point of view, and the obligation not to speak about the search of exoticism in foreign (western) countries as sources of new knowledge and possibilities as per Botton. To Lithuania and its citizens, the western world lies behind the Iron Curtain. Those who comply with the soviet system are allowed to travel —primarily to socialist Eastern European countries or to Cuba. Some writers, who had opportunities to travel abroad prior to soviet occupation, use and remember these journeys in their works, only to be denied publication by the censors. Others travel to various soviet republics. In addition, there is a group of young writers who, in search for exoticism, choose to become sailors. In this profession, they are able to at least have glimpses of ‘western culture’—a major component of exoticism during the years of occupation. Some of the writers are clearly influenced by Kazys Boruta’s marine travel writing Travels to the North (1938–1939). During the second half of the 1960s, journalists are allowed to spend some time on fishing boats. This may have resulted in some documentary prose that also contains elements of literary journalism. Ignas Pikturna (1924–2005) is one of the writers of this period who benefits from working at sea. As Venantas Butkus claims, Pikturna works as the Captain’s first assistant on various fishing and commercial ships for several years (“Lietuviu˛ marinistine˙s literatu¯ros apzˇvalga” 5). Another important author of the period, Vytautas Sirijos Gira (1911–1997), works as a medical doctor on a fishing 11 Jurgis Savickis’s The Earth Is Burning has been read as a cross-genre novel, involving elements of diary, travel writing and literary nonfiction. See, e. g., Imelda Vedrickaite˙ “Diogeno gestas Jurgio Savickio dienorasˇtyje ir kelioniu˛ apybraizˇose” 55–58; Vedrickaite˙, Kelione˙. Keliautojas. Literatu¯ra 90.

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boat. His 1970 travel book, Afrika be liu¯tu˛: laivo gydytojo uzˇrasˇai (1970 [Africa without Lions: Notes of a Navy Doctor]), was accepted—amidst controversy—by the soviet regime. The description of Africa as exotic—as per dictionary definition “unusual and exciting because of coming . . . from far away, especially a tropical country” (“Exotic”)—is interspersed with depicting the gritty realism of life on board of soviet ships. The writer was severely criticised for uncovering the truth about the harsh realities of the soviet sailors and uncovering the truth about bureaucracy, as well as the workings of soviet propaganda (Butkus, “Skandalingi laivo gydytojo uzˇrasˇai”). The quotation below illustrates the narrator’s attempt to discard the layers of propaganda and to acquire his own understanding about the country. The processes engaged in perception remind us of what Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, has called “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (63). In case of experiences described in Vytautas Sirijos Gira’s travel book, meaning arises from testing the horizons of the propaganda discourse and the subjectively perceived reality. The quotation below serves as a case in point: Western Africa, beautiful disease-ridden Africa, as a magnet continuing to attract adventurers, smugglers, hunters, millionaires. . . . On deck, in the open air, they are showing The Three Musketeers. Do we want to show to [African people] and sailors on other ships that we are cultured people? My first acquaintance with the continent—before I got off the ship—made me feel so dizzy that I could not even think about sleep. I stay on deck for quite a while and inhale wet, unhealthy, pleasant African air. (Sirijos Gira, Afrika be liu¯tu˛ [Africa without Lions] 79–80)12

The very next morning, the writer becomes exposed to social realities of Africa that shatter his understanding of the continent as an exotic/exciting locale inhabited by benevolent social equals: The ship is packed with [African people]. Those of higher rank are in the cabin rooms of executive ship management. The “plebeians” are loading fish cargo. Multicoloured people. And not only because of the clothes. Skin colours of African people also differ. I am showing a black person the ship’s medical facility. I give him some dressing materials. Later, I get the ship sanitation certificate signed by this doctor. (Sirijos Gira, Afrika [Africa] Afrika 80)13

12 The original: “Vakaru˛ Afrika, grazˇi Afrika, ligu˛ kamuojama Afrika, kaip magnetas traukusi ir tebetraukianti avantiu¯ristus, rasˇytojus, spekuliantus, medzˇiotojus, milijonierius. . . . Denyje po atviru dangumi rodomi Trys musˇkietininkai. Ar norime pademonstruoti [afrikiecˇiams] ir kitu˛ laivu˛ ju¯rinkams, kad esame kultu¯ringi? Pirmoji pazˇintis su kontinentu, net neisˇlipus isˇ laivo, tiek apsvaigino, kad nesinori ne˙ galvoti apie miega˛. Denyje ilgai alsuoju dre˙gnu, nesveiku, mielu Afrikos oru.” 13 The original: “Laive pilna [afrikiecˇiu˛]. “Auksˇtesnieji” – laivo vadovybe˙s kajute˙se, “plebe˙jai” krauna zˇuvi˛. Margaspalve˙ minia. Ir ne tik ru¯bais. Patys afrikiecˇiai irgi nevienodos odos

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There are also writers who understand their limitations regarding free will and freedom of movement during the soviet times and find subtle ways to deal with the issue. By means of applying allegory or turning to magical realism, they opt for describing utopian travels to fictional countries. An example of this could be Saulius Tomas Kondrotas’s (b. 1953) collection of short prose, Pasaulis be ribu˛ (1977 [The World without Borders]). According to Mirga Girniuviene˙, the writer’s texts entwine two realities: factual reality and the world composed of feelings, intuition, apprehensions, and past experiences (1). As Kondrotas stated in an interview with a Lithuanian writer Jurga Ivanauskaite˙, experience leads to the realisation that what is believed to be factual reality is only its partial representation. Embracing this awareness makes one re-vision representations by denouncing the existing truths and stereotypes. The latter are intended to serve as a cognitive map of oppositional dualities, creating an understanding of the world as being composed of clear-cut categories of good and evil, rational and irrational, among others. For some, such dualisms make it easier to navigate between choices. Yet others, including the writer, opt for redrawing the boundaries between reality and its representation in response to experience. Travel, whether physical or mental, is a means to this end (“Pasaulis be stereotipu˛” 3–4). The following excerpt from the short story “Ru¯ke mano siela” (“My Soul is in the Fog”) serves as a good example: It is a must to see fog in Odessa. I have travelled extensively, however, all the fog that I happened to see, cannot compare to that in Odessa. That evening, when I was sitting in the airport in Odessa, waiting for my plane, it was the peak of autumnal fog period. The weather was warm, wet, smelling of iodine and some rotting seaweed. 11 o’clock. At the airport, all lights were lit. It was exactly at this moment that fog waded in. . . . Since my early childhood, I am tortured by a strange feeling. Sometimes I sit and read a book, hear my father’s and my mother’s smooth breathing, and I suddenly shudder and become overcome with fear when I find myself anticipating that I will hear my father unlock the door and come in, wearing a coat and a beret—my father’s duplicate. Or I see myself alone, identical to me, and thinking in the same way that he is the real me. I stiffen for some minutes imagining what will happen next, how many different problems will arise. Besides, I do not want—I am frightened just by the idea that there will be another man—identical to me. Attacks of severe shivering come frequently, I stare at the wall, afraid to move. (Kondrotas, “Ru¯ke mano siela” [“My Soul Is in the Fog”] 24–26)14 spalvos. Rodau juodaodzˇiui uosto gyventojui lazareta˛. Padovanoju tvarstomosios medzˇiagos. Ve˙liau gavau laivo sanitarini˛ pasa˛ su to gydytojo parasˇu.” 14 The original: “Odesoje bu¯tinai reikia pamatyti ru¯ka˛. Asˇ esu buve˛s daugelyje krasˇtu˛, tacˇiau visi ru¯kai, kuriuos man teko kada nors rege˙ti, neprilygs sˇiajam. Ta˛ vakara˛, kai se˙de˙jau Odesos aerouoste, laukdamas le˙ktuvo, buvo pats rudeniniu˛ u¯ku˛ metas. Oras sˇiltas, dre˙gnas, atsidave˙ jodu ir kazˇkokiais pu¯vancˇiais dumbliais. Vienuolikta valanda. Uzˇdegti visi aerouosto zˇibintai. Ir kaip tik tada atslinko tas ru¯kas. . . . Nuo pat mazˇens mane dazˇnai kankina vienas keistas

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The ending of the story reveals the cause of the narrator’s fears associated with fog and the duplicate. The narrator is haunted by memories of events surrounding his friend’s death. His friend, Lukas Galkis, was driving in the fog and saw a man running next to his car. The man continued running next to the car even after the car reached the speed of eighty kilometres per hour. Because of the fog, the driver did not notice a turn in the road, the car flipped over, and the driver found himself lying on the grass. He noticed the man, who had been running next to his car, running along the grassland. The image on his tee-shirt read: “My soul is in the fog.” To bridge the gap between what is real and what is imaginary or esoteric, in this case, the narrator remembers people saying that there were tracks in the grass—stretching from the accident site across the grassland—that looked as if left by somebody having run along this route (Kondrotas 35). The narrator henceforth becomes attracted to places like Odessa in which a special (and exotic, in the sense of “unusual”) quality of the fog can induce sensations that take one beyond conventional understandings of reality.15 Such sensations can help one to identify with experiences undergone by the narrator’s friend, Lukas Galkis. Romualdas Lankauskas’s (1932–2020) travel writing encompasses exoticism in the search for a higher civilisation as well as for “national consciousness,” as Regina Rudaityte˙ states (“Representations of the Self and the Other” 27). She also contends that Lankauskas’s fascination with the West and Japan, with “the forbidden Other,” results in “a metaphorical space instrumental in the critique of the soviet system and society” (“Representation of the Self and the Other” 27). The most striking feature of the aesthetics of Lankauskas’s travel texts, Rudaityte˙ observes, “is the visual element, the poetic touch that he imparts to what otherwise would be an ordinary travel account, a record of facts and events” (“Representation of the Self and the Other” 28). ˇ ekuolis (b. 1931) also produces documentary prose. He is a famous Algimantas C Lithuanian journalist, traveller, and author who starts his literary career with works based on working on the sea. His texts faithfully continue the mode of ˇ ekuolis is the one author whose writing about travel experiences. Actually, C works cover the three most recent periods (as outlined in this chapter). Many of his books deal with searching for exoticism and provide educational perspectives ˇ ekuolis’s travel books are a significant source of inspiration for travel. on travel. C jausmas. Kartais se˙dzˇiu ve˙lu˛ vakara˛ skaitydamas knyga˛, girdzˇiu uzˇ sienos romu˛ te˙vo ir motinos sˇnopavima˛ ir staiga kru¯pteliu, o po to pasˇiurpstu, laukdamas, kad tucˇtuojau isˇgirsiu rakinant duris ir isˇvysiu ˛ieinant te˙va˛ su paltu ir berete, te˙vo antrininka˛. Arba net dar viena˛ save, visai identisˇka˛man ir lygiai taip pat mananti˛, jog tikrasis – tai jis. Se˙dzˇiu sustinge˛s keleta˛ minucˇiu˛ vaizduodamasis, kas bus paskui, kiek daug kils visokiu˛ problemu˛, be to, asˇ visai nenoriu, mane ga˛sdina jau vien mintis, jog bus dar kitas zˇmogus, toks kaip ir asˇ. Tankiai asˇ taip u¯mai kru¯pteliu ir laukiu, ˛ibede˛s zˇvilgsni˛ ˛i siena˛, bijodamas krustele˙ti.” 15 The meaning of the ‘exotic’ as per Cambridge Dictionary.

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The popularity of his travel books might have been influenced by the following factors: from 1995 until quite recently, he worked as a television producer with a special program and took an active part in the restoration of the Independence movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is also known as a multilingual person who has worked for many years as a part-time travel guide. The third period, travels (after 1990), is characterised by great striving for the exotic. As soon as independence is restored in Lithuania and the borders are ‘opened,’ many people rush to see the ‘Other World.’ At first, the exoticism as a desire to see other ways of life is much stronger than the one related to seeing geographical features of foreign places. As Aurelija Mykolaityte˙ states, “during the soviet period Lithuanian literature was reduced to serve the Soviet ideology. . . . The interwar period writers, who stayed in Soviet Lithuania, were being forced to adapt themselves or were completely silenced” (Mykolaityte˙ 323). Thus the period of liberation from soviet rule is also the period when Lithuanian émigré literature ‘returns’ to the homeland. In addition, in the early 1990s (and even before) memoirs about the deportation appear in great numbers. Much attention is being paid to the ‘restoration’ of truth, that is, excavating long-denied history and suppressed memories. More recently, the strife for knowledge about and experience of aesthetic values become central for travel writers, and Jurga Ivanauskaite˙ (1961–2007) is one of the most important author-travellers to mark this trend. This writer is most directly linked to the exoticism of travel. A person of many skills—novelist, essayist, poet, graphic artist, photographer—she manages to convey one of the important feelings of a traveller. During the period from 1993 to 1994, she travels to India and studies Tibetan Buddhism. In 1996, she visits Nepal, a journey which later materialises in the trilogy on Tibet: Isˇtremtas Tibetas (1996 [Exiled Tibet]), Kelione˙ ˛i Sˇambala˛ (1997 [A Journey to Shambala]), and Prarasta pazˇade˙toji zˇeme˙ (1999 [The Lost Promised Land]). From 2000 to 2002, she travels to Egypt, Peru, and Italy, and these travels are described in her book of essays Kelioniu˛ alchemija (2003 [The Alchemy of Travels]). The exotic in her travels is directed towards the exotic of “self-discovery, the search for the Self” (Rudaityte˙, “Representation” 29). Rudaityte˙ states that in Ivanauskaite˙’s texts India and Nepal are used as an imaginative escape, a relaxation from Western values and rigid rationalism. . . . [T]hese places are both real and imaginary: they function as precise geographical locations (replete with people, customs, landscape, weather, food, clothing, etc.), but they are also imbued with a symbolic meaning. (29)

Poetic mystification of travel inspires many later travellers. It also encourages authors to visit or investigate the countries she had described in her works. Ivanauskaite˙’s texts prove Youngs’s theoretical statement that “[t]he subjectivity

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revealed in this process compromises the objective quality and it is carried through some of the techniques and strategies of fiction” (173). The fourth period, that is, contemporary travels in the twenty-first century (from immigrant experience to sophisticated travels), marks the age of freedom of travel. In this period, writers also display a novel understanding of exoticism; its impact lies in the sensitive comprehension of the detail. Dalia Kuiziniene˙ observes that “during the twenty years of restored Lithuanian independence, Lithuanian culture has come closer to the European and world cultural standards. Over the past decade, a lot of texts have been created, whose authors have been living abroad for a longer or shorter period of time” (Kuiziniene˙ 311). Thus, although this kind of travel occurs under greatly changed circumstances, the observations of a place or people are ‘natural’ elements of travel writing. As mentioned above, the understanding of exoticism and its search has altered. In this period, different examples of fiction, which contain recognisable elements of travel writing, may be considered. These elements are the description of places and traffic/transportation, communication with people, depictions of a different way of life, among others. The traveller is very often the one who has already reached the destination and has already settled (at least for the time being). Among the multitude of potential topics, the exoticism of finding one’s identity seems to emerge as dominant. In the novel Vienos vasaros emigrantai (2003 [Emigrants for One Summer]), Valdas Papievis (b. 1962) plays on the contrast between his home city, Vilnius, and the host city, Paris. In his novel Eiti, 2010, (To Go), Papievis locates the action in Provence, France, and, in a postmodern manner, finds exoticism in spiritual travel. In Papievis’s most recent novel Odile˙ arba oro uostu˛ vienatve˙ (2015 [Odile or the Loneliness of Airports]), the main character is again in Paris and finds exoticism in creating links with strangers through communication. It is also a book about the myths surrounding Parisians and Parisian women. The way the nameless male narrator, a companion of the ninety-year-old “Parisian petite dame Odile,”16 depicts Parisian women recalls Elena Prus’s statement that “[t]he myth of the Parisian woman is a French identity of the feminine singularity. It is related to the constellation of myths of Paris and of the eternal woman. The genesis of the myth is based on her mysterious nature, on the fact that it gives answers to an aetiological question” (Prus 81). To explain the latter aspect, Prus refers to Lucian Blaga’s contention that “myths are ‘the first great manifestations of a culture’ . . . which make up the stylistic matrix of a people” (Blaga qtd. in Prus 82). The emphasis on cultural singularity fully penetrable only to an insider dovetails with the meaning of the exotic as “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual” (“Exotic,” Merriam-Webster). In the novel Odile or the Loneliness of Airports, the narrator 16 I am borrowing the phrase from “Papievis.”

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reveals his developing understanding of French culture which he gains from communicating with Odile˙ and her circle of friends. In the example quoted below, the narrator joins Odile˙ for an aperitif, a traditional French ritual, involving family and friends: I step over the threshold. “You don’t have any flowers. Some of the neighbours have even planted shrubs on their balconies. Don’t you like flowers?” “Have you forgotten how old I am?” I haven’t forgotten. Odile sits with her bony shoulders pressed against the high back of the leather armchair. She’s always a little cold, so before going back out to smoke I wrap her in a shawl. “Age and flowers?” “Flowers need to be cared for.” “Paula could do it.” “If you don’t care for plants yourself it’s as if they aren’t your own, don’t you think?” I look at the ceiling, and it seems to me that the round plaster moulding at its centre is turning, like the wheel of time that one would like to stop. Or roulette. Do you think you could win? “Pour me a little more,” she says, finishing the last drop and holding out the empty glass. “With an ice cube. Before Selma gets here.” How to get out of yourself—as one does by leaving home, driving out of the city, or flying to another country? How to understand yourself if you can’t see yourself from the side? “Why don’t you pour yourself some?” Daylight streams in through the curtains, drawn from the evening like honey from a hive. It slowly goes out. I refill my glass. (Papievis, Odile˙ arba oro uostu˛ vienatve˙ [Odile or the Loneliness of Airports] 11–12)17

17 Translation from Lithuanian into English by Karla Gruodis (“Papievis”). In the original: “Per slenksti˛ zˇengiu. – Ge˙liu˛ ju¯s neturite, kaimynai balkonuose net kru¯mu˛ prisisodine˛. Nemylite ge˙liu˛? – Pamirsˇai kiek man metu˛. – Nepamirsˇau. – Odile˙ se˙di, prakaulius petukus ˛ire˙musi ˛i auksˇta˛odinio fotelio atlosˇa˛, jai visada truputi˛ ve˙su, priesˇ isˇeidamas aru¯kyti ja˛ skraiste apgaubiau. – Amzˇius ir ge˙le˙s? – Ge˙le˙mis ru¯pintis reikia. – Paula gale˙tu˛. – Jei ne pats ge˙le˙mis ru¯piniesi, jos tarsi ne tavo. Tau taip neatrodo? Ant salono lubu˛ – apskritas stiuko apvadas, man regis jis sukasi. Kaip laiko ratas, kuri˛ sustabdyti nore˙tum. Arba rulete˙. Tikiesi laime˙ti. – ˛Ipilk trupute˙li˛, – paskutini˛ ˇslakeli˛ isˇge˙rusi, tusˇcˇia˛ stikla˛ isˇtiesia. – Ir leduka˛ ˛imesk. Kol ne˙ra Selmos. Kaip isˇeit isˇ save˛s – kaip isˇeini isˇ namu˛, isˇvazˇiuoji isˇ miesto, skrendi isˇ vieno krasˇto ˛i kita˛? Kaip suprasti save, jei negali pazˇvelgt ˛i save isˇ sˇalies? – Kode˙l sau nei˛sipili? Vakaro kopine˙jamo korio sˇviesa per uzˇuolaida˛ liejasi.

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After leaving Odile’s apartment, the narrator, “a melancholy, culturally displaced young man” (“Papievis”) broods in Paris like a flâneur, “who wanders around the city with the aim to experience it” (“Flâneur”). He feels closest to clochards, people who like himself feel as if they do not belong to mainstream culture (Papievis, Odile˙ 88). The identification with clochards foregrounds the narrator’s condition as a cultural nomad. Travel as a desire to know foreign cultures is encoded in the subtitle of the novel, “The Loneliness of Airports.” Actually, “[t]here are hardly any airports in the story itself. Instead, it describes the relationship between Odile˙ and her companion—like two strangers, both waiting for the next leg of their journey, and passing the time with pleasant, polite conversation” (“Valdas Papievis”). In his debut novel Viesˇbutis Grenelle (2007 [Hotel Grenelle]), Eligijus Dzeˇzulskis-Duonys places his heroes in different locations—Paris, Kaunas, Cracow, or a Mediterranean resort—searching for the exotic in small every-day life details. Inner spaces in foreign places serve as sites for studying cultural singularities and universal human commonalities: There is something about spaces where people live. Some spaces are extremely well furnished and tidy—literally shining and polished, but somehow hostile and unhomely. Conversely, some are especially modest, to some extent even neglected, but exceptionally pleasant, appealing, and mysterious. Still others are difficult to describe—you walk there as if on some bare field and do not feel anything. Some people stuff everything they possibly can under their roof—everything they have, showing as it were who they are whilst others live as though they never stopped travelling and would not have the time to take off their shoes soiled in travel. There is so much dirt and disorder in their abodes. . . . People differ—separate things and their totality reveal human aptitudes and interests, and the magnitude of human spirit, dissipated in most insignificant belongings and warming the entire abode. . . . One can say that the studio of this unfamiliar yet extremely pleasant and helpful Parisian though accumulated all the possible disorder, also emitted cosiness. Not all of the everyday wear and bedding are put away (lack of time or laziness?). Different books tumbled at random in a small bookstand. . . . Some lovely bric-a-brac sticks out from the pile of books in the same bookstand. A rather resourceful composition of exotic souvenirs, most likely brought by the landlord himself, is carelessly spread around the room. The furniture does not match, the room has the most essential pieces of furniture, not overcrowded, so that a human being does get an impression of being captured in the jaws of things and being devoured or bitten. Here you feel in a room inhabited by a human being but not by bulky exquisite furniture, whence a human being is just an unnecessary addition. At the entrance door, a hastily jotted note in green marker contained an encouraging message:

Pamazˇu ge˛sta. ˛Isipilu.”

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Profitez vous bien de vos séjours a Paris. (Dzezˇulskis-Duonys, Viesˇbutis Grenelle [Hotel Grenelle] 14)18

The novel Cukruota zˇuvis (2012 [The Sugared Fish]) by journalist Audrone˙ Urbonaite˙ treats “different Lithuanian and Chinese cultures and miscommunication in highly emotional fragmented language” (Kuiziniene˙ 318). The novel implies that the perception of the foreign as exotic partly stems from a long history of limited ethnic diversity among the population in Lithuania.19 Specifically, Ethnic Lithuanians account for 5/6 of the population, which makes the country one of the most homogeneous in the Baltic States. The 2011 census found that 84% of the population was ethnic Lithuanians who spoke Lithuanian. Poles made up 6.6%, followed by Russians (5.8%), Belarusians (1.2%) and Ukrainians (0.5%). Poles are mostly concentrated in southeast Lithuania, while Russians are mostly in Vilnius and Klaipe˙da. There are approximately 3,000 Roma in Lithuania, as well as a small community of Tatar. (“Lithuanian Population 2019”)

Audrone˙ Urbonaite˙’s novel is about the role of globalisation on changes in the ethnic composition and the cultural landscape of the country as much as it is about generational differences as regards cultural awareness and intercultural communication. Life in emigration inspires many contemporary authors to choose different genres for describing, commenting, or giving advice on life in different countries. Although the aim of such texts is different from the conventional travel literature, they inevitably contain features of travel writing. Some of these texts can be ascribed to documentary prose or literary journalism, while others can be characterised as one of the many sub-genres of popular fiction 18 In the original: “I˛domus daiktas yra zˇmoniu˛ gyvenamos erdve˙s. Vieni bu¯stai bu¯na itin gerai apstatyti ir sutvarkyti, tiesiog isˇblizginti ir nupoliruoti, bet kazˇkokie sˇalti ir nejauku¯s. O kiti gi, priesˇingai, ypatingai kuklu¯s, net sˇiek tiek apleisti, bet be galo mieli, traukiantys ir paslaptingi. Dar kiti yra tiesiog nenusakomi – vaiksˇtai po juos lyg po plyna˛ lauka˛ ir nieko nejauti. Vieni zˇmone˙s po savo stogu stacˇiai sukisˇa sugru¯da viska˛, ka˛ gali, viska˛, ka˛ turi, tarsi parodydami, kas jie yra, o kiti gyvena taip, tarsi be perstojo kazˇkur keliautu˛ ir niekaip nespe˙tu˛ nusiauti kelione˙se supurvintu˛ batu˛. Tiek ju˛ bu¯stuose purvo ir netvarkos. . . . Nelygu zˇmogus, per atskirus daiktus ir ju˛ sudaroma˛ visuma˛ isˇrysˇke˙jantys zˇmogisˇki polinkiai ir pome˙giai, pacˇiuose menkiausiuose rakanduose pasklidusios ir visa˛ bu¯sta˛ susˇildancˇios zˇmogisˇkos dvasios didumas. . . . Gali sakyti, kad sˇio nepazˇ˛istamo, bet drauge nepaprastai mielo ir paslaugaus paryzˇiecˇio studija, nors ir akumuliuojanti kone visa˛ ˛imanoma˛ netvarka˛, skeide˙ ir jaukuma˛. Ne iki galo susle˙pti (nespe˙ta ar paprascˇiausiai tinge˙ta?) kasdieniai ru¯bai ir patalai. Kaip papuola suverstos knygos nedidele˙je etazˇere˙je virsˇ valgomojo stalo. Vienas kitas simpatisˇkas niekutis, kyˇsantis isˇ uzˇ knygu˛ kru¯vos toje pacˇioje etazˇere˙je. Gan isˇradinga, veikiausiai paties ˇseimininko pargabentu˛ egzotisˇku˛ suvenyru˛ kompozicija, be didesnio ru¯pescˇio isˇde˙liota po visa kambari˛. Nors ir nelabai vienas prie kito derantys, bet bu¯tini baldai – ju˛ tiek, kad zˇmogus nesijaustu˛ ˇ ia jautiesi kambaryje, kuriame pakliuve˛s daiktams ˛i nasrus, ju˛ suvalgytas ar apkramtytas. C gyvena zˇmogus, o ne didzˇiuliai ir prabangu¯s baldai, kuriems bet koks zˇmogus tik kliudo. Prie ˛ie˙jimo duru˛ ant sienos prilipintoje lentele˙je zˇaliu zˇymekliu greitosiomis bru¯ksˇtele˙ti keli padra˛sinamieji zˇodzˇiai: Profitez vous bien de vos séjours a Paris.” 19 See Audrone˙ Urbonaite˙, “Ne˙ vienas zˇmogus nesidzˇiaugia, jei sˇeimoje turi rasˇytoja˛.”

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(detective story, crime fiction, love story, chick lit, magical realism, or others; cf. ˇ epaite˙’s novel Londono ve˙jas [The Wind of London] with the alignment of Zita C the detective fiction genre in Chapter 8). It is in fictionalised narratives, however, that we find a special attachment and a particular sensitivity towards a place. For example, in the recent novel Ruduo Berlyne (2015 [Autumn in Berlin]), by Lina Ever, the reader comes across sensitive descriptions of places in Berlin. This cross-genre novel describes the plight of the female protagonist, Klaudija, to establish herself as an artist in Berlin where she seeks to find a hideaway from her psychopath husband who had attempted to kill her. The description of the city echoes Stephen T. Hardy’s contention that, unlike early travel narratives predominated largely by geographical and scientific information, much present-day travel writing is based on the author/traveller’s attitude to places, customs, and people (7). In Autumn in Berlin, the female protagonist’s movement within the city is almost exclusively limited to locations related to employment or a possibility to make money by selling her craft. The description of places like the market at Kollwitzplatz or Sunday morning Mauerpark flea market in Prenzlauer Berg, produces an account of urban lifestyle and the protagonist’s attempt to integrate into it. In effect, she sets her goals high: she wants her works of art to become exhibits in art galleries of Berlin. In this process, she receives significant help and advice from a bohemian market trader Theodor —who even lends her his market stall—and from his friends. The experience of being helped and accepted creates an impression of Berlin as “an extremely freespirited city”20 where “nobody has any intension to hurt or to offend you”21 (Ever, Ruduo Berlyne [Autumn in Berlin] 25). For Klaudija, the city is “an amalgam of cultures, religions and viewpoints” (25),22 which is why people do not judge others by one’s own standards, do not categorise people into friends and strangers—into castes, groups, and clubs—nor prematurely apply any labels. They do not pretend goodness, they do not pretend to be happier, cleverer than they really are because they do not need to—you would not impress anyone because nobody cares what kind of person you are. She, too, can be who she really is. Who she always wanted to be. Or she can be different. She can be anyone she wants to be. She doesn’t care—one or another man, a question asked in one way or another. Here people celebrate life. She will celebrate, too. (Ever, Ruduo [Autumn] 25–26)23 20 21 22 23

In the original: “Berlynas – itin laisvas miestas.” ˇ ia niekas nenori tave˛s ˛iskaudinti ar ˛izˇeisti.” In the original: “C In the original: “cˇia sumisˇe˛ tiek daug kultu¯ru˛, religiju˛, pozˇiu¯riu˛.” In the original: “zˇmone˙s cˇia neteisia ir nevertina kitu˛ pagal savo masteli˛, jie neskirsto pazˇ˛istamu˛ ir nepazˇ˛istamu˛ ˛i kastas, grupes, klubus, neklijuoja jokiu˛ isˇankstiniu˛ etikecˇiu˛. Jie neapsimeta esa˛ geresni, turingesni, laimingesni, protingesni, nes ne˙ra jokio reikalo – vistiek niekam nepadarytu˛ ˛ispu¯dzˇio, nes niekam neru¯pi, koks tu. Ir ji gali bu¯ti tokia, kokia yra. Kokia visada nore˙jo bu¯ti. Arba gali bu¯ti kitokia. Gali bu¯ti kokia tik nori. Kas jai darbo – vienas ar

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The determination to become independent and her true self in the city which Klaudija seems to find pulsating with freedom of expression and opportunity reminds us of Alain De Botton’s statement that “[w]hat we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home” (69–70). In Ever’s novel, the opposition between home and abroad to a large extent is constructed around dualisms encoded in two contrasting characters, Klaudija’s abusive husband and her new love object Stefan, a German man who is willing to help her to deal with her past shadows. Stefan shows Klaudija around the city and helps her turn it into a personalised space.24 Shortly after Klaudija starts feeling “free to do whatever [she] want[s] and not what the place or [her] relatives impose on [her]” (Ever, Ruduo [Autumn] 260),25 she is tracked down by her husband who attempts to take her back to homeland by force. Klaudija is rescued by the German police, whereas her husband dies when the car, fleeing police, crashes. After the accident, Klaudija’s assessment of her relationship with Stefan crosses the limits of the personal. Rather, she sees them as representatives of different cultures enshrouded in stereotypes of a ‘well-provided westerner’ and an Eastern European, embodying many aspects of the ‘exotic’ stemming from the East-West dichotomy.26 The ending of the novel, entwining plots of travel literature, popular romance and Künstlerroman, among others, suggests the meaning of the exotic closer to that elucidated by De Botton, which—in short—can be defined as hunger for new and positive that travel can offer (57–59). Yet, De Botton points out that perception of place depends on the traveller’s selection of detail that for the traveller come to “define a place”; in this way, the lingering mental picture of a place or its representation becomes indicative of the traveller’s “essential” self. If

kitas vyrisˇkis, vienaip ar kitaip uzˇduotas klausimas. ˇ ia zˇmone˙s sˇvencˇia gyvenima˛. C Ir ji sˇve˛s.” 24 I am drawing here on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space, wherein “space is a practiced place. Thus the street, a place geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by a practice of a particular place: a written text, i. e., a constituted by a system of signs” (de Certeau 117). 25 The original: “Jautiesi laisvas daryti tai, ka˛pats nori, o ne tai ka˛siu¯lo aplinka ar savo lu¯kescˇius ant pecˇiu˛ tau uzˇkrove˛ artimieji.” The quotation reveals that Lina Ever, just as de Certeau, treats a geographical locale (place) as socially coded. For both, the writer Ever and de Certeau, place can be re-signified through individual uses of it or “doing things” in “everyday practices,” to use de Certeau’s phrasing (de Certeau xi). 26 I am referring here to pejorative meanings of ‘exoticism.’ In the pejorative sense, ‘exoticism,’ like ‘orientalism,’ denotes (Western) writers’ ‘othering’ of different (Eastern) cultures—with the effect that the former emerges as more refined, progressive, or civilised than the latter. See, e. g., Ashcroft et al., “Exotic/Exoticism” (87–88). Similar cases of ‘othering’ can be found in the description of Eastern Europeans as in Velicˇkovic´ (2019).

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it impresses as misrepresented in the traveller’s description of place, the “parts” regarded as comprising the “essential” self “have not been given their due” (188). The following juxtaposition of Klaudija’s and her female friend’s, Karolina, views on Berlin serves as an illustration: “I think Berlin changes not only thinking but also blood, perhaps even DNA. The change is irreversible—this is how the city affects all living there,” said Klaudija. “I was there, too, but to me it is just like any other city—full of trash, ragged people, cheap Turkish shops, noise, chaos, over the top youth, smeared concrete walls and construction sites. Half of the streets are fenced, parking lots—overcrowded, cyclists are constant danger to drivers—seem to be popping up from every corner just to can get under your wheels. A catastrophe, not a city, especially for a driver.” “You have hardly spent three days there, you have not befriended the city, haven’t warmed it, fed it, caressed, you haven’t tried to grasp it, and it did pay back—it did not open up for you. You can’t befriend any living being in the blink of an eye, this requires time and patience.” (Ever, Ruduo [Autumn] 270)27

Towards the end of the novel, female protagonist names Berlin “a city where East and West meet” (Ever, Ruduo [Autumn] 260).28 The trope of the meeting point serves as the axis around which details “defin[ing] a place,” in De Botton’s sense, are organised. Besides historical and ideological significations, the trope of the meeting point stands for a breaking point in Klaudja’s personal history: life in Lithuania as an abused wife and life in Berlin as a beloved woman and an empowered artist. There, she can live by the principles of “HAPPINESS, LOVE, UNDERSTANDING, FRIENDSHIP, MIRACLES, INSPIRATION” (Ever, Ruduo [Autumn] 262).29 These principles seem to be dominant in Klaudija’s perception of place as the passage from Lina Ever’s novel quoted above suggests. The differences between the perception of Berlin by the female protagonist and her friend resonate with De Botton’s view on place as subjectively constructed (187–188). What is more, Klaudija’s subjective predisposition towards the city is directed by her inclination to search for the ‘exotic’ in a foreign country in the sense

27 In the original: “– Man atrodo, kad Berlynas pakeicˇia ne tik ma˛styma˛, bet ir krauja˛, gal net DNR. Tu pasikeiti ir jau niekada nebu¯si toks kaip ankscˇiau, taip sˇis miestas paveikia visus, kas jame gyvena, – tare˙ Klaudija. – Asˇ irgi jame buvau, bet man jis miestas kaip miestas – pilnas sˇiuksˇliu˛, skarmaliu˛, pigiu˛ turkisˇku˛ parduotuve˙liu˛, triuksˇmo, chaoso, besidarkancˇio jaunimo, isˇterliotu˛ betoniniu˛ sienu˛, statybos aiksˇteliu˛. Puse˙ gatviu˛ uzˇtvertos, automobiliu˛ aiksˇtele˙se nerasi laisvos vietos, dviratininkai isˇ visu˛ kampu˛ lenda po ratais. Katastrofa, ne miestas, ypacˇ vairuotojai. – Tu buvai vos tris dienas, jo neprisijaukinai, nesusˇildei, nepamaitinai, nepaglostei, nebandei suprasti, ir gavai atpilda˛ – jis tau neatsive˙re˙. Jokio gyvo padaro neprisijaukinsi per kelias minutes, tam reikia kantrybe˙s ir laiko.” 28 In the original: “miestas, kuriame susiduria Rytai ir Vakarai.” 29 The original: “LAIME˙, MEILE˙, SUPRATIMAS, DRAUGYSTE˙, STEBUKLAI, ˛IKVE˙PIMAS.”

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defined by De Botton, which is orientation towards foregrounding the “new” and the “valuable” in travel (77). The latest novel by the same author, Berlyno romanas (2016 [Berlin Romance]), somewhat loses sight of the kind of exoticism that makes the earlier work a significant source of exoticism of a place. Lately, a new type of exoticism can be found in Lithuanian travel literature—exoticism of adventure, the type whose origins can be traced to pre-war travel writings by great Lithuanian travellers (Sˇalcˇius, Posˇka, Paksˇtas, already mentioned above). These may be gourmet adventure travels by Andrius Uzˇkalnis (b. 1970), a journalist and author of essayistic prose, or tearaway-type travels by Martynas Starkus (b. 1973). Great pilgrimage roads inspire many contemporary travellers-writers to search for exoticism in pilgrimage and to describe it in travel books. For example, in her book Kelias ˛i Santjago de Kompostela˛ (2010 [The Road to Santiago de Compostela]), Kristina Stalnionyte˙ constructs her text in such a way that the reader is invited to step on the road of this spiritual travel together with the author: I feel that I’m leaving for a long time. On my return everything is going to be different. I leave my troubles, friends, thoughts, accomplished and unfinished works back in Lithuania. I switch off my mobile. I am overcome by an incredible feeling—it’s so amazing to suddenly leave my surroundings. It seems that my earlier life, the one that I lived just today, does not exist anymore. This is only me alone and the still undiscovered world hiding somewhere, wrapped as a present and hung in the space on the other side of a transparent folding screen. Although I can almost see it, I still cannot reach it. My past life hangs in the air, and everything around seems to stop. (Stalnionyte˙, Kelias [The Road] 15)30

The reader becomes a co-traveller and a confidant, who experiences the same doubts, encounters the same dangers, or is invited to share divine moments. The confessional mode of the above-mentioned contemporary pilgrimage/ travel literature reinforces the idea of the personal dimension and, consequently, leads to altered modes of communication between the author and the reader. The author is no longer an omniscient narrator, but, like the reader, is full of doubts and hesitations as in Joku¯bas Vilius Tu¯ras Sapnuoju, kad einu: Vilnius-Santjago de Kompostela (2014 [I Dream that I Go: Vilnius-Santiago de Compostela]): For many my decision seemed totally incomprehensible, even reckless. Before the journey I wasn’t pious, if not the contrary. However, I became so strongly possessed by the idea that after some time I couldn’t get rid of it and, finally, didn’t want to abandon 30 The original text: “Jaucˇiu, kad isˇvykstu ilgam. Kai gri˛ˇsiu, viskas jau bus kitaip. Lietuvoje palieku ru¯pescˇius, draugus, mintis, baigtus ir nebaigtus darbus. Isˇjungiu telefona˛. Nutvelkia neapsakomas jausmas – smagu staiga pabe˙gti isˇ pazˇ˛istamos aplinkos. Atrodo, kad gyvenimas, kuri˛ gyvenau dar sˇiandien, nebeegzistuoja. Esu tik asˇ ir kazˇkur pasisle˙pe˛s neatrastas pasaulis, lyg dovane˙le˙ suvyniotas ir pakabintas erdve˙je uzˇ persˇviecˇiamos sˇirmos. Nors ji˛ beveik matau, dar negaliu pasiekti. Buve˛s gyvenimas pakimba ore ir viskas akimirkai sustoja.”

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it. I had been thinking for a long time, remembering what I had known, read or experienced before. I was feeling an increasing void. I ached for something non-commonplace, something that could make a strong impact on me, shake me and help me to get rid of meaninglessness. This decision required a considerable sacrifice. It seemed to me—if not now, then never. . . . Intuitively, I sensed that TO GO THERE is more meaningful than not to go. (11)31

In this way, the author’s journey becomes a journey not only into his own hesitations and doubts, but also into the reader’s emotional state, desires, and aspirations.

3.

Conclusion

Tim Youngs has rightly noticed that present-day travel writing “is an inherently transcultural, transnational, even translingual phenomenon” (169). In the age of global communication, travel writing has acquired new forms and methods. However, the distinct feature of the search for exoticism remains. Thus, the role of the travel writer has not changed much. Certainly, the writer now has become linguistically and technologically fluent. She or he can reach the audience very quickly through a variety of media. Readers can even become co-travellers via internet. Therefore, it is not surprising that contemporary readers have changed: they may be more demanding and critical, or even suggestive of the aims and mode of travel. It is possible to draw the conclusion that the “type” of travel writers has not changed much since the beginning of the twentieth century. Due to globalisation, it is the reader who has undergone major changes. The format of travel writing is now influenced by contemporary technologies. The techniques employed by many travel writers suggest that close links with fiction remain. The problems related to the reader’s role, on the one hand, and the notions of fact versus fiction in travel writing, on the other hand, could be some issues for further investigation into travel writing in Lithuania and elsewhere.

31 The original text: “Daugeliui mano sumanymas pasirode˙ visisˇkai nesuprantamas, net beprotisˇkas. Iki tol nebuvau pamaldus, veikiau atvirksˇcˇiai. Tacˇiau jis mane pamazˇu taip uzˇvalde˙ kad po to kazˇkiek laiko negale˙jau, o ve˙liau jau ir nenore˙jau to sumanymo atsikratyti. Ilgai ma˛scˇiau, perkratine˙jau, ka˛ zˇinojau, ka˛ buvau skaite˛s ir patyre˛s. Jutau, kad veriasi vis didesne˙ tusˇtuma. Trosˇkau kazˇko nekasdienisˇko, kas mane stipriai paveiktu˛, supurtytu˛ ir pade˙tu˛ atsikratyti beprasmybe˙s jausmo.”

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Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin. “Exotic/Exoticism.” Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 87–88. Print. Bey-Rozet, Maxime. “From the Casbah to Père Jules’s Cabin: Theorising the Exotic-Abject in 1930s French Cinema.” Studies in French Cinema (2019): 11–18. Web. 20 Jan 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2019.1643186. Bruner, Jerome. “Self-Making and World-Making.” Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Eds. Jens Brockmeler and Donald Carbaugh. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001. 25–37. Print. Butkus, Venantas. “Lietuviu˛ marinistine˙s literatu¯ros apzˇvalga,” 2003. Web. 17 July 2017. . –. “Skandalingi laivo gydytojo uzˇrasˇai.” Diena.lt 18 May 2015. Web. 4 Sep 2019. . Campbell, Mary Baine. “Travel Writing and Its Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 261–278. Print. De Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2003. Print. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Print. Dzezˇulskis-Duonys, Eligijus. Viesˇbutis Grenelle. Kaunas: Prix Fixe, 2007. Print. Ever, Lina. Ruduo Berlyne. Vilnius: Alma littera, 2015. Print. –. Berlyno romanas. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2016. Print. “Exotic.” Cambridge Dictionary. Web. 29 Aug 2019. . “Exotic.” Merriam-Webster. Web. 13 Sep 2019. https://www.merriam-webster.com/. “Flâneur. The Project.” New Urban Narratives, n.d. Web. 15 Sep 2019. . Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects. Eds. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica. Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. 54–67. Print. Girniuviene˙, Mirga. “Saulius Tomas Kondrotas.” Web. 4 Sep 2019. . Hardy, Stephen T. Relations of Place. Aspects of Late 20th Century Fiction and Theory. Brno: Masarykova Univerzita, 2008. Print. Hulme, Peter, and Tom Youngs. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Eds. Peter Hulme and Tom Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1–14. “Intercultural Dialogue.” White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue. Council of Europe, May 2008. Web. 29 Aug 2019. . Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas. Pasaulis be ribu˛. Vilnius: Vaga, 1977. Print. Kuiziniene˙, Dalia. “Lithuanian Exile Literature: Tendencies and Trends.” Trumpa lietuviu˛ litaratu¯ros istorija. A Brief History of Lithuanian Literature. Ed. Dalia Kuiziniene˙. Kaunas: Versus aureus, 2014. 289–310. Print. “Lithuania Population 2019.” World Population Review. Web. 15 Sep 2019. .

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Milaknyte˙, Irena. Children of Siberia: Memoirs of Lithuanian Exiles. Comps. Aras Irena Kurtinaityte˙ and Vidmanas Zavadskis. Trans. Zˇivile˙ Gimbutas. Supplemented translation of the Lithuanian edition. Kaunas: Naujasis Lankas, 2013. 194–205. Print. Mykolaityte˙, Aurelija. “The Most Recent Literature Since 1990.” Trumpa lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros istorija. A Brief History of Lithuanian Literature. Ed. Dalia Kuiziniene˙. Kaunas: Versus aureus, 2014. 323–344. Print. Neyens, Mieke. “Where North and South Meet: Mexico’s Norte in Norwegian Travel Writing.” Travel and Intercultural Communication: Going North. Eds. Eva Lambertsson Björk and Jutta Eschenbach. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 143–154. Print. “Papievis.” European Literature Network. Web. 29 Aug 2019. . Posˇka, Antanas. Nuo Baltijos iki Bengalijos: Su gerve˙mis ˛i pietus. Klaipe˙da: Vilko takas, 2002. Print. Puzinas, Jonas, ed. Lietuviu˛ enciklopedija. Vol. 23. Boston, Mass.: Lietuviu˛ enciklopedijos leidykla, 1961. Print. Prus, Elena. “The Myth of the Parisian Woman in the Modern Society.” Bulletin of Integrative Society. Vol. 21.1 (2015): n. pag. Web. 13 Sep 2019. . Rudaityte˙, Regina. “Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing.” Foreign Correspondence. Eds. Jan Borm and Benjamin Golbert. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 1–18. Print. –. “Representation of the Self and the Other: The Traveller’s Gaze.” Literatu¯ra 54.4 (2012): 19–34. Print. Sirijos Gira, Vytautas. Afrika be liu¯tu˛: laivo gydytojo uzˇrasˇai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1970. Print. Suzˇiede˙lis, Simas, and Antanas Kucˇas, eds. Encyclopedia Lituanica. Vol 5. Boston: Encyclopedia Lituanica, 1976. Print. Suzˇiede˙lis, Simas, and Juozas Jaksˇtas, eds. Encyclopedia Lituanica. Vol 4. Boston: Encyclopedia Lituanica, 1975. Print. Sˇalcˇius, Matas. Svecˇiuose pas 40 tautu˛: ketveriu˛ metu˛ kelione˙s po Europa˛, Azija˛ ir Afrika˛ aprasˇymas. Vilnius: Vaga, 1989. Print. Sˇalkauskis, Stasys. “Dvieju˛ pasauliu˛ takoskyroje.” Rasˇtai. Vol 4. Vilnius: Mintis, 1995. 20– 193. Print. Sˇimoliu¯nas, Saulius. “At the Boundaries of Two Worlds.” Lituanus 3.4 (1955). Web. 4 Sep 2019. . Tamosˇiu¯naite˙-Urboniene˙, Dainora. Children of Siberia: Memoirs of Lithuanian Exiles. Comps. Aras Irena Kurtinaityte˙ and Vidmanas Zavadskis. Trans. Zˇivile˙ Gimbutas. Supplemented translation of the Lithuanian edition. Kaunas: Naujasis Lankas, 2013: 72–99. Print. “Travel Literature.” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Web. 5 Apr 2017. . Tu¯ras, Joku¯bas Vilius. Sapnuoju, kad einu: Vilnius – Santjago de Kompostela. Vilnius: In Via Baltic, 2014. Print. Urbonaite˙, Audrone˙. Cukruota zˇuvis. Vilnius: Alma literra, 2012. Print. –. “Ne˙ vienas zˇmogus nesidzˇiaugia, jei sˇeimoje turi rasˇytoja˛.” 15 min. 5 Mar 2015. Web. 15 Sep 2019. .

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“Valdas Papievis.” Lithuanian Culture Institute, n.d. Web. 15 Sep 2019. https://english.lith uanianculture.lt/. Vedrickaite˙, Imelda. Kelione˙ Keliautojas. Literatu¯ra. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 2010. Print. –. “Diogeno gestas Jurgio Savickio dienorasˇtyje ir kelioniu˛ apybraizˇose.” Colloquia. 21 (2008): 55–77. Web. Jan 8, 2020. . Velicˇkovic´, Vedrana. Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. Print. Vidu¯nas, Vytis. “Didzˇioji Antano Posˇkos kelione˙.” Sˇiaurietisˇki atsive˙rimai 1 (2015): 69–76. Web. 17 Aug 2019. . Youngs, Tim. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

Part Two: Migration and (Inter)Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature

Milda Julija Danyte˙

Chapter 6 – A Lithuanian Child’s Dialogue with War in Alain Stanke’s Autobiography Des Barbelés Dans Ma Mémoire (So Much To Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell)

1.

Introduction

The child narrator’s voice in Alain Stanke’s autobiography of his childhood, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire (1969 [So Much to Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell, 1977]) is heard from the opening paragraph of the text: An enormous hand, hairy and dirty with grubby fingernails, grabs my shoulder and hauls me out of the car. It’s a Russian soldier. Impatient. Yelling something I don’t understand, he pushes me towards the ditch by the Birstonas road. What does he want? Must be some mistake . . . must explain that I haven’t done a thing. Aunty will tell him. (Stanke, So Much to Forget 1)1

The hand appears like that of a giant in a fairy tale: disembodied, huge, nonhuman, and uncivilised. As readers quickly pick up in the following paragraphs, this small boy is living in an upper-middle class world where he is loved and protected: the car is chauffeur-driven and the boy is wearing the sailor suit that was popular among upper-class boys in the period prior World War II. Only now, as readers understand long before the child does, the boy’s world has been invaded, along with the rest of Lithuania and its temporary capital Kaunas. It has been invaded not only by the soviet army but also by the entire killing machinery of war. Old norms are swept away, and old values, privileges and securities disintegrate under the stress of violence and aggression. The boy, Aloyzas, is the younger version of the writer Alain Stanke, separated by several decades, is one of hundreds of thousands in Europe who is suddenly caught up in World War Two. His native Lithuania suffers occupation by first the soviets, later by the Nazis, and, last, by the Allied forces that bomb Germany where Aloyzas 1 “Une main énorme, velue, sale, aux ongles crasseux, m’empoigne brusquement par l’épaule et m’oblige à descendre de l’automobile. C’est un soldat russe. Il est impatient. En vociférant dans une langue que je ne comprends pas, il me pousse vers le fossé qui longe la route de Birsˇtonas. Que me veut-il? Il fait sûrement erreur… Il faudra lui expliquer que je n’ai rien fait. Tante le lui dira.ˮ (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 15).

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has been sent as forced labourer. In this first encounter with an occupying army the child narrator still thinks in polite terms: “Must be some mistake” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 1).2 After having experienced different forms of cruelty, the boy learns less decorous modes of expression in a number of languages, new forms of address, terms for objects, actions, and feelings in a war zone. The aim of this chapter is to consider how, in a narrative about a child’s experiences in a world of war, Alain Stanke focuses on many aspects of what in general can be called language. In a literal sense Aloyzas finds himself learning foreign languages—Russian and German—because of his relations with soviet and nazi soldiers. At the same time he has a more challenging task, to master what can be called the language of war, the visual and auditory communication related to the aggression and weapons that now become part of his daily life. This chapter considers the implications of choosing a child narrator for the text. It takes into account some autobiographical theory, recent criticism on how war is represented in literary narratives and research by child psychologists. At the heart of the chapter lies an analysis of the different kinds of language in the text. Language is here interpreted in a broad sense that includes human speech, body language, and the language of warfare, the last of which Aloyzas finds increasingly oppressive as it comes to dominate his everyday world.

2.

So Much to Forget as Autobiographical Writing and as Writing about War

Alain Stanke was already a well-known figure in French Quebec culture in 1969, when he published an autobiography of his childhood from ages six to eleven, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire (1969), later translated into English as So Much to Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell (1977). Stanke had come to Montreal in 1951 from France and became an important presence in French Quebec culture and a press, radio and television journalist. Alain Stanke was born Aloyzas Stankevicˇius in 1934, into an upper-middle class family in Kaunas, which was then the temporary capital of Lithuania. His father was the director of the Kaunas radio station. For him, World War II began unexpectedly at the age of six, when the soviet army first occupied his country. Soon his family was forced to move out of their home and expected to be deported to Siberia along with many other Lithuanians in June 1941. Saved from this fate by Hitler’s breaking his pact with soviet Russia, the family found itself under threat from the nazi occupation. Eventually the whole

2 “Il fait sûrement erreur . . . ” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 15).

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family was sent to a labour camp in Germany. In the chaos of the final weeks of the war, they were able to escape to Paris by train. Autobiographical writing can be of any length and may contain idiosyncrasies because it is characteristic of writers in this genre to make choices which determine the specific form and content of their texts. One of the founders of modern autobiographical theory, Philippe Lejeune, refers to the lack of formal rules. Lejeune’s own definition of autobiography is very loose: “the retrospective prose narrative that someone writes concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life” (viii.). He further emphasises the autobiographer’s freedom by qualifying autobiography as “necessarily in its deepest sense a special kind of fiction,” since “its truth [is] as much created as (re)discovered realities” (ix). In the text under question, one of the most significant authorial decisions made by Stanke is to recount his past through a particular first-person narrator: himself as the child Aloyzas. He could have cantered his narrative on the child but presented it through the eyes of an adult, using a third-person narrator and interpreting what the child saw through the mature knowledge of an adult. Instead, he chooses to foreground not only what a young boy saw happening around him, but also what he felt and what judgments the child drew on people and events. Indeed, when the structure of the narrative is scrutinised, it becomes clear how tight it is and how it differs from many traditional autobiographies that begin with a summary of the narrator’s origins and situation. Stanke’s autobiographical narrative places the child at the centre of events during the period from 1940 to 1945. He begins with the child’s first confrontation with the war at the age of six, when the soviet soldiers entering Kaunas almost shoot him, and the narrative concludes with the day the war ends and the family reaches Paris. The boy is then eleven. The opening paragraph is the one already cited at the beginning of this chapter, when both the notion of war and its reality suddenly take the form of soldiers leading Aloyzas, his aunt, his brother and their chauffeur away to be shot. It is a powerful, dramatic beginning to a story in which acts of violence repeatedly erupt around the boy over and over again in the course of the war years. More than 150 pages later, the closing sentences of the text begin with a declaration over loudspeakers on May 5, 1945, that the war is over: “The proclamation, which is repeated continuously, fills my whole body with a sort of warm explosion. Sweat trickles down my backbone. ‘LA GUERRE EST FINIE! LA GUERRE EST FINIE!’ It’s the first complete sentence that I learn in French” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 164; emphasis in original).3

3 “La proclamation que l’on répète inlassablement produit comme une explosion chaude dans tout mon être. La sueur inonde le creux de mon dos. LA GUERRE EST FINIE! LA GUERRE EST

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As their train enters France, the family has finally left not only its captivity as forced labourers in Germany but also the whole period of the war. Nevertheless, the child narrator does very little to provide the kind of emotional or generalising conclusion that readers may expect. As briefly as possible, he describes the joy people feel: “People cry, people dance, people kiss each other!” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 164).4 Even here he does not refer to his parents or brother, although they are all together. As is usual in this text, he instead focuses on a concrete detail, the rain, about which he comments in typical child-like fashion: “My feet are wet but I don’t care. Soon I’ll have new shoes” (164).5 In this way, the whole text is bounded by the beginning and ending of the war for this child. It is clear that this short book does not cover all the events in Aloyzas’s life during these five years. Many facts have been pruned away without any summaries, and even time references, like the leap forward during the nazi occupation of Kaunas—“Time passes: days, weeks, months”—are not frequent (76).6 Nothing is said about what happens to Aloyzas in France. The child exists within the tight limits of the war narrative, heightening the drama of his confrontations with soldiers, killings, bombardments and sudden transfers of his family from one place to another. In a similar way, Stanke does not provide any explanations of Lithuania’s political situation during World War II or any context for first the soviet and then the nazi occupations. He undoubtedly relies on some general knowledge among his target audiences, which are (initially) French and (later) English, but the details of the Lithuanian situation would probably not have been known to these readers. Instead, he begins abruptly and continues in this manner. Historical events impinge on the child’s consciousness only as specific acts that he witnesses himself. Although the text contains many footnotes, only a few of them reference or explain historical phenomena, although more could have been inserted to this end. Given the fact that the text is autobiographical, it is interesting that it does not contain any of the appendages common in such texts: there are no maps to show readers where Lithuania is and no photographs of the family and its home. It seems that Stanke wants his readers to concentrate their attention on the child’s voice. Stanke’s manner of describing the horrors of the war is not very similar to the methods identified by recent specialists on the literature of war. Critics like Kate McLoughlin, Margot Norris, and Petra Rau have produced studies that are very useful in analysing how writers of war fiction deal with the large scale of violence and death in twentieth-century wars. McLouglin points to the use of statistics, FINIE! C’est la première phrase complète que j’apprends à dire en français” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 179). 4 “On pleure! On danse! On s’embrasse!” (179). 5 “Mes pieds sont mouillés mais je n’en ai cure. Bientôt j’aurai des souliers neufs” (179). 6 “Le temps passe. Des jours, des semaines, des mois” (92).

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though both she and Norris agree that this does little to help readers to identify with victims (McLouglin 53; Norris 26). A more fruitful device is what McLoughlin calls the “synecdochic approach,” in which one or a group of characters stand for all those in the war (53). For Norris this device raises the danger of distorting the reality of participants in a war, as certain groups are selected as typical even though they are not really so (26). She further points out that the writer’s own side in a war is usually represented by individualised characters while the opponents remain a faceless mass (27). In the case of Stanke’s narrative, the choice of a small Lithuanian boy as the narrator and central character clearly skews the historic reality of the text as a historical document: it cannot be argued that Aloyzas is typical of any group, not even Lithuanians or Lithuanian children. Nor can his encounters with soldiers become the basis for generalisations about the soviet Russian military in the occupation, as these are too random and individualised. Another stylistic device that McLoughlin finds frequent in narratives of war is the appeal to the “inadequacy of language” in describing the physical facts of war (55). However, because Stanke’s focaliser is a child who still sees the world through his senses and describes very precise and concrete instances of torture, shootings and air raids, Stanke does not use this device, either. Petra Rau’s examination of how the individual body of a soldier can be represented as the site for violence works somewhat better for Stanke’s narrative (Rau 8–14). Aloyzas reports almost every act of brutality as a sequence of sounds and sights that reverberates through his own body. In one of the extended episodes of wartime violence which Aloyzas witnesses, the torture of Lithuanian partisans by soviet political commissars, it can be seen how the narrative focuses on the details that the boy takes in through his senses. At the family’s country villa he is taken by the caretaker, Ponas Petras, to a cemetery where the man habitually leaves food and mail for Lithuanian partisans. There, the sound of an approaching truck so alarms Ponas Petras that he pulls Aloyzas up into the top of a tree to hide. The adult’s fear transmits itself without words to the boy through the sweat that soaks his shirt. Four prisoners are taken out of the truck, and one is chosen for interrogation, but he refuses to speak. Then a savage beating begins: the boy can see that the partisan’s shirt is wet with blood: “the blows rain down and vibrate through the tree, filling my entire body. Bloody scraps of flesh hang from his cheeks” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 56).7 Aloyzas feels these acts as though they are inflicted on him: “My nails bite through the skin of my clenched fists. . . . My whole body goes stiff. My heart pounds against 7 “Les coups pleuvent sans rémission. Ils cinglent et résonnent jusqu’à notre arbre, en se répercutant dans tout mon être. Des morceaux de chair sanguinolente pendent sur la joue” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 69).

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my ribs and a bloody mist swims before my eyes” (56).8 Then he cannot bear to watch what is happening to the other prisoners and hides his face under his friend’s arm. The soldiers’ brutal acts now speak to him through sounds: “I hear shouts, footsteps, then bullets. More cries” (56).9 The beatings continue: “thuds, blows, more blows, constant blows, and terrible screams. . . . One more thud, then a sudden quiet spell in which we hear whispers, vague words, steps, the sound of digging” (70).10 Finally the truck is started, doors slam, and the vehicle drives off: “The sound fades and changes tone: the vehicle has reached the paved road. Then it disappears completely” (70).11 From long sentences and repetitions of words like “blows,” the sentences now become shorter. They follow a different rhythm as the sounds of violence are replaced by those of something close to normality. This emphasis on the corporeal experience of war is close to what Rau calls the “body-at-war,” but she links this with a strong sense of nationhood (8), which is too abstract a kind of thinking for Stanke’s child narrator. Only once in the text does anyone speak to Aloyzas about Lithuania as a nation and its fate. But the boy does not refer to any patriotic notions. This omission of historical contextualisation is another characteristic element of Stanke’s text. It makes readers feel as if they are listening to a real child’s voice and, indeed, being strongly embedded in this character’s mind.

3.

The Child Narrator in Stanke’s Autobiography

Another and more important line of theoretical thinking is connected to the choice of a small boy as narrator and focaliser for the text. Kate Douglas argues that it is wrong to label children as ‘unreliable narrators’ on the grounds that their limited experience of the world makes them misinterpret events and people’s motives. In a book-length study, Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory, Douglas suggests that a better term is “a naïve child narrator” (123). Indeed, what seems like a shortcoming can be seen as a positive attribute from a narrative point of view. Less able to use abstract reasoning, young children focus very sharply on the physical details of a scene, person or event, only occasionally making generalisations about the observed details. 8 “Les ongles s’enfoncent dans la chair de mes poings crispés … Tout mon être se cabre. Mon cœur cogne atrocement contre ma poitrine et un brouillard de sang trouble ma vue” (69). 9 “J’entends crier, j’entends des pas, et puis des balles. Encore des cris” (69). 10 “ … des bruits sourds, des coups, encore des coups, toujours des coups et des gémissements atroces … Soudain, après un autre choc sourd, on n’entend plus rien, sauf des chuchotements, de vagues conversations, des pas, puis des bruits de pelle” (70). 11 “Son bruit se fait plus doux. Le son a changé. Je sais que le véhicule a atteint le gravier de la route. Tranquillement, le ronronnement s’estompe. Définitivement” (70).

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Critics on the use of child narrators in both fictional and autobiographical texts also point out that these “may offer a ‘radically Other’ view of the world” (Rye) and that they “question the things we take for granted and take for granted the things we question” (King). Their very presence in a text, as Elizabeth H. Tompkins asserts, brings into the narrative “a group of incredibly marginalised voices” (14). In texts about extreme situations like those in Stanke’s narrative, all the rules set up for children in a given society during times of peace are broken during military occupations and wars. Instead of going to school to be educated, children in wartime are taught how to hide from gunfire and bombing. Instead of learning to obey the Ten Commandments, they learn to lie about themselves and their families. Finally and most traumatically for young children, they have to learn to accept that their parents and other caring adults cannot be depended on to protect them anymore. Gill Rye suggests that, despite the counter-arguments of psychologists, “the myth of the innocent child and of childhood as a paradise lost still persists” in Western culture (“Writing Childhood”). To read about horrors perpetuated on children seems worse than hearing about those inflicted on adults, while children themselves are supposed to be spared even the knowledge of such acts. Yet children are full of curiosity about the world around them: they feel a powerful desire to know, an aspect of their nature that can be restricted to some extent in times of peace and strong community norms, but not so easily when civil order breaks down. Avril Thorne and Kate McLean refer to three “master narratives” used by the authors of autobiographical narratives about traumatic events: in the so-called John Wayne master narrative, “the narrator [takes] a position of courage and stoic resolve during intensely negative experiences”; the “Florence Nightingale” narrative features “concern for others, ”while the “vulnerability narrative” is characterised by “the expression of intensely negative emotions and feelings of helplessness” (qtd. in Fivush et al. 340). It may seem that stories about children in extreme situations fall naturally into narratives of vulnerability. As Claire King argues, asserting that “child protagonists are unable to effect change themselves. Rather, they are trapped as observers, ingenuous participants in their environment” (“Child Narrators”). Yet is this always and necessarily the case? Children may be driven by as strong a desire for survival as adults. Fictional narratives with child protagonists like Huckleberry Finn or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter show them to be successful in their struggles. In fictional texts, this may be a distortion of reality that is created to satisfy the hopes of readers by providing what is called a ‘happy ending.’ Still, autobiographical narratives certainly do not all depict children as passive. In Alain Stanke’s narrative, the child he remembers often takes up a small boy’s version of a John Wayne master narrative, behaving with courage and showing real agency, not just experiencing the war passively.

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Another issue that arises when child narrators are used is that of voice. For texts in which the narrator and/or focaliser is a child, as Rye states, the accounts “strive for a sense of authenticity” but not, as she continues, by mimicking “the language of a child;” instead, she considers it more common to “create an impression of a child’s voice” or at least “a child’s point of view” (“Writing Childhood”). This can be seen in the opening sentences of Stanke’s narrative that have been quoted at the beginning of this chapter, where the size of the adult hand relative to the small size of the child’s, along with the boy’s appeal to moral codes he has been taught, and his trust that his aunt will intervene on his behalf all create the illusion of a child speaking. Rye also emphasises what she sees as a fundamental principle. Namely, in narratives with children playing the roles of narrators and focalisers, in almost all cases their voices are “mediated, modified, appropriated by adults” (“Writing Childhood”). She states that this relationship can be “clear and distinctive,” or that the writer may prefer “blurring the boundaries” between the adult version of the self who is writing the text, and the remembered child, who is speaking (“Writing Childhood”). One can observe occasional signs in Stanke’s narrative of an adult mind editing the child’s experience. For example, the almost seamless fluidity of the narrative is due to the focus being kept throughout on the boy’s relations with different players and actions in the war. Events in his life that are not connected with the war are simply left out of the text. As a result the text is strongly unified in a way that suggests an experienced and sophisticated authorial hand. However, at the same time, it is only very occasionally in Stanke’s narrative that the first-person voice is that of an adult. Among rare examples of a more mature voice is the statement made in the episode in which Aloyzas is almost shot by Russian soldiers: “This new terror is the first trauma of my life” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 17).12 It is an adult voice that evaluates this specific fear among those experienced in six years of life. However, this very brief intervention does little to alter the readers’ sense that a child is speaking to them, especially given the subsequent course of events. When they are facing death, the boy’s aunt urges him to pray, but he rebels: “I don’t want to die. I don’t know how to pray standing up. I don’t want to . . .” (17).13 Three very short sentences repeat the refusal that children often put up against adults’ expectations. Here the genuine note of naïveté that is typical of young children appears: “I don’t want to die” (17).14 Taught to always kneel to say his prayers, he cannot accept a change in the ritual: 12 “Cette terreur nouvelle est la première grande douleur de ma vie” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 17). 13 “Je n’ai pas le gout de mourir. Je ne sais pas prier debout. Je ne veux pas…” (17). 14 “Je n’ai pas le gout de mourir” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 17).

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“I don’t know how to pray standing up” (17).15 He concludes stubbornly: “I don’t want to,” every child’s last weapon against the apparently inevitable. Elsewhere in the text, certain occasional signs of an adult voice appear in the use of references to time. Sometimes these take the form of a specific date. For example, the initial episode of the book concludes with this statement: “On this day, June 15, 1940, war has entered my six-year-old world and I know that nothing will ever be the same again” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 23).16 Although Tim Love asserts that small children are very conscious of their age and frequently refer to it (“Child Narrators in Adult Fiction”), this summary does not sound like a child’s in terms of its phrasing or ideas. However, it is important for Alain Stanke that his readers interpret events in their proper historical context. In similar fashion, the very small number of other dates given in the narrative is connected with historical phases of the war that directly affect Aloyzas’s family. For instance, when the family is taken to Germany as forced labour, the boy witnesses the fire-bombing of Wurzburg. In this case a footnote gives the specific date, which is 16 March 1945 (Stanke, So Much to Forget 150). In the final pages of the book, when the family is on a train escaping to France, the last sub-section is also headed by a precise date, “April 3, 1945,” and later references are given to specific days, May 3 and May 5, respectively, when the war officially ends (175; 178–179). In general, however, and in accord with the slow development of calendar thinking among young children noted by psychologists such as Robyn Fivush and colleagues, time passes in the narrative not by dates but by references to seasonal events (“The Making of Autobiographical Memory”). Stanke’s narrator describes the winter of the Russian occupation as “cold and hard” (79)17; the boy notices the long line-ups at the doors of shops and the sudden increase in the number of drunkards on the street. Yet, he pays equal attention to the physical sensation of the cold hurting his hands and eyes (79). The narrator mentions both his seventh and tenth birthdays, the latter more a sad than a happy day, for there are neither presents nor cake (112). The time between these birthdays is marked by major events during the German occupation: everyone in Kaunas is forced to attend the public hanging of Russian parachutists, for instance. Also, Aloyzas’s closest friend, Lazys, who is Jewish, goes into hiding with his family. He is later caught and the Jewish ghetto is burned to the ground. The house to which the boy’s family has been moved is requisitioned, thus forcing them to take refuge in the school where his father works. When the Russian army approaches Kaunas, the family undertakes a perilous journey to a farm on the German border. Here, 15 “Je ne sais pas prier debout” (17). 16 “Ce 15 juin 1940, mes six ans ont découvert la guerre et je sais que jamais plus rien ne sera comme avant” (23). 17 “… âpre et dur” (79).

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the long-dreaded event occurs: his father is arrested, and the whole family is deported to Germany to become forced labourers. It is possible for readers who know Lithuanian history to date and explain all these events, but by not doing so, Stanke maintains the child’s voice and perspective. However, it is only when one looks at the narrative from a certain distance that one perceives elements that indicate an adult editor. In reading the text, the vivid and dramatic voice of the child narrator carries much more weight. Alain Stanke could have easily increased the presence of an adult voice within the story, but clearly preferred not to do this, and thus gives priority to Aloyzas’s voice and character.

4.

Psychologists on Middle Childhood

Still another theoretical approach to the text that needs to be mentioned involves contemporary research on middle childhood development. To use these findings does require a sensitive touch because the text, although it describes real experiences of an actual person, is not a historical document. Philippe Lejeune, one may want to remember, warns readers to be aware of the proximity of autobiography to fiction (ix). In the final sense, this is not the child Aloyzas Stankevicˇius’s narrative: it is Alain Stanke’s adaptation of his memories of what he saw, heard, said, felt and thought from the ages of six to eleven. Nevertheless, the emotional and intellectual ways in which Aloyzas reacts to the war are consistent with what child psychology sees as the common line of development for a child of his age. Aloyzas experiences the Second World War from ages six to eleven, which psychologists call ‘middle childhood.’ Libby Balter Blume defines this as “the developmental period between early childhood and adolescence” (“Middle Childhood”). In this period children not only increase their knowledge of the world, but also begin to apply more conceptual reasoning to the phenomena around them. As one article states, “they begin to understand the rules of society and its moral bindings” (Chatterjee, “Middle Childhood Development”). In terms of language proficiency, this is a significant period of growth. Children not only increase their vocabulary (it is calculated that children learn over 5,000 words a year in this period), but they also acquire the ability to “grasp the double meanings of words” and understand forms of playing with language like puns and metaphors (Chatterjee, “Middle Childhood Development”). Another source explains that children in middle childhood usually “have high self-esteem” (Chatterjee, “Psychosocial Development of Middle Childhood”). Blume adds that, by the end of this stage of life, children show more ability at “self-regulation” (“Middle Childhood”). These general characteristics of middle childhood appear in the representation of Aloyzas, who is a bright,

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confident child and who is quick to absorb new knowledge and especially linguistic skills in his encounters with the world at war. Psychologists studying this period of development also offer insights as to how children at these ages understand and react to death, a topic very pertinent to Aloyzas’s experiences during the war. Researchers assert that children even in much less dangerous and traumatic situations are fascinated by death. As Mark W. Speece, the author of many studies on the subject, states, “death-related experiences are common in childhood” so that children “at an early age try to understand” death (“Children’s Concepts of Death”). Speece identifies two unresolved problems in this kind of research: at what age do children develop a complex and relatively ‘mature’ understanding of death? Can researchers use the notion of an adult understanding as the goal to which children should move?” From specific case studies, Speece concludes that the age at which individual children reach such an understanding varies from between four to twelve years or even later, with seven years being an average age for this comprehension (“Children’s Concepts of Death”). Dunya Yaldoo Poltorak and John P. Glazer, in a study of children in hospitals, find that “serious illness itself accelerates cognitive development in often unpredicted ways”; these children can have an understanding of death without being able to conceptualise it in language (572). The extreme situations that Aloyzas finds himself in during the war, when he witnesses people being tortured and killed and is often in danger of dying himself, may also encourage the development of his cognitive powers.

5.

The Development of Aloyzas’s Comprehension of Violence, Death and Other Aspects of War

Childhood is a continuous experience of education, of which the formal kind conducted in school is often not the most significant for a child. During wartime, Aloyzas experiences a form of total immersion in foreign languages and ideologies that have taken over the world he has known up to the first soviet occupation of Kaunas in June of 1940. When the Russians enter Kaunas, Aloyzas is six years old, at the boundary between early and middle childhood, both naïve and quick to learn. Because of the way that a shouted command in Russian has saved him in his first encounter with soviet soldiers, Aloyzas first clings to the belief that knowledge of this language can protect him from any further brutalities. A child of six, he is still at the stage of language acquisition in which mastering new words is a matter of pride. The soldiers are ready to kill him as a member of the wealthy middle class. A single word “Wait!,” yelled by a Russian soldier, saves them: “If we get out of

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this, if they don’t kill me today, I’ll remember that magic word ‘padajditie’ as long as I live” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 6).18 When they return to their car, they find that the soldiers have already stolen what they could, including his toys, and vandalised the car’s interior: “the dashboard in pieces, the radio torn out, and the leather seats slashed to ribbons” (6).19 The violent tearing that was supposed to be carried out by bullets on their bodies was inflicted on their luxurious car instead. For the first time Aloyzas understands that his sense of invulnerability is wrong, that remaining alive is not inevitable: “alive, alive, we’re still alive” (20),20 he keeps repeating to himself until he starts to cry. It may be that this is the first time the small boy clearly understands that he too can die, although child psychologists assert that the belief in the possibility of one’s own death, contrary to earlier thinking, has been found to develop very early in young children (Speece). But this frightening experience has convinced Aloyzas of the power of foreign languages. Some days later, encouraged by the friendliness of the Russian soldiers encamped on the lawns of his home, he and his brother move from gestures to active use of the Russian language. Aloyzas is proud to be able to put a new word, “vaina” [‘war’] to appropriate use to explain why he suddenly cannot buy the soldiers food from a nearby shop (Stanke, So Much to Forget 28). “War” now has accumulated all kinds of meanings, from shootings to food shortages. An even greater matter of pride is that friendly contacts with the Russian soldiers have led to the acquisition of an additional identity: “they call us by our first names or by nicknames: Lyulka and Alyosha. Now I have five different names. It makes me feel rich!” (28).21 The episode with the Russian soldiers makes Aloyzas seem very young. He does not feel culturally threatened and simply accepts these men who enjoy playing with his toy train as an extension of his family. Indeed, his whole thinking about language is still very childish. When he first witnesses soviet Mongolian soldiers killing Lithuanian passers-by for their own amusement, he seizes hopefully on one word they use, which he thinks means ‘goodbye’ and so signals the end of the attack. He is sure that this word is magic in some way (Stanke, So Much to Forget 34–35). But the Mongolian attacks continue with even more force and reach his own neighbourhood. He asks a Catholic priest whether God would stop the Mongols. The priest tells him that God will do so if, 18 “Je me dis que si j’en réchappe, si l’on ne me tue pas aujourd’hui, je me souviendrai de ce mot magique aussi longtemps que je vivrai. Je le redis dans ma tête: “Padajditie…”” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 19). 19 “… un tableau de bord en miettes, la radio arrachée, les banquettes de cuir lacérées en maints endroits” (20). 20 “Vivants, vivants, nous sommes vivants!” (20). 21 “On nous appellee même par nos prénoms, ou encore par des noms qu’on nous a donnés. Ainsi, mon frère devient Liulka, et moi Alioscha. Je compte sur mes doigts. Ça me fait cinq prénoms. Je me sens riche!” (41).

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as a small child, he prays fervently. Aloyzas then creates a magic ritual of his own, forcing himself to stay up all night repeating the only prayer he knows by heart, the “Our Father”: “I recite it without stopping, without swallowing a single syllable. And at night I begin again, on my knees by the bed and then again with my head buried in the pillow. Sleep overtakes me while I’m still struggling with ‘Te˙ve musu, kurs esi danguje’ . . .” (45).22 The following morning, it is a great shock for him when his mother says the Mongolian soldiers have not gone. This throws many beliefs into doubt: faith in God, confidence in the priest as a privileged adult and his new idea that language can be used in a magic way. In contrast to his Jewish friend Lazys, who is the same age as him but whose parents talk to him about the political situation, Aloyzas insists on seeing the Russian soldiers who are not Mongols as real friends. Lazys calls him an idiot, pointing out that Russians almost shot him. He suggests that Aloyzas put rat poison in the sausage that he buys with Russian money for the soldiers. Now the boy is not sure what to think; he even doubts that rat poison would kill Russian soldiers: “They may not be the same as other people” (28).23 At this age he still believes in many forms of magic. A year later, in June 1941, when the nazi attack forces the sudden withdrawal of the soviet army from Lithuania, Aloyzas has already developed a greater cognitive ability, as well as the ability to critique the judgments made by others. The Russian retreat is greeted as a kind of miracle since this ends the mass deportations to Siberia, which have also threatened Aloyzas’s family. The boy interprets Lithuanian cries of joy at seeing the Russians leaving to indicate the end of the war. He is thus puzzled by the behaviour of an elderly woman, who laughs and even kisses the ground, crying: “War, war! . . . Thank God for the war!” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 73).24 He asks a man who is throwing stones at the departing trucks whether the war is over: “No, the war isn’t over, and it’s a good thing!” (73).25 Aloyzas now doubts adult wisdom about the meaning of the word ‘war’: “Grownups are strange people. They don’t know what they want” (73).26 He finds it hard to transform the word ‘war’ into something with a positive meaning. The German soldiers themselves, “clean, handsome and imposing” (73),27 do impress him and he admits, with a new-found irony that “the new war

22 “Je la recite sans arrêt en prenant soin de n’escamoter aucune syllabe. Et je recommence le même soir avant de me coucher, à genoux au pied de mon lit, et encore après, la tête enfouie dans l’oreiller. Finalement, épuisé, le sommeil me gagne pendant que je fais des efforts surhumains pour murmurer: Te˙ve musu, kurs esi danguje…” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 58). 23 “Je ne suis pas certain non plus qu’ils soient des hommes comme les autres” (41). 24 “C’est la guerre, la guerre! … Merci mon Dieu pour la guerre!” (86). 25 “Non, elle n’est pas finie la guerre… Et HEUREUSEMENT!” (87). 26 “Décidément, les grandes personnes sont bêtes. Elles ne savent plus ce qu’elles veulent” (87). 27 “… propres, beaux et imposants …” (87).

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seems more agreeable than the old” (74).28 The ironic overtones in this formulation emerge more directly in the paragraph that ends Part One: “I’m not convinced that they’re friends, these men in khaki—they also have guns and long, threatening black swords hanging from their leather belts. I look at the weapons over and over again, and each time I feel the same panicky shock. Do these German knives work the same way as the Russian ones?” (74).29 Aloyzas has made rapid progress in interpreting languages and ideologies; although he is only seven, he is clearly less naïve than he had been a year earlier, and he is more independent in his thinking. Nevertheless, this does not mean that he has ceased to see the world through a child’s eyes. Later, he and his friend Lazys decide that there is no real difference between Russian and German soldiers. Adult readers, knowledgeable in history, might well agree, but the two seven-year-olds draw a conclusion based on their own understanding of the world: “We decide they’re the same people in different coloured uniforms” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 76).30 The experience of war they have had so far has made them see through appearances to essential similarities which they do not have the conceptual vocabulary to express. However, soon after the beginning of the nazi occupation of Lithuania, Aloyzas’s sensitivity to language helps him perceive that the linguistic climate has changed for the worse. Although Aloyzas is too young to understand that the Nazis see Lithuanians as an inferior people to be sternly controlled, he notices that the first German word that he learns is “verboten” [‘forbidden’]: “It is verboten: to go down certain streets, to hide enemies in the house, to leave the town, to spend the night away from home, to walk quickly in the street, to carry parcels, to wear sunglasses, to have a beard, anything and everything is verboten” (79).31 He also notices that German orders are backed up with violence; he has lost his faith in his protective status as a child or the saving grace of knowing foreign languages and remarks wryly that he has to force himself not to run about as he used to so that he will not “get a bullet in the legs” (79).32 On the other hand, learning languages still fascinates him. 28 “Cette nouvelle guerre paraît plus agréable que la première” (87). 29 “Moi aussi je ris, même si je ne suis pas encore convaincu de les aimer ces hommes en kaki, car eux aussi ont des fusils et de longues épées noires et menaçantes qui pendent à leur large ceinture de cuir. Cent fois je regarde leur arme et cent fois je ressens en moi le même choc brutal, la même angoisse: les couteaux allemands sont-ils aussi tranchants que ceux des Russes?” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 87). 30 “Nous décidons qu’il s’agit des mêmes hommes à qui l’on donne d’autres uniformes” (92). 31 “Il est verboten de passer dans certaines rues, verboten de cacher des ennemis à la maison, verboten de sortir de la ville, verboten de passer la nuit ailleurs que chez soi, verboten de marcher vite dans la rue, verboten de porter des paquets, verboten de porter des lunettes de soleil, verboten d’avoir une longue barbe, verboten, verboten, toujours et partout verboten” (95). 32 “… me retrouver avec une balle dans les jambs” (95).

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Aloyzas’s acquisition of German begins with military terms, as one might expect. He remarks with pride that “My education continues. I know the difference between a flame-thrower and a hand grenade, between a Wehrmacht soldier and a Luftwaffe airman. . . . And I know that the worst Germans are the S.S. and part of the Gestapo” (79).33 There are no scenes of friendly relations developing with the German soldiers, however. The fragments of German that appear in the second and third parts of the book are most often peremptory orders, given in the imperative: “Kommen sie mit uns, schnell!”; “Aufstehen!”; “Schnell! Schnell!, hurle notre gardien, Absteigen!” [“Come with us, quickly!”; “Get up!”; “Hurry up and get out!”] (101, 117, 125). Two long episodes, one in the first part and the second in the third part of the book, also show how Aloyzas’s cognitive powers develop over the course of the war year in relation to the ideological situations around him. Both the soviet communists and the German nazis make attempts to convert Aloyzas into an ideological tool. The episodes describing the Russian attempt to introduce elements of communism in Aloyzas’s school often border on farce, as Aloyzas, like the other children, is too young to really understand ideological concepts. One morning the crucifix above the chalkboard is replaced by a photograph of an unknown man with a moustache. Aloyzas is not displeased because he found the tortured figure of Christ too similar to the partisans whose killing he witnessed. Later that day a soldier names and praises the man in the portrait, explaining that Stalin is the leader and everyone’s friend. He also confides that God and heaven do not exist, appealing to their pride by calling religious accounts stories for babies. However, when he asks if they understand, the class shocks him by responding enthusiastically and in unison: “Yes, sir” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 62).34 Clearly, there is a good deal of ideological work to be done, and the instructor corrects them, introducing the word ‘comrade’: “You mustn’t say Sir, there are no more Sirs. Call me Draugas or Tovarich. From now on you may call everyone Draugas. We are all comrades—the teacher, the principal, your parents, me and Stalin! Raise your fists in the salute!” (62).35 The gesture seems bizarre to Aloyzas, more a threat than a greeting, but the children do as they are told. That evening Aloyzas tells his parents how the soviet soldier told them to listen to what 33 “À la longue, mes connaissances deviennent solides. Je sais la différence entre un lanceflammes et une grenade, un soldat de la Wehrmacht et un aviateur de la Luftwaffe. … Je sais aussi que les plus horribles parmi les Allemands sont des S.S. et qu’ils font partie de la Gestapo” (95). 34 “O-U-I Ponas!” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 76). 35 “Il ne faut plus dire Ponas! Il n’y a plus de Ponas. Appelez-moi Draugas ou Tovaritch. À partir d’aujourd’hui, vous avez le droit d’appeler tout le monde draugas. Nous sommes tous les camarades: l’institutrice, le directeur, vos parents, moi et Staline! Levons en l’air nos poings fermés, pour saluer!” (76).

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their parents were saying about the occupation and to report it at school to him. The boy’s parents, shocked, warn him that he might then be taken away from his family. This is the only time in the narrative that readers see Aloyzas as a small boy being guided by his parents: it makes him seem like a very young child, indeed, and fits with the notion of the master narrative of vulnerability described earlier (Fivush et al.). A very different kind of child protagonist appears four years later in a companion portrait in a nazi school. Aloyzas and his family have been deported to Germany as forced labourers. He is now ten years old and has made up his mind about the realities of war: he hates soldiers, weapons, the now habitual acts of violence and destruction, as well as the burden of fear. In addition, his cognitive powers have matured in a manner that is usual for pre-adolescence so that he can evaluate abstract systems like the nazi ideology propagated around him. When they pass through the city of Berlin, which German guards insist rules the world, he doubts this: “Berlin doesn’t look like the centre of the world. It’s nothing but ugly ruins and desolation” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 106).36 Aloyzas now understands the ironic disparity between nazi rhetoric and the real world of wartime destruction. Aloyzas’s situation reminds us of the aforementioned Claire King’s claim that children are not able to escape their naturally passive status (“Child Narrators”). This is a question of what sociologists call agency and structure. Jeffrey Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux define agency as “the power to do something,” asserting that “[s]ubjects have agency—the ability to respond to their historical contexts and, with any luck at all, change them in the process” (255; emphases in the original). The structural context for Aloyzas’s acts in this period of his life is powerful and dangerous: he is not only a child but also a Lithuanian child who has been sent to a labor camp. In the nazi system, his life has little value. Still, as was true for the soviet occupiers of Kaunas, his status as a child means that he can possibly be molded into the nazi system, and he is sent to a local school. He tries to make friends with the German boys, but they bully him and call him names. The term “Auslander”—foreigner seems especially nasty to him; he would prefer to be stigmatised as stupid than by what he calls “that awful nickname” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 108).37 His teacher suggests that he join the Hitlerjugend, but he refuses, after which he feels that this man is observing him in a hostile way. Meanwhile, within the child a sense of anger is developing. Up until now, he has tried to use language systems as modes of friendly communication. But now he decides to openly boycott the nazi ideological system. The school demands that 36 “… il me semble que Berlin n’a rien sur quoi puisse s’appuyer le monde entier. Ce ne sont que ruines lugubres et désolation” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 124). 37 “Quel horrible mot!” (126).

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pupils make the nazi salute and shout “Heil Hitler!” at the beginning and end of each class: so far, he has never done this. On this day, he knows that the teacher is watching him closely and determines to continue to rebel. His teacher comes down the row and asks whether he made the salute and then, when Aloyzas answers that he did not, asks him why. The boy flashes back, “Because I’m an Auslander,” (109)38 earning the immediate response: a blow to the face and then one in the stomach, as well as the shouted order to get out. Acting as an agent here means to deliberately provoke a representative of the nazi system. Aloyzas has reached the point at which he can no longer remain passive. The two school episodes demonstrate the development of Aloyzas’s cognitive abilities as well as his determination to make his own decisions. There are no parents in the second episode to provide explanations and guidance for the child. In the nazi school he understands the symbolic meaning of his refusal to make the nazi salute. Despite possible consequences, he has reached the point in his relations with war at which he can no longer remain passive.

6.

Speaking without Words: The Child’s Response to the Language of Weapons

The war functions as an accelerated learning period for Aloyzas. The final feature of the development of his cognitive and emotional response to what he is compelled to learn relates to the language of weapons. Various kinds of weapons and the necessity of correctly understanding how they function, including their auditory aspects—what can be called the language of weapons in use—now figure largely in the child’s life. As noted earlier, words associated with the weaponry of war are the very first linguistic acquisitions that the boy makes during the war. When soviet troops entering Kaunas meet up with the family limousine, soldiers decide to execute these examples of the Lithuanian upper class. In this encounter the sheltered sixyear-old learns about guns, bullets and cannons, and that their deadly functions are part of the general term war. The idea of guns as a means of killing is hard for him to understand. He tries to compare them to the dangers presented in fairy tales: “I knew there were snakes that could kill you, but I didn’t know that men could makes snakes out of wood and have them spit iron stones which kill. No, there was nothing like that in the story books they gave me” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 3–4).39 Within a matter of days, however, he becomes friendly enough with 38 “Parce que je suis un ausländer!” (127). 39 “Je sais qu’il existe des serpents qui font mourir, mais j’ignore que les hommes savent fabriquer des sortes de serpents de bois capables de cracher des pierres de fer, capables de

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the soldiers who camp on the lawns of their house and climbs onto the previously unfamiliar tanks. Military weapons at this point become a new kind of toy. Just as children frequently enjoy collecting all kinds of things, he and his friend Lazys start collecting terms for military weapons: “we discuss the war and soldiers, like grownups” (75).40 Aloyzas is still inclined to call all long sharp weapons knives, while Lazys can distinguish among swords, sabres and bayonets. He has also picked up information about a German invention, a kind of bullet which explodes on contact, tearing the human body into fragments. This acquisition of knowledge still seems safely theoretical, a new kind of game. The next level of learning occurs in a brutal episode in which the two boys, wandering through the town, accidentally witness soviet Mongol soldiers. These soldiers are exercising their horses while shooting in the air and then shoot and kill Lithuanian passers-by. This event is described through the child’s horrified sense impressions, which he often relates to sensations in his own body. For example, there is the surprisingly loud sound made by gunshot: “It makes a terrible noise which resounds in my ears” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 32).41 This distressing event starts with some unusual sounds that they hear as they approach a park: “piercing cries” and the “neighing and approaching hoofbeats” (30).42 When Aloyzas sees them, the horses look strange to him. They are small animals that bound forward ridden by small men “who yell at the top of their lungs and brandish huge, shining swords over their heads” (31).43 The boy is still so much part of a peacetime society that “it upsets [him] to see [the horses] trample on the grass” (32).44 The sounds made during the killings become the ‘natural speech’ of these acts, evoking a direct physical response in his own body: “their hoofbeats are so hard that the earth vibrates like a drum. I’m terrified. I cover my ears and my sweating temples” (33).45 The soldiers ride over one man and kill the woman who runs to help him. Soon the Mongol soldiers extend their attacks on Lithuanians in the neighbourhood of the boy’s home. Now he can read, as it were, the sounds of horses’ galloping hooves, distinguishing the sound made by Mongol horses from that of Russian ones by a different system of shoeing

40 41 42 43 44 45

donner la mort; ça non! je n’ai vu ça nulle part dans les livres de contes qu’on me donne” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 17). “Nous discutons de guerre et de soldats, comme des adultes” (127). “Ça fait un bruit terrible qui résonne sans fin dans mes oreilles” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 45). “… des cris aigus … une gallopade qui se rapproche” (44). “… qui hurlent à tue-tête en agitant d’immenses épées scintillantes qu’ils tiennent très haut” (44). “… je m’attriste de les voir piétiner la pelouse du parc …” (45). “… la terre résonne comme un tambour tant les coups de sabots des chevaux sont violents. Tout ce vacarme m’effraie. Je pose les mains sur mes oreilles, couvrant du même coup mes tempes perlées de sueur” (46).

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the animals. These sounds, which at first hearing were alarming, but lacked specific meaning, now speak directly of violence to come. The language of war takes on an even more terrifying form with the aerial bombardments that Aloyzas has to endure with his family. The first are by Russian planes attacking nazi-occupied Lithuania. Later, in the third part of the book, Allied planes bomb nazi Germany, where the family is working as forced labourers. Air raids like the weapons used in more personalised acts of violence demand learning another technological language. From the air-raid siren—“my eardrums are invaded by the scream of a siren”—to the planes flying overhead, this kind of communication again speaks to the boy’s body (Stanke, So Much to Forget 81, 82).46 A more experienced neighbour gives them lessons in interpretation and warns them that the “throbbing noise” they hear means that the airplanes are loaded heavily with bombs and will probably attack soon (82).47 It is still a shock, however, when the first bombs fall in the middle of a summer’s day. Again, the boy describes the sensation through what his body feels: “the noise is terrible . . . I’m coughing and spitting. My ears are blocked and my nose bleeds” (84).48 He can interpret all the stages of an air-raid through what he hears and feels: “the familiar sequence of sounds: after the wailing sirens, voices and hasty footsteps; then a moment of silence and, slowly, the growl of motors which increases, fills our ears and vibrates right through us” (119).49 Sometimes, even when they have not been allowed into a shelter because they are foreigners, and around him people are praying, he is not afraid because he can interpret what he hears: “It’s not that I’m used to them, but at least I know the pattern. When the long, high whistle sounds I know the danger is over – the bombs won’t fall directly on us. We just have to lie flat to avoid shrapnel” (119–120).50 It turns out, though, that he has still not completed his education in air-raids. In the final year of the war, when Germany has no effective anti-aircraft system left, he is living in a labour camp outside the city of Wurzburg. In the middle of one night everyone is woken up by the familiar sound of airplanes which quickly becomes something new: “It’s a different buzzing tonight, the planes are close

46 47 48 49

“… un son strident me transperce le tympan” (97). “… un vrombissement monstrueux …” (98). “Le vacarme est effroyable … mes oreilles sont bouchées, mon nez saigne” (100). “… après la plainte de sirènes viennent les éclats de voix et les pas agités sur le sol; suit alors un moment de silence puis, lentement, s’installe un grondement de moteurs, un vacarme qui s’amplifie, qui envahit bientôt les oreilles et résonne jusqu’aux entrailles” (Stanke, Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 136). 50 “Je ne dirai pas que je m’habitue, mais je les “connais” mieux. Lorsque j’entends un sifflement long et aigu, je sais qu’il n’y a pas de danger: les bombes ne tomberont pas directement sur nos têtes. Il s’agit simplement de s’étendre par terre pour se protéger des éclats” (136–137).

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and flying low. The noise is dreadful” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 134).51 Then lights from the sky illuminate the scene: an elderly Polish officer interprets: “The pilots have searchlights . . . they’re strafing in a straight line” (134).52 Just as he speaks, a terrible bombing begins. Aloyzas describes his terror through his senses: “the bitter taste of fear is back. It grips my temples and glues my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The fear is mixed with a sense of such powerlessness that I feel dizzy” (134).53 He cannot bear to think that he will die at the hands of those who are fighting on his side. When the air raid ends, they become aware of fires burning in their encampment and almost everywhere else. Up on a hill, they can see the city of Wurzburg: “Huge and terrifying red flames lick the whole area, and a slimy black smoke covers the sky. The smell of death is everywhere” (135).54 Later, he and his brother surrender to their curiosity and explore what has happened to the city. They meet hundreds of people rushing to leave what are now ruins and collapsing buildings. The dead lie everywhere: “Charred and twisted bodies are strewn over the ground. There are corpses everywhere, some without heads, mutilated, squashed, covered with blood and dust. . . . A small woman of uncertain age drags the body of burned child on a sort of sled. Pity, fright and nausea well up in my throat” (136).55 This is the first time in the text that the feeling of pity for strangers is explicitly named, showing that Aloyzas is maturing. It is also the first time that he generalises so much, with his list of the way death has disfigured bodies. Further in this episode, another change in Aloyzas can be seen. Separated from his brother, he sees the bombers flying over the city again. The best he can do is to hide in a deep hole made by an earlier bomb: “Shattering, deafening and maddening noises burst around me. . . . At each explosion a lump of earth falls on top of me. An awful, invisible pressure, like the breath of an infernal monster, seems to push me deeper at each blow . . . if I open my mouth to relieve my eardrums, it fills with earth” (Stanke, So Much to Forget 142).56 Far from accepting a passive or

51 “Ce soir-là, le ronronnement est très different. Les avions s’approchent. Ils volent bas. Le grondement est infernal” (150). 52 “Les aviateurs ont accroché les lampes … C’est qu’il va y avoir un ratissage en règle” (150). 53 “Le goût âcre de ma peur revient. Elle me martèle les tempes. Ma langue colle au palais. À ma peur se mêle un sentiment d’impuissance si grande que j’en ressens comme un vertige” (150). 54 “Des flammes rouges, gigantesques, terrifiantes, surgissent de partout et une fumée noire, visqueuse, recouvre le ciel. On sent partout une odeur de mort” (151). 55 “Des corps calcinés, tordus, jonchent le sol. Partout des morts décapités, mutilés, écrasés, couverts de sang et de poussière. … Une petite femme sans âge traîne sur une civière improvisée le cadaver d’un enfant brûlé. La pitié, la peur et la nausée me soulèvent le cœur.” (Stanke Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 151–152). 56 “Des bruits fracassants, étourdissants, démentiels éclatent aussitôt. … À chaque explosion, une couche de terre vient s’abattre sur mon dos. Une pression colossale et invisible, tel un souffle monstrueux venu des ténèbres, semble vouloir me pousser plus creux dans la terre à

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victim posture, however, Aloyzas rouses himself and responds with his own language of war: “I cough hard to feel my throat, and through the suffocating dirt I scream incomprehensible words. Fright, anger and pain are mixed” (142– 143).57 He runs back to his camp and finds his building, despite being located outside the city, badly damaged. His alert child’s eye notes everything, from the fact that the pile of wood he had cut has now been swept off the surface of the earth, while the hens are all dead, “flattened like pancakes by the air pressure of the exploding bombs” (143).58 As a child narrator, he compares the flattened chickens to pancakes, which is typical of his knowledge of the world. Yet, in the same utterance he speaks like an expert on the air pressure and explosions. There is something sad about this combination: the child has learned too much. He has learned about things that a child should not know—especially since his knowledge of the technology of war has come to him through his physical senses and his desperate desire to survive.

7.

Conclusion

Even though autobiographical works, like historical ones, take up real events and people as their subject, one of the principal features of this kind of writing is that it is strongly determined by a particular writer’s decision of what to include and what to leave out. Alain Stanke’s text is not unusual in restricting itself to a single major topic in his life, the boy Aloyzas’s experiences in wartime. However, his choice of a child narrator does give his narrative an uncommon and distinctive point of view. Furthermore, he limits narrative details very much to those that a child would observe, to a child’s way of seeing the world. His text also gains cohesion through the emphasis on the war as a learning experience, on language and dialogue, and on how the boy lives through violent and terrifying events. These events are described in relation to the narrator’s physical senses and thus render the text dramatic and very intense.

chaque detonation. … Si j’ouvre la bouche pour soulager mes tympans, elle se remplit de terre.” (Stanke Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 151–152). 57 “Je crache avec vigeur pour dégager ma gorge. Et à travers ce magma qui m’étouffe, je crie de toutes mes forces des mots inintelligibles. Je crie à la fois de peur, de colère et de douleur.” (Stanke Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 158). 58 “… aplaties comme des crêpes par la pression d’air que les bombes ont dégagée en explosant.” (Stanke Des barbelés dans ma mémoire 158).

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Works Cited Blume, Libby Balter. “Middle Childhood.” Oxford Bibliographies. 29 May 2014. Web. 28 Dec. 2021. . Chatterjee, Renuka Anup. “Middle Childhood Development: Intelligence Development Stage of Childhood.” Child Health Explanation. ChildHealth-Explanation.com, 2011. Web. 27 Dec. 2021. . –. “Psychosocial Development of Middle Childhood.” Child Health Explanation. ChildHealth-Explanation.com, 2011. Web. 27 Dec. 2021. . Douglas, Kate. Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory. New Brunswick, N.J. and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Print. Fivush, Robyn, et al. “The Making of Autobiographical Memory: Intersections of Culture, Narratives and Identity.” International Journal of Psychology 46 (2011): 321–345. Web. 3 Jan. 2019. . King, Claire. “Child Narrators in Adult Fiction.” Bookanista. Web. 9 Dec. 2016. . Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katerina Leary. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print. Love, Tim with Elizabeth Baines and Charles Lambert. “Child Narrators in Adult Fiction.” Litrefs Articles. 14 Jan. 2011. Web. 28 Dec. 2021. . McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Nealon, Jeffrey, and Susan Searls Giroux. The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Lanham and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. Print. Norris, Margo. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Print. Poltorak, Dunya Yaldoo, and John P. Glazer. “The Development of Children’s Understanding of Death: Cognitive and Psychodynamic Considerations.” Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 15.3 (2006): 567–573. Web. 22 Dec. 2021. . Rau, Petra. “Between Absence and Ubiquity. On the Meaning of the Body-at-War.” Introduction. Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature. Ed. Petra Rau. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Rye, Gill. “Writing Childhood in Post-War Women’s Literature.” Introduction. Forum for Modern Language Studies. 49.2 (2013):119–125. Web. 9 Dec. 2016. . Speece, Mark W. “Children’s Concepts of Death.” Michigan Family Review. 1.1 (1995): 57–69. Web. 27 Dec. 2021. .

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Stanké, Alain. Des barbelés dans ma mémoire. Montréal: Les Éditions internationals Alain Stanké, 1998. Print. –. So Much to Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell. Trans. Susan Altschul. Toronto: Gage Publishing, 1977. Print. Tompkins, Elizabeth H. “Synthesizing Narrative Analysis with Peace and Conflict Studies: The Case of African Child Soldier Autobiographies.” Honors Thesis. College of William and Mary, 2013. V&M Scholar Works. Web. 20 Dec. 2016. .

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Chapter 7 – Lithuanian Literary Tradition and Intertexts of Western Culture in Lithuanian E/Migrant Literature

1.

Introduction

Aspects of intertextuality, the constant dialogue with other texts, works of art, and representatives from different cultures with diverse experiences are particularly evident in the literature of various Lithuanian émigré writers. Western culture and alien environment exerted an enormous impact upon the development of their aesthetic and creative thought; however, intertextuality as dialoguing with literary and other media expands the boundaries of a literary text and appeals to the cultural memory of the reader. In the present discussion, the notion of intertextuality includes textual links manifesting themselves as a citation, plot transformation, anagram, allusion, parody, and as polylogue-type imitation.1 The text often becomes a reference to its own internal relations, and other texts or media rather than gesturing to the external world. When analysing exilic cultural processes, cultural theorists discuss the interface of several cultural contexts in diaspora and émigré texts. To name this cultural interface the concept of cultural translation is used, which is supported by theories of postcolonialism, interpreting cultural translation as a paradigm of communication between cultural groups. Homi K. Bhabha, defines the concept as a vague metaphorical way of conveying the realia of a foreign culture. He writes about “a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (Bhabha qtd. in Pym 140). The relationship between cultural layers correlating with each other in Lithuanian diaspora literature has undergone several stages: from mentioning discrete details of the alien culture and its geographical locations to their transformation, adaptation, interweaving, and convergence of cultural phenomena. Meanwhile modern Lithuanian writers, representatives of émigré lit1 The discussion of these aspects of intertextuality draws on the works of Irina Melnikova: Intertekstualumas: teorija ir praktika (2003 [Intertextuality: Theory and Practice]) and Literatu¯ros (inter)medialumo strofos, arba Zˇodis ir vaizdas (2016 [Literary (Inter)mediality Stanzas, or Word and Image]). See also Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree 18.

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erature, contemplate and describe transformations of several cultures. They also seem to engage with the concept of cultural translation in their works. In her first book, Lietumi priesˇ saule˛ (2007 [Rain against the Sun]) philosopher and writer Dalia Staponkute˙ writes in the style resembling that of a personal essay. She speaks of the necessity to ‘translate’ oneself into another culture when living in a foreign environment: “This way a translator was born within me—not one who translates books, but one who translates herself into another culture and becomes part of it” (Staponkute˙ 20).2 This chapter presents the context of Lithuanian exile literature and the general situation of Lithuanian e/migrant literature when a dialogue with another culture becomes inevitable for the writer. Consequently, manifestations of this dialogue become apparent in the writer’s work. Prose works of selected migrant writers, representing different generations, are chosen for analysis. The oldest generation of Lithuanian writers are referred to as exiled or émigré writers. They started their creative path in independent Lithuania and continued their creative traditions in exile. The generation that matured in the 1950s and 1960s made their debuts outside their home country, and is referred to as the zˇemininkai, or the ‘earth’ poets, the generation who still felt the tug of their native soil. The ‘earth’ poets is the title of the anthology, Zˇeme˙ (Earth), published in 1951. In exile literature, the poets without their home/land, the bezˇemiai generation, refers to the works of writers who started writing in North America where they immigrated after World War II. After Lithuania regained independence in 1990, the labels émigré and exile literature as references to literature written outside Lithuania tend to be replaced with e/im/migrant literature (see Chapter 8 for a more detailed discussion of this point). In this chapter, works of authors who belong to different generations are chosen for analysis. Jurgis Jankus (1906–2002) belongs to the oldest generation, while Algirdas Landsbergis (1924–2004) is of the “Earth” generation. Their works were written and published after the Second World War—from the 1960s to the 1980s. The chapter also explores intertextual correspondences in texts created outside Lithuania in the twenty-first century. Some representative works of the latter category are the novel Pogrindis (2011 [Underground]) by LithuanianCanadian Antanas Sˇileika (b. 1953) and literary work by the artist Egle˙ Paulina Pukyte˙ (b. 1966), who has lived in Great Britain for the past decade. After World War II, many Lithuanian intellectuals and artists left Lithuania and settled in post-war Germany and Austria. The greatest wave of emigration from Lithuania started in the summer of 1944. When the German and Russian front approached Lithuania, many Lithuanians fled to the West. People left their 2 All translations from Lithuanian into English are by Nemira Macˇianskiene˙ unless otherwise stated.

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homes to avoid soviet repressions, such as deportation to Siberia and imprisonment in gulags. As historian Vincas Bartusevicˇius explains: The necessity to leave homeland fell upon Lithuanians unexpectedly. We cannot say that Lithuanians were unaware of what was happening around them. In the 1940s the echo of the upcoming political crisis had not passed Lithuania by. Furthermore, the country had experienced the first soviet occupation with its cruelty and the sudden marching of the German troops across the country. Still, it seemed that the possibility of a massive withdrawal of the nation had not been foreseen either in the plans of the inhabitants, or by the political leadership. Therefore, the decision to flee was quite spontaneous, accepted at the last minute by most, and allowed for taking only indispensable things for survival. (29)

Statistics in encyclopedias and historical studies are the following: in 1944–1945, about 60,000 Lithuanians who had fled Lithuania sought refuge predominantly in Germany and lived there for almost five years. In post-war Germany, divided into sectors by the Allied winners, Displaced Persons (DP) camps were formed for refugees from the Baltics and from Eastern European countries. To escape repressions, “a great part of the Lithuanian nation’s intellectual, creative, social, and political elite withdrew to the West. In their memory they held images nurtured in independent Lithuania; whereas the capable young people, studying in Western universities, managed to renew them through the achievements of the free world” (Aleksandravicˇius 412). Literary life in Western Europe was especially productive for a great number of Lithuanian writers of various generations. During this period almost three hundred books were published—poetry and novels; they were published by several publishing houses, newly based in Germany. New tendencies in Lithuanian exile literature started to emerge (Kuiziniene˙, Lietuviu˛ literatu¯rinis gyvenimas 12). It was the poetic image that best expressed the lost homeland and pain caused by the loss and the uncertainty most meaningfully. Bernardas Brazdzˇionis, Faustas Kirsˇa, Mykolas Vaitkus, and other representatives of the oldest generation, who had earned recognition in the pre-war homeland, each published several poetry books where social and patriotic motifs became pronounced. In their poetry, the relationship with the Lithuanian literary tradition was evident, and refusing to adapt to the alien culture is explicit (Kuiziniene˙, Lietuviu˛ egzilio kultu¯ra 306). On the other hand, the writers of the younger generation were rather flexible and receptive to taking over and adapting everything positive they had received while studying at German and Austrian universities. They read books, searched for parallels between European culture and Lithuanian culture in exile, and attempted to understand the place of Lithuanian culture in the world. Theirs was an individual connection with the reality of that time, feeling themselves part of this context, experiencing a continuous tension between their Lithuanian identity and world citizenship. It was the flexibility of the young that

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allowed them to take over what was positive and new in the alien culture, whereas the writers of the older generation often withdrew and closed themselves off in the Lithuanian tradition, thus narrowing their worldly outlook. Most often the topic of the lost homeland dominated in their works. The shock as a general reaction to wartime events in the homeland left behind made many young Lithuanian writers receptive to the phenomena of Western culture and art. Living in Europe, they had the opportunity to experience Western culture in practice. As playwright Kostas Ostrauskas insightfully remarks, “We not only faced it eye-to-eye, but were fully immersed in it, in the very centre of its vortex” (25). Henrikas Nagys, writing a study about the Austrian modernist poet, Georg Trakl, sought not only to reveal impressionist and expressionist traditions of Trakl’s works, but also to spread the ideas of this famous poet among the Lithuanians in exile. In his letter to the Lithuanian émigré writer Antanas Vaicˇiulaitis he wrote: “Comparing [Trakl’s] writings with those of European lyrics of the new age, I will also touch upon Lithuanian poetry” (Nagys). The tendencies of post-war expressionism are considered in copious cultural texts of that time, with an attempt to single out and define general tendencies of post-war literature under the impact of expressionism: The works of that time [post-war expressionism] are a direct expression of soul’s agility and internal life, without using an external object or a traditional method. Indifferent both to beauty and ugliness, an expressionist artist seeks to highlight life for us in a direct way, life that flows for him from within his hidden wells. . . . It is art which turns its back on form and destroys it. (Jungfer 5)

The young generation of Lithuanian writers was much influenced by the philosophy of existentialism, especially by the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Their writing was popular in post-war Europe. It also inspired Lithuanian writers. The impact of existentialism was described as follows: “It was a kind of curiosity and opening towards everything” (Levinas 52). That Lithuanian writers living in Europe were attracted to existentialist writing is evidenced by the fact that Lithuanian publications of the German period engage into debates with existentialist ideas. It is not only in France but rather in all of post-war Europe that existentialism became the philosophy of the period. Sartre’s philosophy was in line with the confusion, hopelessness, and frequent nihilistic moods of DP living in Germany after World War II. As Walter Laqueur holds, Sartre’s “philosophy is one of freedom and choice, which leads a human being out of despair; engagement and the cult of action is to save humanity from the absurdity and purposelessness of life” (290). The tendency to search for new forms of expression, unusual for the Lithuanian tradition of that time, and the quest for paths off the beaten track for prose fiction are felt in the early work of Antanas Sˇke˙ma, Marius Katilisˇkis, Julius

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Kaupas, Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, all of which were published in Germany. Interest in Western philosophy and literature encouraged experimentation, and it was the most appealing way to express one’s pain and suffering. Post-war literature is distinguished by artistic experiments that liberated young Lithuanian artists. The tendencies in literary developments echo J. D. Adam’s statement that “[d]uring periods of experimentation art renews itself, develops new techniques and broadens its horizons” (8). In the literature by Lithuanian émigrés, loss and suffering together with the discovery of a hitherto new and unknown culture expanded and diversified the Lithuanian literary tradition. It is natural that some of these experiments were misunderstood or evaluated critically. By means of these experiments, the young Lithuanian authors withdrew from traditional assessment and approval. The production of some of the books was minimal, only a few or several dozen; therefore, they became a bibliographical rarity in Germany itself, intended only for a narrow circle of likeminded people. Some younger authors self-published, typing their chapbooks, then illustrating them by drawings and multiplying them by rota print. They aimed to speak about human existence in a universal way through an unexpected genre—the fairy tale. Yet, in some texts, for example those by Julius Kaupas, the world of fantasy acquires contours of reality as their action is set in a specific, concrete area in Kaunas. In Julius Kaupas’s works, the use of lyrical irony and a non-traditional approach to long-standing values led to the transformation of the usual literary fairy tale genre in the Lithuanian literary tradition. The works by Antanas Sˇke˙ma, Jonas and Adolfas Mekas exhibit a clear tendency towards minimising the plot or providing its fragment with a more universal meaning—in many cases that of myth, legend or fairy tale. These authors often use fairy tale or biblical symbolism in their texts, which frequently entwines with the ideas of existentialism. The symbolism emerges when the logic unique to a traditional fairy tale is ruined, or when the connotation of a particular experience is conveyed with the aid of a religious motif. This way, in each work several texts clash; interaction and dialogue appear, and the work ‘outgrows’ the limits of tradition out of which it develops. In 1945–1950, the theme of lost homeland dominates in prose and poetry written outside Lithuania. Loss is expressed through romanticised images of Lithuanian history and idealisation of the country left behind. Meanwhile, the younger generation proceeds to complicate and modernise the Lithuanian novel. In the work of almost every writer living abroad, a certain dialogue with Western culture and world literatures evolved, resulting in changed topics, genres and stylistics of the Lithuanian novel in particular (Kuiziniene˙, Lietuviu˛ literatu¯rinis gyvenimas 118).

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The Boundaries of Jurgis Jankus’s Literary Dialogue

Many senior generation writers limited themselves to romanticising their native land and portraying the terrors of the soviet occupation and the war. Jurgis Jankus (1906–2002), a representative of the oldest generation, does not restrict himself to depicting only Lithuania in his works. Images of a metaphoric postwar reality, which is no longer part of the Lithuanian world, find their place in his prose fiction. In the short stories and novels written in America, the author describes the surroundings in which Lithuanian characters are part of the multicultural world. The literary works of Jankus are distinguished by their thematic and generic diversity. In his novels and short stories written in exile, a unique image of the post-war apocalypse emerges. His later works can be characterised by an intriguing intertextuality with popular Western literary features, such as the genre of the detective as well as elements of the mysterious and the fantastic. Jurgis Jankus’s novella “Pasaulio dailininkas” (1951 [“A Painter of the World”]), written in a surrealistic and expressionistic manner, undoubtedly links with the work of Edvard Munch, the classic of Western expressionism. In the novella, the writer creates a particular situation: an abstract character, a painter, who tries to record a world catastrophe and orient himself in the total chaos unfolding around him. The phantasmagoric picture of the world created by the writer becomes a separate, independent character. A state of total catastrophe, spreading around the world, is being depicted, and is being confronted. This confrontation is often depicted as an encounter between the chaotic world and the helpless individual. The intertextual dialogue with Munch’s “The Scream” is suggested in the following episode: He was whispering, but the whisper seemed like a great scream, while the image started approaching us with its finger pointing in our direction. His lips, the colour of clotted blood, opened wider, and we could see two pairs of sharp fangs; the plump arm hanging at his side balanced like a pendulum, and its fingers cringed as if ready to seize you by the throat. (Jankus, “Pasaulio dailininkas” [“A Painter of the World”] 202)3

The novel Anapus rytojaus (1978 [Beyond Tomorrow]), written much later, displays intertextual links with realism, the detective novel, the mystical, psychology and philosophy. The synthesis of the genres and the interdisciplinarity of the intertextual dialogue feed into the theme of the novel—the comatose state of the protagonist—and into the title of the novel, Beyond Tomorrow. The focus on 3 In the original: “Jis sˇnibzˇde˙jo, bet sˇnibzˇdesys buvo panasˇus ˛i dideli˛ sˇauksma˛, o paveikslas, pirsˇta˛ isˇtiese˛s, e˙me˙ arte˙ti ˛i mus. Sukrekusio kraujo spalvos lu¯pos labiau prasive˙re˙ atidengdamos dvi poras asˇtriu˛ ilcˇiu˛, sˇalia kabanti putli ranka susˇvytravo ˛i ˇsonus ir pirsˇtai susiriete˙ taip, lyg nore˙tu˛ griebti uzˇ gerkle˙s.”

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being between life and death disrupts the chronology of the novel and adds complexity to the character. Jankus’s novel is multilayered; there is a constant manoeuvring between reality and a vision. In his review of the novel Beyond Tomorrow, Vytautas Volertas (under the pen name Dyvas) points to the novelty of the novel in the context of Lithuanian prose: “This novel by Jankus is modern in a way that is different from others” (Volertas 373). Engaging with discourses of psychology and philosophy, the novel Beyond Tomorrow negotiates the boundaries between life and death, reality, and vision, present and future. The male protagonist, Petras Miksˇa, experiences moments of telepathy and hallucinations. The action takes place over several weeks. Petras Miksˇa is returning home from his night shift at the factory at midnight. He is caught in a severe snowstorm and is saved by a nurse, Klaudija, who finds him collapsed in a snowdrift, and takes him to the hospital where it appears that his heart had stopped beating for a short time. The patient himself does not feel that he had lost consciousness, or even that his life was disrupted. However, after this event he sees and feels everything differently. It seems to him that it is not Klaudija who saved him, but he saved her. Twice in his visions he sees Klaudija dead, and then, for the third time, he experiences her death in reality. To rephrase it, he experiences future events in his visions and these events become real, that is, they happen in real life: he sees the death of medical doctor Goldberg in his mirages, and the doctor really dies a few days later. There are many directions of fabulation in Jankus’s novel: incidents that do not relate to the plot; constant switching between several planes. Such fabulation aligns Jankus’s work with modernist novel. The novel pushes against the boundaries of both tradition and modernity. The male protagonist, his wife, and their surroundings are very traditional. The characters’ lives take the usual course; they go to work, at weekends they participate in the events of the Lithuanian parish, and on Sundays they go to church. In this regard, the characters’ lifestyle embodies that of an exemplary Lithuanian family. The narrative abounds in details and systematic descriptions of the environment. It is precisely this objective and static space that becomes the site allowing a glimpse into the causality of the protagonist’s inner tensions. It is the elements of everyday life that help Jankus to create the impression of reality and the tensions inherent in it. The typical mundane life in exile is recorded slowly and coherently. This is how Miksˇa, the male protagonist, describes his job: I take time to place all the tools in order. The day workers get ready to go home, the night shift prepares to sit at their machines. They’re still standing around, telling each other how they each managed to dig their way out of the snow. I have only some work left. To prepare three machines for the morning shift. (Jankus, Anapus rytojaus ([Beyond Tomorrow] 277)4 4 In the original: “Isˇ le˙to tvarkausi ˛irankius. Dienos darbininkai skirstosi namo, o naktine˙

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The narrative gradually presents more details about the protagonist: that he is no longer young, that having brought up his children, he has seen them off into the world. He lives an unduly traditional and unexceptional life: he takes care of the house; he is friends with the parish priest. Descriptions of people and things are coherent, comprehensive, and concrete. It is a puzzle why the author decided to use so many elements characteristic of the realist novel in this work, written in a nontraditional genre, which seems to be breaking away from the tradition of realism. It seems that almost every one of Jankus’s books aims to cause surprise and to intrigue the reader, and to create a paradoxical environment. On the one hand, Jankus creates a supremely traditional character of Lithuanian prose who at best would be expected to express nostalgic memories about the reality of the Lithuanian village left behind. On the other hand, the male protagonist of Beyond Tomorrow is placed into a space that, in Lithuanian prose of the time, was nontraditional: a state between life and death, where all the values and convictions the protagonist had held are turned upside down. To convey the ambiguity of such a state, the novel avoids chronological narration. Yet, it engages with the genre of the detective to create intrigue. However, it is only partly possible to speak about the use of detective elements in this work. In the novel, two people are murdered: Klaudija and medical doctor Goldberg. There is also the murderer, Big Bill, although he is more of a symbolic or a mystical character. He appears and disappears again; he oscillates between a negative and a positive character. According to Vytautas A. Jonynas, Big Bill is the voice of “Kafka’s Angst, phobia, uncertainty, and metaphysical anxiety” (220). There is an attempt in Miksˇa’s and Klaudija’s visions to make this fear concrete, to name it; however, not one of the characters is able to do that. The policemen who try to detect the crime fail to perform the goal associated with the detective genre—to solve the mystery of the crime. The investigation of the crime remains episodic; the murder mystery is not solved. The elements of both the traditional realist and those of the detective novel serve the function of highlighting psychological and philosophical issues in the novel. The emphasis on the characters’ emotional states and probing into the boundary between life and death constitute the essential philosophical foundation of the novel. Having experienced Klaudija’s death in visions twice, Petras Miksˇa does not accept it as true when it does happen. Miksˇa tries to understand his mental states by speaking with his doctor, with his wife, with the parish priest and, finally, by talking to himself. With psychological acuity, the novel reveals Miksˇa’s inner turmoil through reminiscences of his childhood and through references to subconscious dimensions. The text does not try to explain what death is; the novel just narrates pamaina rengiasi se˙sti prie masˇinu˛. Jie dar stoviniuoja ir pasakoja, kaip kuris isˇsikase˙ isˇ sniego. Man darbo nedaug. Rytinei pamainai turiu paruosˇti tris masˇinas.”

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events. By using a complex structure of the novel and by employing different genres, Jankus points to, as it were, to the fluidity of boundaries between good and evil as illustrated by the characters of Big Bill and Robson, the traditional and the non-traditional (a character who represents tradition is placed into a nontraditional environment), reality and mirage (his metaphysical experiences), life and death. All phenomena in Jankus’s novel exist on equal terms and function reciprocally. Finally, the omnipresent fear unites everything in the novel: . . . I was feeling how the cramp was contracting my heart into a hard ball, and my whole body broke into a cold sweat. The fear remained. It didn’t die. It wasn’t strangled. It knows neither doors nor walls. Isn’t it more eternal than immortality? (Jankus, Anapus rytojaus [Beyond Tomorrow] 494)5

The novel ends with this question. Disregard of generic conventions and the novelty of the topic help the author to create an appealing and innovative novel, not only among his own works but in the whole of Lithuanian literature. The author constructs a character who is painfully searching for answers to essential questions of existence. In his novels, Jankus depicts human spirit and behaviour that are often impossible to explain by logic. A human being, placed by the author in various situations, is a mystery, which the author tries to solve. Characters of Jankus’s novels embody features of neoromanticism, which is described by Lithuanian critic Vytautas Kubilius as follows: “A human being is not clear to himself, and the task of a novelist is to open his uncertainty suggestively, as a discontinuous process which has no final conclusions” (281). The author himself has spoken about his novels many a time, shaking off any relationship to modernist literary traditions and emphasising his constant attempts to go in depth into the mysteries of a human’s internal life: I’ve written and am writing everything looking only into my interior. I’ve never tried and never try to comply with anyone’s theories. To be honest, I’ve never been interested in any theories and didn’t have time for them. It seems to me that at the centre of prose (at least my prose) is a human being; whereas the purpose of the word is to introduce that human (who has been invented) to a group of real (not created) people so that while reading it would be difficult to differentiate which is which. (Jankus, “Letter”)

In his novels written in exile Jankus raises and analyses essential moments of human existence: complexities of human relationships, spiritual crises, the relation to death, the interface between reality and visions, the labyrinths of human nature, including the turmoil in the world of passion, the anatomy of sin and wrongdoing.

5 The original: “. . . jutau, kaip sˇirdi˛ me˙sˇlungis traukia ˛i kieta˛ kamuole˙li˛ ir visa˛ pila sˇaltas prakaitas. Baime˙ neisˇnyko. Ji nemire˙. Jos niekas nepasmauge˙, ir ji nezˇino nei duru˛, nei sienu˛. Argi ji bu¯tu˛ amzˇinesne˙ uzˇ nemaruma˛?”

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Jankus’s character is most often portrayed in a critical situation, facing the necessity to choose, to try out and to check principal moral convictions. Jankus’s prose surprises us by its intrigue and by the dialogic nature of his literary contexts, his ability to enrich traditional Lithuanian prose not only with ‘non-Lithuanian’ themes and plots, but also with a coherent narrative with fragments of different narrative links, dynamic action, and an abundance of nontraditional characters. It is due to this reason that several novels by Jurgis Jankus have sparked quite extensive discussions and received contradictory evaluations as they link elements of popular and serious literature and create intriguing plots and contradictory characters.

3.

Cultural Intertexts: The Case of Algirdas Landsbergis and Links with Kostas Ostrauskas

Playing with cultural realia as an intertext is a characteristic among the writers of the middle generation—the zˇemininkai who made their debut abroad. This is characteristic of prose and drama by Antanas Sˇke˙ma, poetry and prose by Jonas Mekas, and novels by Eduardas Cinzas. Still, two representatives of this generation are most famous for their use of intertexts: Kostas Ostrauskas and Algirdas Landsbergis. Kostas Ostrauskas is a representative of modern and postmodern drama; his avant-garde works show the impact of absurd theatre. Ostrauskas’s dramas are characterised by intertextuality, transformation of wellknown plots from world literature, playfulness, relativity, and the poetics of paradox. Kostas Ostrauskas’s plays are intellectual, replete with historical and cultural allusions, reflecting on realia of different time periods. Ostrauskas’s plays disrupt the traditional plot. His plays, Pypke˙ (1951 [A Pipe]) and Gyveno karta˛ senelis ir senele˙ (1963–1969 [Once Upon a Time There Lived a Grandpa and a Grandma]) have features of avant-garde and experimental drama. Works of art and music, biblical plots, characters from Lithuanian and Western classical literature and historical names form the world of Ostrauskas’s plays, which change the canon of a traditional play in the Lithuanian literary tradition. Ostrauskas experiments with the canon of the genre: his plays erase the boundaries between fiction and criticism and so expand the limits of the literary text. In Ostrauskas’s words: “Some critics claim that criticism is also creative work, thus, a critic is a creator” (Ostrauskas 10). Algirdas Landsbergis made his debut in North America; consequently, the generic and thematic diversity of his works, including the short story, the novel, drama and critical articles, stimulates interest in the intertexts of his works. The author himself has spoken about his maturing in exile as an academic and as a

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writer. Landsbergis, discussing the dilemma of loss and discovery, like most émigrés, has confessed that the second part of this dichotomy suppressed the former one in due course: You will be sad having lost your homeland, your ‘language’s home’ and will enjoy new worlds, tasting the aesthetic fruits which were forbidden for five years. These internal contradictions will eventually become your natural state of being . . . you will become convinced that weeping about your fate is a waste of time; exile, bilingualism and multicultural perspectives will become a precious gift for you. (Landsbergis, “Autobiografija” [“Autobiography”] 461–462)6

In a manner similar to Ostrauskas, Landsbergis emphasised that it is the horizon of Western culture which had opened before him that suppressed the feelings of loss. In the context of exile prose, Algirdas Landsbergis’s work is distinguished by the novelty of theme and form. A distinguishing feature of Landsbergis’s novels is their experimental nature manifesting itself as the novels’ focus on constant transitions from one dimension to another; depiction of characters caught up in a flux of changes; manipulation with the points of view, and varying writing techniques. In the modernist novel Kelione˙ (1954 [A Journey]) two dimensions supplement each other—the mundane and the spiritual. The protagonist lives through the odyssey of his departure from Lithuania; however, at the same time he is on a spiritual journey and his internal metamorphoses take place. The themes that dominate in Landsbergis’s novel are ruins, encoding a catastrophe the world is facing, and the attempt of a young man to find both the meaning of his spiritual existence and support in the chaotic post-war setting and the labyrinths of an alien country. In the novel “the real conflict is not among people now but inside a person, and it emerges from a person’s desire to somehow find some sense in the ruins of today’s world” (Sˇilbajoris 283). A constant relationship with the alien, the other, who represents an always different truth of life, an area for morality, helps the protagonist to mature and to survive. The relationship of the novel’s protagonist, Julius Laiku¯nas, with temporary protagonists, inclusion of his inner monologues into the constantly changing fragmentary descriptions of his surrealistic experiences, dreams, visions, and tragic experiences create a kaleidoscope of the world that surrounds him amid the fragility of his internal world and his journey. The theme of crisis pertains not only to an individual and his nation but also to the crisis faced by post-war Europe. In Algirdas Landsbergis’s A Journey, the fragmentary world and the catastrophe are expressed through the reiterated motifs of fall, ruins, and a complicated emotional rela6 In the original: “Liu¯de˙si neteke˛s gimtine˙s, savo ‘kalbos namu˛,’ ir dzˇiaugsiesi naujais pasauliais, smaguriausi penkerius metus uzˇdraustais estetiniais vaisiais. Tie vidiniai priesˇtaravimai virs tavo natu¯ralia bu¯sena. . . . ˛isitikinsi, jog raudoti apie savo dalia˛ – laiko gaisˇinimas; egzili˛, dvikalbyste˛, daugiakultu¯rine˛ perspektyva˛ imsi laikyti ypatinga dovana.”

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tionship with the present, revealed foregrounding the fragility of the moment and difficulties involved in daily of survival. These ideas are actualised in the spiritual journeys of the protagonist. The surrealistic depiction of reality, creating impressions of uncertainty and frailty, becomes the axis of the novel. As in many other texts by Lithuanian émigrés written in the 1950s, it is the relationship with the European post-war world crisis and its culture rather than with the Lithuanian contexts that is important in Landsbergis’s novel and in the short stories written during this period. This culture is best expressed by an image peculiar to surrealistic existentialism—when a person is searching for oneself, trying to identify oneself with another, which is, the search for oneself in another. In Landsbergis’s short story “Graikijos ve˙jas” (1956 [“Greek Wind”]), which is part of the short story collection Ilgoji naktis (1956 [The Long Night]), an intertextual antithesis is created. The story describes the realia of life in the German DP camps, the hardships of daily life, contradictions, and peripeteia of relationships among refugees of various nations. However, the text is constructed as an antithesis of quotidian life and Greek myth, and Greek culture. The short story starts with an epigraph: a brief presentation of the Ariadne myth. Within this intertextual context, everyday dialogues of refugee characters take place and are confronted with citations of classical texts, which add a dimension of universality to the situation of the refugees. Ironic dialogues between refugees who incidentally meet in a tavern and encounter each other because of the post-war situation ‘signal’ misunderstandings, chaos, uncertainty, and the tension of waiting. This way, dialogue, where different languages and fragments of separate words are heard, becomes a symbol of post-war turmoil: “You are Greek?” he asked looking at her with white eyes. “Yeah,” she replied neither in English, nor in German. “I am studying Greek culture.” “Do you understand classic Greek?” He continued and started uttering some strange words repeating—os, os, os all the time. “No, no understand,” she shook her head. “Very little English, very little German.” (Landsbergis, Graikijos ve˙jas [Greek Wind] 136) 7

At the end of the short story, the meeting of the refuges in the tavern is generalised, relating it to the myth told at the beginning of the story, making the form of all human inter-relations, of love, and the instability of life in exile universal: 7 In the original: – Ju¯s graike˙? – tare˙ jis, zˇiu¯re˙damas ˛i ja˛ baltom akim. – Taip, – atsake˙ ji nei anglisˇkai, nei vokisˇkai. – Asˇ studijuoju graiku˛ kultu¯ra˛. – Ar Ju¯s suprantat klasikine˛ graiku˛ kalba˛? – te˛se˙ jis ir prade˙jo berti kazˇkokius keistus zˇodzˇius, visa˛ laika˛ kartodamas – os, os, os. – Nesuprantu, – ji pakrate˙ galva˛ – labai mazˇai anglisˇkai, labai mazˇai vokisˇkai.

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Yes, she will be standing like Ariadne on Naxos Island, waiting in vain for the unfaithful Theseus. She will be standing as if frozen in the night, as if an indelible picture in the Minos marble, worrying and creating a wonderful eternal recurrence. (Landsbergis, Graikijos ve˙jas [Greek Wind] 143)

The late works by Landsbergis, his dramas, and a collection of short stories, Muzika ˛izˇengiant ˛i nerege˙tus miestus (1978 [Music Entering Unseen Cities]), develop the principle of polylogue, typical of modernism and postmodernism, even more, converge different dimensions of intermediality. A dialogue of two interpretations, two different texts is often the backbone of a literary work in this collection. The author also uses the principle of text within a text, paraphrases of works of art or music, favoured by modernists.

4.

History in Antanas Sˇileika’s Works

A historical narrative is created in prose by Antanas Sˇileika. The author was born and started his writing in Canada; he has published six books of prose fiction, written in English. Antanas Sˇileika’s literary works feature multiculturalism, inclusion of documentary discourse into his fiction, and its reconstruction. The early prose of the writer Buying on Time (1997) move the reader back to the first years of living in Canada. Much attention is devoted to the experiences of the war refugee generation in the Western world. From a teenager’s point of view and with humour and irony, the main character is telling a story about his parents’ worries and their contradictory relations with people of other nations while settling in an alien and unknown environment. The novel Woman in Bronze (2005) creates a picture of an artist between the wars. His life is split into two stages: the rural Lithuanian environment and the journey through Poland, and the artist’s maturing and his experiences in Paris. Both stages shape his creative individuality. The novel creates a dramatic character of an artist, revealing his difficult process of adaptation and artistic quests in Lithuania, Poland, and Paris. The novel abounds in historical and cultural intertexts: historical and cultural personalities, such as Jozef Pilsudski, Jacques Lipchitz, Josephine Baker, and others, interact with fictional characters. Sˇileika’s novel Underground (2011) depicts a painful period in Lithuanian history, which often causes discussions and arguments. It is the post-war and resistance period between 1944 and 1953, often referred to as the years of resistance and partisan war, when detachments of partisans tried to fight for Lithuanian independence; many perished, and others were forced to hide. This topic was rendered as heroic and romantic in the texts of exile writers. Only a few texts occasionally reveal the issues of resistance and totalitarianism as well as the crisis of

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humanism that fell upon Europe in a more problematic and dramatic way. Sˇileika’s works follow this tradition, narrating history in a broad historical context. In Underground, Sˇileika focuses on a broader period of time, and mythical Lithuania acquires contours of a more concrete location. A human being and history are seen through a complicated post-war lens. The resistance is viewed not only from the angle of Lithuanian historical memory, but also from European and world perspectives. Telling a story from a broader perspective, a concrete episode or situation is endowed not only with a broader concept of space, but it is also viewed from a wider temporal frame and acquires a future dimension. When writing Underground, Sˇileika chose a historical personality as prototype of his main character, a participant of the partisan war Juozas LuksˇaDaumantas. Luksˇa was one of the most outstanding Lithuanian heroes, who participated in the underground struggle against the Nazis when Germany occupied Lithuania. After the return of the soviet occupation, he became an active member of the underground and was the leader of the organisers of the Lithuanian partisan movement. He was killed in 1951. Sˇileika has mentioned in several interviews that he had read this author’s historical book Forest Brothers and based his story on it, but he improvised and changed some historical facts, seeking to make the book understandable and approachable to readers from different backgrounds. The book addresses the readers who had never experienced anything similar, and who, perhaps, viewed the concept of homeland differently. In an interview with Eva Stachniak, a Polish writer and radio journalist living in Toronto, Antanas Sˇileika mentioned that the Canadian readers to whom his latest book was in particular addressed, were not aware of and understood very little about what had occurred in Europe after the Second World War. They most probably did not differentiate between Lithuanians and Russians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, and other nations of the former Soviet Union (Stachniak). Without any doubt, the writer chose a risky path. In 2011, the novel was published in English, and in Canada it was included in the list of the hundred most read books and received reviews in the Canadian press. In 2012, a Lithuanian publication of Underground appeared, and received favourable reviews. Leonidas Donskis interpreted the historical situation of the novel in the broad context of European history, saying: Underground, the latest novel by Antanas Sˇileika, depicts the brutal suspension of Lithuanian modernity and destruction of the Lithuanian state, which is barely understood in the West and most often described only in abstract terms, but which caused the partisan resistance against the occupying power. Intertwined with a perfectly disclosed love story and human dramas, one more time this novel confirmed Sˇileika’s talent in relating a European narrative which any European country could recognise as its own and a book that could be appreciated not only by an older generation of readers. Just as Woman in

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Bronze, where the saga of modern Lithuania is masterfully interwoven into the history of Europe and where the fates of Jewish, Lithuanian, French, Polish and other nations are entangled into the same unmanageable knot, Underground is a deeply European novel. (Donskis, “Reike˙jo gyvam susideginti” [“One Had to Set Oneself on Fire”])

At the same time, a letter by Nijole˙ Luksˇiene˙-Paronetto, the wife of Juozas LuksˇaDaumantas, was published and disseminated in the Lithuanian press. It dealt with the novel’s failure to reflect historical truth (Brazˇe˙naite˙-Luksˇiene˙-Paronetto).

5.

Intertexts in Some Post-independence Migrant Literature

The most recent literature written abroad is diverse, crisscrossing genres. Poetry by women is marked by coherent narration. In narrative poetry, poetic metaphor connects the past and its cultural realia with experiences of migrant life. This is characteristic of the books by women writers, Neringa Abrutyte˙ and Agne˙ Zˇagrakalyte˙, published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Diana Sˇarakauskaite˙’s book of poetry, Septyni gailestingumo darbai ku¯nui (2013 [Seven Compassionate Works for the Body]) depicts feelings, incidentally captured, which lead the speaker to emotional, psychological and existential crises. The description of these crises breaks, provokes, expands and deepens the seemingly exploited themes that explore the loss of the homeland. Mature and succinct language, intertexts, as well as unexpected archaic inserts, overlap with contemplations on exile identity. In this book, a historical context merges with that of the family’s past and with the poetry of the Chinese poet Li-Young Lee, for example, his poem “Immigrant Blues” to bring to the fore the experience of total loss: “It is a story about the voices ripped from our throats, / Which would sing from our soul, but they no longer know any songs” (Sˇarakauskaite˙, Septyni gailestingumo darbai ku¯nui [Seven Compassionate Works for the Body] 36).8 Recent works of authors writing in Lithuania and abroad exhibit a rather ironic approach to emigration and émigrés. Egle˙ Paulina Pukyte˙’s Bedalis ir labdarys (2013 [A Loser and a Do-gooder]) is the author’s third book written abroad. The first two books, Ju˛ paprocˇiai (2005 [Their Habits]) and Netikras zuikis (2008 [Fake Rabbit]), were written in essayistic style, aphoristically. The books depict differences between Lithuanian and British traditions and lifestyles. The third book, A Loser and a Do-gooder, is evidence of a liberated writer who chooses contradictions and contrasts, intertextual poetics, irony, and grotesque. In A Loser and a Do-gooder, the parts “Odise˙jas” (“Odysseus”) and “Isˇ Iliados” (“From the Iliad”) are named ironically. The mundane dialogue of e/migrants, 8 In the original: “Tai istorija apie isˇple˙sˇtus isˇ gerklu˛ balsus, / Kurie isˇ visos sielos dainuotu˛, tik daugiau nemoka dainu˛.”

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presented in the text and versified in an antique hexameter, is full of swear words, slang, and fragmented references to daily routine: In the daytime we were drinking—beer, vodka and anything that we had, whereas in the evening we went for a walk, just to see the area, when we were passing the old squat—where earlier it was we who lived there, we saw the light in the window of the second floor—Oh, just look at that! After all we had been thrown out by the police and had to move, And now someone else is living there! We need to see who’s settled there. (Pukyte˙, “Isˇ Iliados” [“From the Iliad”] 33)9

The book is constructed of dialogues; Lithuanians who migrated to Britain are talking in the poems and minidramas. Comic and paradoxical situations are created by comparing fragments of daily life. Through these devices, the author consciously highlights cultural differences. Everyday dialogues of e/migrants and their trivial paradoxical routine situations are ‘inscribed’ into the form of drama. Separate texts are also dialogues constructed as SMS messages which emphasise the absurdity of the émigrés’ quotidian life and reveal their rather superficial mutual relations. In one or another aspect they show the relationships between Lithuanians and their supposed do-gooder Brits, amid the immigrant reality, full of crimes, squats and fights. Thusly, “this book does not foster positive selfimage. Still, the manner chosen by Pukyte˙ to speak about emigration is suggestive and functions like a photo flash, exposing all” (Kaniaviene˙). Pukyte˙’s texts represent the unattractive side of emigration, peculiar to the literary works of many authors of the younger generation. Characters created by these authors try to escape the ghetto of the Lithuanian community, hide their individuality and their real feelings under a mask of cosmopolitism. They disavow traditions and even their ethnic roots. These features are vivid in the literary works by twenty-first century Lithuanian migrant writers, as discussed in the next chapter.

6.

Conclusion

Post-WWII first generation Lithuanian émigré writers, living surrounded by an alien culture, were very active in adopting the experiences of Western culture, relating them creatively with the Lithuanian cultural tradition. Even during the early period of Lithuanian exile, a great many of literary texts were created in 9 In the original: “– Diena˛ mes ge˙re˙m – alu˛, degtine˛ ir viska˛, ko buvo, / o vakare pasivaiksˇcˇiot isˇe˙jom, sˇiaip, po rajona˛, / e˙jom pro sena˛ji˛ skvota˛ – ten, kur gyvenom ankscˇiau mes, / zˇiu¯rim, dega sˇviesa antro auksˇto lange – nu grazˇiausia! / Mus juk policija isˇmete˙ ir isˇsikraustyt ture˙jom, / – Ve˙l gyvena kazˇkas ten! Reik pazˇiu¯re˙t, kas ten se˙di.”

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which aspects of a cultural dialogue, interaction with the other, and unexpected interpretations of classical literary plots appeared. Being influenced by existentialism and expressionism, Lithuanian exile writers create surrealistic images of post-war crises, apocalypses, and states of traumatised and split consciousness in their texts. Such creative constructs were inspired not only by the most renowned philosophers and writers of that time, but also by works of art, whose textual interpretations and intertextual allusions are evident in the early prose of Jurgis Jankus and Algirdas Landsbergis. The historical theme of the Lithuanian resistance emerges in the novel Underground by Antanas Sˇileika, who used the memoirs of partisans as supporting plots to create a multilayered historical narrative. Many intertextual transformations can be found in the texts of the authors who are writing outside Lithuania in the twenty-first century. One of the most striking examples could be the latest books by Egle˙ Paulina Pukyte˙, who contrasts trivial émigré reality and the canon of high culture. Comicality and paradoxical situations are constructed by comparing fragments of everyday conversations. The author consciously highlights the existing cultural differences.

Works Cited Adams J. D. “Rytdienos knyga.” Zˇvilgsniai. Eds. Jonas Mekas and Board of Editors. (1946): 3–9. Wiesbaden: Giedra. Print. Aleksandravicˇius, Egidijus. Karklo diegas. Lietuviu˛ pasaulio istorija. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2013. Print. Brazˇe˙naite˙-Luksˇiene˙-Paronetto, Nijole˙. “Dar vienas ‘istorinis’ romanas.” Bernardinai.lt. 2 Apr 2013. Web 25 Aug 2021. . Donskis, Leonidas. “Reike˙jo gyvam susideginti, kad Lietuvos buvimas taptu˛ faktu pasauliui.” Delfi zˇinios 22 Mar 2013. Web 25 Aug 2017. . Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Linkoln and London: University of Nebraska, 1997. Print. Jankus, Jurgis. Anapus rytojaus. Chicago: Ateitis, 1978. Print. –. “Pasaulio dailininkas.” Pirmasis ru¯pestis, Chicago: Lithuanian Book Club, 1951. Print. –. “Letter to Dalia Kuizieniene˙.” 20 May,1994. Print. Jonynas, Vytautas. “Aleksandras Jurgis Jankus.” Lietuviu˛ egzodo literatu¯ra. 1945–1990. Eds. Kazys Bradu¯nas and Rimvydas Sˇilbajoris. Chicago: The Lithuanian Research and Studies Centre, 1992. Print. Jungfer, Victor. Mu¯su˛ kultu¯ros kryzˇkele˙je. Sˇviesa 4 (1948): n. pag. Print. Kubilius, Vytautas. XX amzˇiaus literatu¯ra. Vilnius: Alma litera, 1995. Print.

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Kaniaviene˙, Dainora. “Bedalis ir labdarys arba prasmiu˛ grimasos.” Literatu¯ra ir menas 9 Dec. 2014. Web. 15 Oct. 2016. . Kuiziniene˙, Dalia. Lietuviu˛ egzilio kultu¯ra: tarp praradimu˛ ir atradimu˛. Vilnius: Kronta, 2008. Print. –. Lietuviu˛ literatu¯rinis gyvenimas Vakaru˛ Europoje 1945–1952. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2003. Print. Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Autobiografija.” Egzodo rasˇytojai. Autobiografijos. Eds. Algirdas Titus Antanaitis and Aldona Mickiene˙. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ sa˛jungos leidykla, 1994. Print. –. Ilgoji naktis. London: Nida, 1956. Print. Laqueur, Walter. Europa mu¯su˛ laikais. 1945–1992. Trans. Arvydas Sabonis. Vilnius: Pradai. 1992. Print. Levinas, Emanuelis. Etika ir begalybe˙. Trans. Aru¯nas Sverdiolas. Vilnius: Baltos lankos.1994. Print. Melnikova Irina. Intertekstualumas: teorija ir praktika. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2003. Print. –. Literatu¯ros (inter)medialumo strofos, arba zˇodis ir vaizdas. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2016. Print. Nagys, Henrikas. “Letter to Antanas Vaicˇiulaitis.” March 3, 1947. Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum. AntanasVaicˇiulaitis’s Fund. Print. Ostrauskas Kostas. Ketvirtoji siena. Chicago: A. Mackaus knygu˛ leidimo fondas, 1996. Print. Pukyte˙, Egle˙ Paulina. Bedalis ir labdarys. Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2013. Print. Pym, Anthony. 2010. Exploring Translation Theories. Didcot: Taylor and Francis, 2017. Print. Stachniak, Eva. “Writing Eastern Europe in Canada.” Antanas Sileika: The Official Author Site, 12 Jan 2014. Web 25 Aug 2021. . Sˇarakauskaite˙, Diana. Septyni gailestingumo darbai ku¯nui. Kaunas: Kauko laiptai, 2013. Print. Sˇilbajoris, Rimvydas, Netekties zˇenklai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1992. Print. Sˇileika, Antanas. Underground. Markham, ON: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2011. Volertas, Vytautas [Dyvas V.] “Gyvenimas, mirtis ir pamisˇimas lygiomis dalimis.” Aidai 8 (1979): 372–375. Print.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Nemira Macˇianskiene˙ for translating this paper from Lithuanian into English. I am extremely grateful to Professor Violeta Kelertas for editing the paper.

Irena Ragaisˇiene˙

Chapter 8 – Migrancy and Cultural Belonging in Selected Fiction by Contemporary Lithuanian Women Writers

1.

Introduction

This essay explores the multiple patterns in which cultural identity of postindependence Lithuanian migrants have been presented in the literary work on migrancy by three Lithuanian women writers: Gabija Grusˇaite˙ (b. 1987), Kristina ˇ epaite˙ (b. 1957). In particular, the focus is on Sabaliauskaite˙ (b. 1974) and Zita C belonging, especially within the context of globalisation. Belonging is analysed as a marker of the literary characters’ identity and as a site of identification against which personal and cultural identity is construed around similarity and difference.1 Broadly defined, identity, as Jeffrey Weeks holds, “is about belonging,” and it is established in relation to other(s). Identity as belonging “is also about [an individual’s] social relationships [and] complex involvement with others, [which] in the modern world . . . have become ever more complex and confusing” (Weeks 88). In this sense, “[a]t its most basic [belonging] gives [us] a sense of personal location, the stable core to . . . individuality” and helps in managing the many “contradictory identities, which battle within us for allegiance” (88). Whilst salient identity “depends on a host of factors,” according to Weeks, “the values we share or wish to share with others” play a major role in determining the constellation of allegiances (88). The emphasis on shared values as a discursive frame for marking commonality also foregrounds the idea of difference from ‘others,’ by extension a sense of un-belonging. Forming within “borderlands between cultures,” immigrant identity forms as the “process of adaptation involving changes in values, norms and behaviour” (Lacroix 23, 20). Migration indispensably exposes migrants to “new influences” which “provide a challenge to earlier self-perceptions and self-images, and through 1 My discussion of identity and difference draws on the work of Woodward (“Introduction” 1–6; “Concepts of Identity and Difference” 7–50); Identity and Difference; Understanding Identity (2002); Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Ethnicity (2004). See also, e. g., Cohen and Sheringham, Encountering Difference: Diasporic Traces, Creolized Spaces (2016).

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such challenges the compositional elements of multiple identities may be redefined” (White 3). One of the elements that frequently becomes subject to reconsideration is ethnic identity, even if “many migrants may not have held a particularly strong view of their own ethnicity prior to movement” (3). Catherine Gomes states that “separated from their support networks . . . [and] familiar surroundings,” migrants tend to cling to their national identity “since this is the longest-running identity which [they] posses” (137). Consequently, [i]dentifying with the nation . . . allows for a certain stability even in the wake of unstable social conditions” (123). Gomes also notes that post-independence nations experience a high degree of commonality among their nationals and stress unity of the nation. National identity is “demonstrated by . . . loyalty to the state,” whence self-identification with “‘stayers,’ not ‘quitters’ who had migrated” is an expression of such loyalty (123). Similar views existed in post-independent Lithuania, especially in the early years of independence regained in 1990. Those who emigrated were labelled as traitors, while those who emigrated provided counter arguments by saying that they were making use of opportunities not available in the home country (Gin; Mejeryte˙).2 Then, it was national unity which was the prevalent mode of national identification (Kuzmickas 74–76). A sense of national unity and belonging stemmed not from what Stuart Hall, echoing Foucault’s disciplining model, described as deriving from the state effecting “cultural power” to regulate identities (Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity” 616). Rather, civic, and political actions of the Lithuanian people manifested national unity in their struggle for political and economic independence. Adhering to signifiers of national identity played an important role in the struggle. In this regard, a sense of national belonging and civic duty links with Benedict Anderson’s idea of a nation as sharing a culture with those living within “finite, though elastic geographical boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (7). To this way of thinking, imagining the nation as a community creates a feeling of commonality among the nation being “conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). For Lithuanians, the idea of “comradeship” is embedded in a shared goal to sustain the integrity and sovereignty of the nation.3 National cultural discourses foregrounding the idea of the nation as “comradeship” are modelled on important moments in the history of the country when unity beyond ethnic or other 2 Cf. Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, for citizens of countries under the soviet rule, emigration was associated with restrictions on travel and with involuntary displacement, whereas immigration almost exclusively implied “asylum seeking” (Chowaniec 7). In general, moving beyond state borders used to mark a converging point with the condition of exile, commonly aligned with a “politically determined” condition precluding a possibility of return, thus leading to the development of exilic consciousness and diasporic orientation (146, 141). 3 For the history of Lithuania, see, e. g., Zigmantas Kiaupa, The History of Lithuania (2002).

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divisions allowed Lithuanians, including those living in the diaspora, to realise desired outcomes (Saldukas 97–105; Janauskas 301–334). Currently, such discourses function as a discursive frame to describe identities that are considered strategically essential for nation building—socially, culturally, and economically ˇ iubrinskas 5).4 In post-independent Lithuania, the discourse celebrating (C freedom of movement as a gain of independence is supplanted by the discourse of national belonging as responsibility for the future of homeland (Grigas 6). Thusly conceptualised, the identities of “‘quitters’ who had [e]migrated,” to borrow from Gomes, are constituted along the spectrum of national allegiance (perceived as civic duty) and that of personal aptness to establish oneself in the host country (7–8). In terms of these parameters, e/migrant identities are frequently rendered positive or negative depending on how successful they are as im/migrants and on their orientation with respect to return migration. On the negative side, contemporary Lithuanian discourses on emigration are underpinned by notions of lack of commitment and responsibility towards one’s country, disregard to the native country’s future fate and even lack of ability to make a living in the home country (Karaliu¯te˙ 45–46). The above discussion echoes Stuart Hall’s statement that “national identities . . . are formed and transformed within and in relation to representation” of national belonging in “national culture” (Hall, “The Question” 612; emphasis in the original). Accordingly, national identity is not only bound by national borders but also by “the idea of the nation as represented in its national culture” (612; emphasis in the original). As Hall points out, looking at a nation as “not only a political entity but something which produces meanings” on the one hand allows identification of “the way national cultures help to ‘stitch up’ differences into one identity” (612, 618). On the other hand, the anti-essentialist understanding of “national cultural identities” underscores plural, unstable, even contradictory nature of cultural identity stemming from diversity within national cultures conditioned by cultural and historical processes such as cultural and political dislocations, and globalisation, in addition to contingencies across cultural categories such as class, gender, race, and religion (Hall, “The Question” 611, 615–619; “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 51–53). The representation of these cultural categories affects processes of self-identification. In her elucidation of Hall’s claim that identity is “[n]ot an essence but a positioning” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 53; emphasis in the original), Kathryn Woodward holds that “[r]epresentation includes the signifying practices and symbolic systems through which meanings are produced and which position us as subjects” (“Introduction”14). In essence, “these symbolic systems create the possibilities of

4 Cf. Milena Almagro and David André s-Cerezo (763).

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what we are and what we can become” with respect to the degree of agency in subject-specific contexts (14). The discussion that follows shows how e/im/migrant identity, as depicted in the selected fiction on migrancy by contemporary Lithuanian women writers, is constructed as “narrative responses,” as Chantal Lacroix would have it (22), to identity positions produced by discourses of home and host cultures. Within these identity positions and within the limits of agency available to the im/migrant, self-positioning includes a reflection on factors that affect the re-alignment of im/migrant’s cultural identity as, following Stuart Hall, being based on “those aspects of our identities which arise from our ‘belonging’ to distinctive ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and, above all, national cultures” (“The Question” 596). The formation of cultural identity will be discussed as oscillation between what Angelika Bammer has called horizontal and vertical orientations regarding cultural belonging. A “horizontal . . . way to think of a cultural community,” Bammer argues, results from forming an identity by establishing links “crossand intraculturally” with similar-minded communities, which are found through multiple displacements (xv). On the opposite axis, a vertical orientation in cultural identity formation stresses seeking connectivity to ethnic and ancestral roots. Using “vertical lineage” as a site of identification reinforces fixed oppositions into “us” and “them,” identification with “a tradition” and “a past to which ‘we’ belong” (xv). Such orientation in identity re-alignment, based on an essentialist perception of cultural identity as deriving from the national culture “to which ‘we’ supposedly cohere,” presupposes the existence of “them” who “by definition are foreign” and undermines the heterogeneity of the past (tradition) and the national culture (xv). The oscillation within the two orientations will be discussed in terms of hybridities that emerge in the context of migration and globalisation. The discussion will show the ways of engagement with discourses diversifying the understanding of national identity as an aspect of cultural identity and, hence, belonging. In particular, the emphasis will be on the literary characters’ self-positioning with regard to what has been believed to be essential qualities of Lithuanian national identity formed by the discourses foregrounding national unity and civic duty. The discussion foregrounds the characters’—especially those of the younger generation—horizontal/transnational orientation in terms of cultural belonging and new forms of allegiance to the state. The discussion regards the characters’ vertical orientations in their identity re-alignment as probing into historical and cultural contingencies which affect their sense of belonging in the host and home countries. These contingencies, as the analysis highlights, complicate the characters’ horizontal orientations. The present discussion uses the trope of migration to refer to “the movement of people to another country, leading to temporary or permanent resettlement”

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(Bartram et al. 4). It is also taken into account that the trope of “migration,” including that of “travel,” undermines the “historical circumstances,” including the scope of movement, just as it blurs the boundaries between “choice” and “circumstance,” thus overlooking the factor of power relations within the specific sociopolitical context (Kaplan 4–5). To signal discursive frames determining subject positions in particular circumstances, prefixed forms e/migration and im/migration will be used. The trope of transience, as the section below reveals, highlights the cosmopolitan nature of migrancy.5

2.

Identity and Transience: Gabija Grusˇaite˙

Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s debut novel Neisˇsipildymas (2010 [Unfulfilment])6 embodies an important change happening in Lithuanian literature since the first decade of the twenty-first century, which Rimantas Kmita and Ju¯rate˙ Sprindyte˙ name as “the propensity towards a nomadic consciousness” (“Sˇiuolaikine˙ literatu¯ra”). They point out that the nomadic consciousness replaces attachment to place as an essential characteristic of ethnic identity. With the demise of the Iron Curtain and the changing bounds of possibility regarding movement outside nation state borders, Lithuanian literature starts to be increasingly peopled with mobile characters, cultural transients, and transnational migrants. With the figure of “an intellectual nomad” replacing that of a homesteader—the literary character symbolising deep-rootedness of Lithuanian cultural identity in the agrarian tradition—motifs of homelessness and rootlessness become not infrequent in the national literary arena. Such motifs take centre stage largely in the literary works by young women writers who identify themselves as “citizens of the world and as Eastern Europeans, who have relocated to the new Babylons of the world reverberating with freedom and diversity.” The novels by these writers are categorised as “epics of the twenty-first century lost generation and manifestos of the disillusioned generation born in the dawn of Lithuania’s independence” (Kmita and Sprindyte˙).7 Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s personal experience as a migrant—her travels in Europe and Malaysia—feeds into the thematic network of her work, although the author does not consider the novel Unfulfilment autobiographical (“G. Grusˇaite˙s romanas Neisˇsipildymas”). As Gabija Grusˇaite˙ states in an interview, she started writing the novel at the age of nineteen when she came to London as an undergraduate student. It took her four years to complete the novel. She regards the process of 5 For the discussion of transience along such lines, see, e. g., Gomes 119–147. 6 All translations from Lithuanian into English are the author’s own unless otherwise noted. 7 The text from Kmita and Sprindyte˙ is a quotation with minor adaptations.

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writing as “a reflection of her personal development, her experience of migration ˇ ersˇkute˙). Written in predominantly and development of her political views” (C first-person perspective, Unfulfilment is profoundly intertextual. The references are to academic and cultural discourses on identity, postfeminism, postmodernist notions of reality as simulation, to mention but a few. The engagement with these fields of knowledge may be due to the fact that the author graduated from Lithuania’s most prestigious art school in the capital city and then studied ˇ ersˇkute˙). media and anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London (C The novel Unfulfilment features “cosmopolitan characters who are able to adapt to any cultural setting despite the awareness of their marginal status as Eastern European migrants” (Stonkute˙). Migration as lifestyle and the characters’ cosmopolitan orientation aligns them with what Catherine Gomes defines as “transient migrants” who “not only leave their nations of birth or citizenship permanently but also temporary” (1). The category of these “international migrants” includes “both skilled and unskilled labour forces together with a growing number of students flowing between nations” (1). Gomes holds that questions of identity are “frequently on the minds of the transient migrants,” as “being in transience provides a space that encourages, enables and possibly even forces transient migrants to contemplate their self-perceived identities . . . formed in transience [or] followed transient migrants from the home nation” (119). One of the major reasons of the migrants’ enhanced “awareness of [their] national (cultural) identity” is related to the fact that “once in transience” migrants start “to perceive differences between themselves and other members of their host society” (126). The following quotation from Grusˇaite˙’s Unfulfilment serves as an entry point into the analysis of identity and the related issues such as (national) belonging, memory/nostalgia and difference: I was pondering: the yearning linking the three of us together must be stemming from that dark rain-soaked soil which brought forth so much grayness. We felt alien wherever we went. . . . We would seldom talk about Lithuania, would not buy Lithuanian bread, and would not miss our mothers’ burgers. We carried our origin as a mystery—for us it was not national identity or geography—it was rather a sign of sadness, as if a totem engraved on the forehead. It sometimes seemed we belonged to some secret Masonic lodge, with each member having some mechanism of self-destruction installed. (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 29)8 8 In the original: “Susima˛scˇiau: turbu¯t mus visus tris jungiantis ilgesys kilo isˇ tos tamsios lietingos zˇeme˙s, kuri pagimde˙ tiek daug neapre˙piamos pilkumos. Buvome svetimi visur, kur e˙jome. . . . Retai kalbe˙davome apie Lietuva˛, nepirkdavome lietuvisˇkos duonos, nesiilge˙davome mamos kotletuku˛. Nesˇiojome˙s savo kilme˛ kaip paslapti˛, mums tai nebuvo nacionaline˙ tapatybe˙ ar geografija, greicˇiau liu¯desio zˇenklas ant kaktos lyg nematomas totemas. Kartais atrode˙, kad priklausome slaptai masonu˛ lozˇei, kurios kiekvienas narys turi ˛itaisyta˛ savinaikos

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Here especially characteristic is the central character’s speaking for her group to represent their feelings about belonging and difference. The shared experience of difference by the female protagonist, Rugile˙, and her two male friends, with whom she shares accommodation in East London, seems to be conditioned by their “origin.” The representation of the latter concept departs from traditional understanding of origin. The latter can stand for ethnic identity as “a perceived separate origin and continuity” (De Vos 11). It can also be national identity—“a sense of belonging to and being a member of a geopolitical entity” (Verdugo and Milne 3). Dissociation from what Catherine Gomes calls “everyday consumable signifiers of home” (121), such as “Lithuanian bread” and “our mothers’ burgers,”9 does not free the characters from a lingering feeling of difference. The physical presence of the difference feels like “a sign of sadness, a totem engraved on the forehead” (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 29). These markers of difference stem from territorial origins—the “dark rain-soaked soil which brought forth so much grayness” (29). The reference to homeland in geographical terms as a country having wet climate connotes the etymology of the country’s name as originating from the Lithuanian word lietus (rain), as per popular belief.10 How the narrator Rugile˙ understands belonging reminds us of Gomes’s statement that “place, in terms of nation and territory [is] important to transient migrants” since “their identities [are] almost exclusively linked to place and to the culture of that place” (119). In Unfulfilment, the characters’ notion of belonging has been read as an attempt to ‘erase’ the identity formed by national discourses as they are believed to be, to an extent, infused with residues of the soviet era. In this process, as Martyna Kucˇinskaite˙ states, self-destruction frequently appears as the only avenue of escape. An alternative is plunging into the world of art, music, and even nature (130).11 Writing about migration, is yet one more alternative in that, following Liesbeth Minnaard, literature provides a space to “rework the cultural matter of which . . . national identities are made . . . and shows the space it opens up for new imaginaries of belonging” (14). A useful epitext in this regard is Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s explanation of her stance on cultural belonging and on patriotism: mechanizma˛.” For the discussion on effects of European integration and globalisation on literary representations of Lithuanian national identity, see Vytautas Martinkus 78–89. 9 While home-made burgers are the quintessence of the Lithuanian family cuisine, Lithuanian bread, rye bread is “a symbol of food in Lithuania’s culture” (“Lithuanian Bread”). Some Lithuanian migrants say that what they miss most in emigration is traditional Lithuanian bread; they therefore bring bread to the host country so that they have enough before the next trip to the homeland or, where available, they buy traditional bread in local Lithuanian food stores in the countries of emigration (“Juoda lietuvisˇka duona”). Others say that Lithuanian ˇ epaite˙, “Emigrantai”). migrants frequently opt for international foods, including bread (C 10 For the etymology of the placename, see, e. g., Zigmas Zinkevicˇius, “Lietuvos vardas.” 11 Quoted with minor adaptations.

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The word patriot is not part of my language stock. For me, the word evokes associations with provinciality. This may be particularly important at the time when the so-called patriots started categorising people into those loving the country and the traitors. It is ridiculous and sad since citizenship and nationality are not a matter of love or lack of love, but that of commitment and responsibility. The latter constitute the basis of my relationship with Lithuania: I speak and write in Lithuanian. My journeys are part of my sense of my national identity: my behaviour as a migrant is embedded in an awareness that I represent my country and present it to the people who had never heard about such a state. I know that I represent it well. Nationality for me—neither more nor less is part of my identity. (Grusˇaite˙ qtd. in Limontaite˙)

In Unfulfilment, the search for identity as (cultural) belonging invites a reading within the paradigm of the postmodern antiheroic quest. The novel engages with the narratives of Exodus and the Holy Grail. Both of these narratives focus on redemption and re-integration into the established social order.12 Characteristic of an antiheroic character, Rugile˙, a young Lithuanian migrant woman at the margins of society, sets her goals outside the moral codes inherent in the aforementioned quest narratives that underline much of Western thought and behaviour. Rugile˙’s quest concerns the causalities that determine her own identity and that of her entire generation. Her moral codes lie outside dominant discourses which foster common values.13 Rather, the novel deconstructs these scripts as grand narratives. In this regard, it adopts a postmodern orientation towards “anarchy, heterogeneity, fragmentation, fluidity, and pluralism” (Davis 10). Postmodern orientation is manifested in Rugile˙’s frequent critique of the choices made by her parents and their impact on her own failure to develop into a well-adjusted adult. Rugile˙ condemns her mother for clinging to social conventions and for trying to produce a simulation of a happy family by prioritising the accumulation of wealth and material possessions. Rugile˙’s mother works in the public prosecutor’s office, which symbolically reinforces her role as a guardian of social laws. In contrast to the dominant, controlling mother, the father is passive. He accepts the mother’s priorities. The father is the means through which items for the ‘well-being’ of the family, such as a “heated swimming pool, idiotically authentic summerhouse, and golf clubs” find their way to their (out of town) collective garden (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 75).14 The latter is a relic of the soviet times and a blueprint of collective living. It is also a means to uphold collective mentality.15

12 For the meaning of the heroic quest, see, e. g., Piotr Sadowski (1996). 13 Cf. These qualities of the antihero have been described by Eric Bender (“Rise of the Antihero”). 14 Complete sentence in the original: “Sode atsirado sˇildomas baseinas, idiotisˇkai autentisˇka pave˙sine˙ ir golfo lazdu˛.”

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Simulation of happiness in family life also appears to be an inevitable part of realities experienced by Rugile˙’s London flatmates, Gabrielius and Lukas. Rugile˙ implicitly places her consideration of the relationship between identity formation and family history within the framework of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum, which is, taking the signs circulating in culture as reality (Poster 1–2). When Rugile˙ says about Gabrielius that, for him, simulation was superior to life (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 26), she may be suggesting that his reality—like postmodernity—is replaced by representation and is thus lost in simulation/hyperreality in Jean Baudrillard’s sense (Baudrillard 167). That which causes Gabrielius’s reliance on representation in lieu of physical reality is rendered in flashbacks. They show his mother, an aging ballerina, as constantly slipping between real and simulated/ideal, and his father, a once successful arts director, perceiving this slippage as a betrayal. Gabrielius remembers that as a child he felt lost in these competing visions of reality: the one embraced by his mother who perceived sign/image as reality and the one that he envisioned as real. He remembers how meaning became destabilised to the point that he could not be sure what was real and what was not real. The two planes constantly displaced each other and thus reflected the instability of meaning in the representations of life. His mother univocally relied on this instability and used it to model the reality of others. A momentary instance of admiration and transcendence would overwhelm him when he watched his mother performing on stage. This moment would be continuously displaced by a memory of a “blue basin at home where she would soak her stiff feet” (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 26).16 When his mother quit ballet, she resorted to experiencing her reality through identification with her ‘outer self,’ presenting the image of a beautiful, desired and desiring “Spanish prima donna,” who frequents tea parties in the company of her cherub-like young son (26).17 The impressive “dark-eyed woman with the posture of a queen” would be admired by passers-by in the central street of old town Vilnius (26),18 just as she would be an integral part of signs that, for visitors to their house, created an image of family success and happiness. This image also underlies the memory of his mother when she identifies with Anna Karenina to avoid the reality of “dirty dishes, stains, poverty and boredom” (27).19 The mother’s attempts to live a life through already existing 15 For the more in-depth discussion of the meaning and function of the collective garden, see Matas Sˇiupsˇinskas et al., “Idea of Collective Gardening and Its Materialisation in Lithuania” 102. 16 In the original: “. . . niekaip negale˙jo pamirsˇti to melsvo dubens, kuriame ji gri˛zˇusi namo mirkydavo sustirusias pe˙das.” 17 The original: “ispanu˛ primadona.” Cherub-like young son is “infantas” in the original. 18 The original: “. . . moteris juodomis akimis ir karaliene˙s laikysena.” 19 The original: “. . . su neplautais indais ir de˙me˙mis, su skurdu ir su nuoboduliu.”

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or created representations and the father’s withdrawal into himself leave Gabrielius without any guidance. His reality is one where the imagined/fictional and the real become interwoven with each other and so make meaning infinitely destabilised. Despite efforts to disentangle himself from the falsity instilled by his mother, Gabrielius, as Rugile˙ characterises him, “reiterates the same simulation of impeccable life by removing stains of wine from the carpet, dressing elegantly and disbelieving love as much as his mother believed in its truthfulness” (27).20 While for Gabrielius obsession with representations which precede and determine his reality can be regarded as stagnation in the identity which he fails to reject, the other London flatmate, Lukas, considers representation superior to the real world. Representation, for Lukas, is associated with art and the transcendent. For him, a photographer, his art, not the physical world, exists as reality. As the narrator observes, possibly echoing Baudrillard’s notion of “a precession of simulacra” (Baudrillard 166), which is, modelling of reality on media representations, for Lukas, “The art of photography itself is reality, and this is an undeniable fact in this house and in this city, where a copy becomes more important than what it precedes, just as our coat is superior to us” (Gruˇsaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 31).21 Reflection on the construction of meaning as manipulation of reality by the media and an inclination of audiences to accept mediated realities as real life extends into a critique of consumerism. Such a critique is suggested in references to London’s Oxford Street as part of Dante’s nine circles of hell. The Leicester Square, Soho, Camden Town, Covent Garden are some of the places described as the modern Inferno (29–30). They stand for sites where media significations and symbols are most explicit, transforming the city into an essence which functions, in Ihab Hassan’s phrase, as the “invisible, imaginary, made of dream and desire, agent of our all transformations” (qtd. in Backes 1). By implicitly engaging with postmodern notions of representation, the central character of Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s novel not only acknowledges her awareness that all aspects of cultural identity—whether based on gender, nationality, or ethnicity —are socially constructed. She also shows her agency by reflecting on selfassumed identities in respect to their respective discursive frames. When Rugile˙ falls in love with a woman, she describes the transformation of her identity not by referring to the real world but to signifiers in culture. As an enactment of lib-

20 The original:“. . . kartoja ta˛ pacˇia˛ sˇvaria˛ gyvenimo simuliacija˛, kruopsˇcˇiai panaikindamas vyno de˙mes ant kilimo, grazˇiai rengdamasis ir tiek pat stipriai netike˙damas meile, kiek jo motina tike˙jo.” 21 The original: “Pati fotografija ir buvo tikrove˙, tai nepaneigiamas faktas sˇituose namuose ir sˇitame mieste, kur kopija tapo pranasˇesne˙ uzˇ savo pirmtaka˛, kaip kad mu¯su˛ paltas yra pranasˇesnis uzˇ mus.”

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eration from heterosexual scripts, she rejects “the world of Bridget Jones” (47).22 Yet Bridget Jones attracts her attention precisely because of the character’s antiheroic traits. These include “act[ing] in ways contrary to society’s standards” and “reflect[ing] society’s confusion and ambivalence about morality,” because of which the “unorthodox” antiheroic character “can be used for social or political comment” (Morrell). In Unfulfilment, a comment associated with unorthodox nature of the antihero can be discerned in Rugile˙’s description of single city women who mingle in the bar where Ugne˙, her homosexual partner, sings. The women in their forties exemplify one of the concepts of postfeminism, which is “the figure of woman as empowered consumer” (Taske and Negra, “In Focus” 107). Rugile˙ refers to these empowered women, who spend evenings in the bar to realise their individually perceived femininities, as “Bridgets whom nobody awaits at home, and who are not obliged to call home to inform that they would come back later” (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 62).23 Their independence and the social change that their re-visionist stance towards the discourses on gender roles produces, however, is claimed to be a delusion. This category of women who had freed themselves from the bondage of patriarchy, as the narrator states, swapped their lives for a bottle of almond-scented body lotion. Somewhat strangely, in the 1960s all women suddenly started feeling subjugated and declared war on men, but when they won it, established a new form of slavery subjecting themselves to the beauty industry. (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 61)24

The quotation, in effect, reiterates much of the postfeminist discourse on consumerism as a trap (McRobbie 32–33). As argued in the criticism on the subject, consumerism enables engaging in (de)constructive ways with symbols constituting identities. On the other hand, it “re-installs normative gendered stereotypes” (Lazar 371). Most importantly, consumerism generates profit and, by extension, patriarchy-driven structures of power (McRobbie 32–33). For Rugile˙ the oppositional discourse in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary provides her a discursive space for a re-assessment of the production, consumption, and regulation of identities in her own culture.25 The novel uses this thematic frame to allude to a near absence of such a space in her own national culture, as can be gleaned from the following: 22 The original: “. . . atsizˇade˙jau Bridzˇitos Dzˇouns pasaulio.” 23 The original: “Bridzˇitu˛ namuose niekas nelauke˙ ir joms nereike˙jo paskambinti, kad pranesˇtu˛, jog truputi˛ ve˙luos.” 24 The original: “. . . isˇkeite˙ gyvenima˛ ˛i migdolu˛ kvapo losjona˛ ku¯nui. Keista, septintajame desˇimtmetyje visos moterys staiga pasijuto isˇnaudojamos ir paskelbe˙ vyrams kara˛, o ji˛ laime˙jusios suku¯re˙ nauja˛ vergove˛ grozˇio industrijai.” 25 See Kathryn Woodward’s discussion of the relationship between “the processes of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation,” “Introduction” 2.

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Our stories, both Ugne˙’s and mine, were so unnational, so unLithuanian, so untrue that they had to remain untold. I was aware that my country valued clarity and cold northern melancholy, while we were vivacious, strong, and doomed to endure our destiny. (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 17)26

The articulation of exclusion reminds us of Laurel Richardson’s statement that “[p]articipation in a culture includes participation in the narratives of that culture, a general understanding of the stock of meanings and their relationships to each other” (24). Rugile˙ re-assesses the cultural repository of her national culture to understand the oscillations between convention and defiance and their impact on the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. Her frequent allusions to the motif of drowning as a reaction to the Panoptical gaze of society suggest an intertextual link with the short story “Paskenduole˙” (1913 [“A Drowned Woman”]) by Lithuanian male writer, Antanas Vienuolis. The story describes a young country girl who becomes pregnant and drowns herself as she sees no place in society driven by orthodox moral laws and participating in moral surveillance. This intertextual link is especially pronounced when Rugile˙ realises that, in the eyes of her mother, she fails to perform her gender. Rugile˙’s rejection of identity as “an independent, pretty, smiling gently, but God forbid not giggling indiscreetly, well-dressed lady maintaining an upright posture”27 leads her mother to see her daughter as drowned, “vanished in the depths of mist”28 (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 76). The intertextually derived signification of drowning as punishment for defiance of social conventions converges with the goals of the antiheroic quest. The title of the novel Unfulfilment as paratext creates anticipation of failure or deconstruction of narratives defining success. Typical of deconstruction and critique of truths and established paradigms as part of the ‘postmodern turn,’29 the quest in Grusˇaite˙’s narrative is for unfulfilment. The quest is a striving not for redemption but for expulsion from (social) paradise. What drives the quest is “a desire to break all laws of humanity and to transgress all boundaries for just a split second of feeling immortal before plunging into the oblivion of the night” (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 105).30 Apart from postmodern nihilism, it is apparent that the target of Rugile˙’s critique is “adaptive behaviour” 26 The original: “Tiek mano, tiek Ugne˙s istorijos buvo tokios nenacionaline˙s, nelietuvisˇkos, netikros, kad ture˙jo likti nepapasakotos. Zˇinojau, kad mano ˇsalis me˙gsta aisˇkuma˛ ir ˇsalta˛ sˇiaurietisˇka˛ melancholija˛, o mes buvome gyvos, stiprios ir pasmerktos isˇtverti savo likima˛.” 27 The original: “. . . savarankisˇka, grazˇi, ˇsvelniai besisˇypsanti, bet, gink Dieve, per garsiai nekikenanti, puikiai besirengianti ir tiesiai vaiksˇtanti dama.” 28 The original: “pradingusi ru¯ko gelme˙je.” 29 For deconstructivism in postmodern literature, see, e. g., Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. 30 The original: “. . . sulauzˇyti visus zˇmogisˇkumo ˛istatymus, perzˇengti visas ribas tik tam, kad trumpa˛ akimirka˛, priesˇ panirdami ˛i nakti˛, pasijustume nemirtingi.”

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implied in the balance between the Freudian pleasure principle and the reality principle. Rugile˙ desires to de-construct the “moralism” that is behind the striving for this balance.31 By questioning the narratives of normativity, the narrator not only reflects on her own experiences, but also addresses the complexities of subject positions, social positions and subjectivities defining her entire generation: The generation of the post-soviet occupation freedom were not granted some natural right to exist. Feeling guilty for the mere fact they existed, they daily struggled to prove to the world their utility. But only a few had the talent and the courage. The rest lived under the cross of mediocrity, consciously comprehending that, for several thousand years, this world has been going nuts without facing its final collapse. Voices professed global warming and the end the world; all desired—rather prayed—to be inscribed in history as the last unhappy generation of this world. And gave birth to even more unhappy children. They had neurotic dogs and built houses that they didn’t want in Tarande˙. (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 79)32

This passage exposes the sociohistorical milieu which complicates self-perception amongst the protagonist’s generation born in the 1980s, at the dawn of Independence. The self-irony, verging on pessimism, invested in the description of the contingencies and the produced subjectivities foregrounds hopes associated with newly arisen opportunities brought by the Independence, the commodification of these opportunities by some social groups, and the realisation of the power of social demands within these opportunities. Considering the contextual factors, it may be suggested that the writer’s generation feels guilty for not having experienced the social and political turmoil that the earlier generations had endured. At the same time, they find it difficult to adapt to a social system that is entangled with the discursive practices of the transitional processes. The female protagonist’s quest for belonging acquires new overtones when she settles in Essaouira, a port, “linking Morocco and its Saharan hinterland with Europe and the rest of the world” (“Medina of Essaouira”). Given the antiheroic nature of Rugile˙’s quest, leaving Europe can be seen as a rejection of its cultural code. Rugile˙’s settling in Essaouira resembles Eva Karpinski’s definition of exile, which she primarily describes in discursive terms as “step[ping] out of any discourse of 31 The discussion of adaptive behaviour draws on Simon Boag’s Freudian Repression, the Unconscious, and the Dynamics of Inhibition (3). 32 The original: “Posovietiniams laisve˙s vaikams niekas nesuteike˙ savaime suprantamos teise˙s egzistuoti. Jausdami kalte˛, kad isˇvis gyvena, jie kasdien bande˙ ˛irodyti pasauliui, kad yra reikalingi. Bet tik nedaugeliui uzˇteko talento ir dra˛sos. Visi kiti gyveno nesˇdami sunku˛ vidutinybe˙s kryzˇiu˛, sa˛moningai suvokdami, kad sˇitas pasaulis jau kelis tu¯kstantmecˇius eina velniop ir niekada iki galo nesubyra. Balsai pranasˇavo globalini˛ atsˇilima˛ ir pasaulio pabaiga˛, visi trosˇko, isˇties melde˙si bu¯ti ˛irasˇyti ˛i istorija˛kaip paskutinioji nelaiminga sˇio pasaulio karta. Ir gimde˙ dar nelaimingesnius vaikus. Augino neurotisˇkus sˇunis, state˙ namus Tarande˙je, kuriu˛ nenore˙jo.” Tarande˙ is a residential area in the capital city Vilnius (Author’s comment).

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containment” to seek new understandings and new identities stemming from establishing “new loyalties by transcending the boundaries of nationhood and tribal ties” (19). Rugile˙ associates the new spatial location with a new discursive space, offering new self-definitions and new modes of belonging that she can experience with her homosexual partner, Ugne˙. However, life in the much desired El Dorado feels like a standstill; a point of no return; imprisonment in the ‘here and now’ dimension, flooded by memories of broken relationships and ill fates of friends met en route. This standstill, on the other hand, seems to be associated with rootedness and the acceptance of the mundanity of life ‘here and now’ as opposed to the central characters’ past, marked by a state of perpetual transitionality both in terms of travel and in the sense of casual relationships created in different travel destinations. In Essaouira—the final travel destination at the time of narration—Rugile˙ no longer sees Ugne˙ as “a priestess” whom she had worshiped, nor as “a pompous illusion” or as “a queen of the stage, but just as a human being” who, in different ways, stands for the darkness of the id (Grusˇaite˙, Neisˇsipildymas [Unfulfilment] 173).33 As such, Ugne˙ stands for a sole source of Rugile˙’s identity, an identity born out of the realisation that “despite whatever Uncle Sam, Kate Moss or Google say, life has its own form, direction and purpose, it is something more than time spent on saving for a new iPod or on dating” (166).34 Implicitly elaborating on the Proustian theme of “lost time,” the novel closes on depiction of Rugile˙ sitting on the bedside of her female partner and watching her in unrestful sleep, “until a new day explodes as gray light” (175).35 The negative overtones reverberating in the description of seemingly positive outcomes of the quest may point to the postmodern “indeterminacy” (Bertens 45–48) and to the Proustian notion of “lost time”/memory (cf. de Botton), as some of the dimensions affecting the meanings of the quest and those of (un)fulfilment. Grusˇaite˙’s second novel Stasys Sˇaltoka. Vieneri metai (2017 [Cold East, 2018])36 depicts transience of the male protagonist, Stasys Sˇaltoka, a Lithuanian, who turns twenty-nine at the novel’s opening. He leaves New York for Southeast Asia to shoot films about the ‘Third World.’ By delving into the problems of this 33 Complete sentence in the original: “Ji eina sˇalia, nebe deive˙, kurios bijojau ir kuriai klaupiausi, nebe pompastisˇka iliuzija ar scenos karaliene˙, o tiesiog zˇmogus, kuris nustu¯me˙ mus gilyn ˛i tamsa˛.” 34 The original: “. . . nesvarbu, ka˛sako de˙de˙ Semas, Keite˙ Mos ar guglas, gyvenimas ture˙jo forma˛, krypti˛ ir paskirti˛, jis buvo kazˇkas daugiau nei laikas, kuri˛ turi praleisti taupydamas naujam aipodui ar eidamas ˛i pasimatymus.” 35 The original: “. . . kol pilka sˇviesa isˇsprogsta diena.” 36 All translations of Stasys Sˇaltoka. Vieneri metai from Lithuanian into English are by Kipras Sˇumskas unless otherwise noted. In the original, the title contains the name of the male protagonist, Stasys Sˇaltoka, the literal meaning of which is “Stanley Colder” (Grusˇaite˙, Cold East 40).

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part of the world, he hopes to experience “emotional (re)structuring” and “recharging,” as Philip Stone uses the terms in his discussion on the effects of travelling to places marked by suffering and injustice (67–68). Apart from the themes of migrancy and identity, the thematic span in Cold East bears similarities with the ladlit genre, peopled with consumerism-oriented hedonistic male protagonists in their thirties and forties “confronted” with “fear” to “embrace” stable relationships and “adult responsibilities.” The genre is considered “the masculine equivalent of the Bridget Jones phenomenon”; it is also “a masterly examination of male identity” in the contemporary post-industrial world (Showalter 60). Dissatisfied with low achievement in his career and personal life, Stasys Sˇaltoka creates an ideal version of his selfhood on social media, but experiences inner turmoil at being unable to live up to the social ideal that he presents himself to be on Instagram: I’m twenty-nine and my life only looks complete through Instagram filters; you crop out the battlefield and hide untidy mornings, and all that’s left are blue eyes which aren’t even really blue. . . . Going through the photos always makes me see myself from an odd angle—that’s not a reflection of me, that’s someone else. Weekend photos of someone else. I can’t pick one to post on IG. So I open Tinder. Left. Left. I am looking at smiling women at the speed of forty photos per minute. Right. Match. (Grusˇaite˙, Cold East 13–14, 18)37

Realising that he is no longer “the same prodigious teenager [he was] just several years ago”38 and that every moment of success is superseded by an awareness that “[v]ictory is either yesterday’s news or in the distant future, whereas this day is always a hill [to be] climb[ed] anew,” he succumbs to utmost cynicism (13).39 The cynicism arises from dissatisfaction with himself and most importantly from his inability, as the male protagonist puts it, “to smash Eastern Europe in his blood”

37 The original: “Dvidesˇimt devyneri, ir mano gyvenimas atrodo isˇsipilde˛s tik per IG filtrus. Isˇkerpi mu¯sˇio lauka˛, paslepi netvarkingus rytus – matosi tik me˙lynos akys, kurios isˇ tiesu˛ ne˙ra iki galo me˙lynos. . . . Zˇiu¯riu nuotraukas ir apima keistas jausmas, jog matau save isˇ toli, kad cˇia ne mano atspindys, o kazˇkieno kito. Savaitgalio nuotraukos. Negaliu isˇsirinkti, kuria˛ kelti ˛i instagrama˛. Tode˙l ˛isijungiu tinderi˛. ˛I kaire˛. ˛I kaire˛. Keturiasdesˇimties nuotrauku˛ per minute˛ greicˇiu zˇiu¯riu ˛i besisˇypsancˇias moteris. ˛I desˇine˛. Match.” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 14, 19–20). 38 The original: “. . . nebesi tas vunderkindas paauglys, koks buvai priesˇ kelerius metus” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 13). 39 The original: “Pergale˙ yra vakaryksˇte˙ naujiena arba tolima ateitis, o sˇiandiena kiekviena˛kart isˇkyla kaip kalnas, ˛i kuri˛ turi ˛ilipti” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 14).

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(19).40 At times, cynicism erupts as desperation produced by internalising discourses of ‘othering’ and as a response to the social and financial difficulties that Stasys has experienced integrating into the West since his arrival to Britain as a student (40–41).41 By describing how the male protagonist—despite the adaptations he has made—still feels positioned as ‘other’ and how he navigates his life in the West, the novel addresses the question of the role of the West in representing the ‘rest’ of the world. A comparable idea can be gleaned from the depiction of the project to “shoot documentaries” about corruption and injustice in Southeast Asia from a western point of view (78). The project fails, as Kenny—Stasys’s American friend—is likely kidnapped by local criminal networks. The loss of a friend and the failure of the project suggest the complexities of problems in the region that the seemingly superficial Western(ised) filmmakers fell short of realising. Ironically, it is not their intension to delve into these complexities in order to deal with them. They make the films for their own benefit. When offered to shoot a film about corruption in Malaysia, Kenny becomes enthusiastic about it. His enthusiasm, as the male protagonist envisions it, betrays “a touch of a hunter who smells blood” (84).42 By pointing to the lack of empathy as the underlying characteristic of the male protagonist and his circle of friends—including a son of a Russian mafia figure, Alex, whose father provides contacts to be used in making films about corruption in the region—the novel gives thought to the meaning of “hav[ing] a soul” (18). When Stasys’s female friend tells him that “[s]ometimes it seems [he does not] have a soul,” (18)43 she seems to be referring to him as soulless, which is, as per dictionary definition, “showing no human influence or qualities” (“Soulless”). The questioning of the existence of these qualities in the male protagonist relates to his engagement in creating embellished identities on the social media. This process involves breaking “an individual’s ‘identity’ . . . into two constituent parts: the ‘I,’ or the unique self-awareness and self-reflection of the individual, and the ‘me,’ or the aspects of the core accessible by external observers” (van Kokswijk qtd. in Booth 142). For Stasys, embellishing the “me” part allows him to boost the number of ‘likes,’ by implication, profit (Grusˇaite˙, Cold East 12).

40 Literal translation from Lithuanian into English by the author of this chapter. The original: “. . . sulauzˇyti Rytu˛ Europa˛ mano kraujyje” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 19). 41 For the treatment of post-accession Eastern Europeans as a semi-alterity/‘other,’ see Vedrana Velicˇkovic´, Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe (2019). 42 Continuous text in the original: “– Gerai. Let’s do this, – girdzˇiu medzˇiotojo gaidele˛ jo balse” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 99). 43 Continuous text in the original “– Kartais atrodo, kad neturi sielos, – sake˙ Dzˇanet Los Andzˇele” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 19).

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The latter thematic strand links to the novel’s emphasis on the role of the media in manipulating with basic human values leading to the devaluation of life. The novel closes on Alex pointing a gun at the male protagonist Stasys when they are performing a symbolic burial of Kenny by drowning his watch. Engaging with the Proustian themes of lost time and the meaning of life, the burial is described as an epiphanic moment during which Stasys understands that by “throw[ing] the watch into the waterfall [he] throw[s] the anxiety of time away”: Throwing out the fear of living. I’ve got rid of a terrible feeling—a sense that my white, post-Soviet, hipster, deplorable, laughable life has no meaning. (Grusˇaite˙, Cold East 251)44

An integral part of this epiphany is Stasys’s sensing a romantic attraction to Alex. The deliberation of plans for the future life, however, is paralleled by Alex’s casual remark that he has “this overwhelming urge to kill someone” (252).45 Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s novel Cold East has been described as “A new voice that disrupted Lithuanian literature!” (Grusˇaite˙, Cold East front cover). One of the means that is considered to have produced this disruptive effect is the abundance of the English language in the Lithuanian text. Such a linguistic ‘turn’ contrasts with the meaning assigned to the Lithuanian language by post-World War Two Lithuanian exiles who fled Lithuania “to escape soviet rule” (Sˇilbajoris 211). A quotation from Daiva Markelis’s “literary memoir of her childhood community” (Dundzila) provides an illustration: At home, my parents talked to my sister and me in Lithuanian. They watched for the intrusion of English words into our speech the way high school biology students look under a microscope for germs. . . . Having borne the collective guilt of leaving their homeland in the hands of the enemy, my parents’ generation was not about to shoulder the responsibility for the death of the oldest European language (as we were told it was again and again). (Markelis, White Field, Black Sheep 17)

The quotation illustrates the perception of the Lithuanian language as an essential signifier of ethnic identity among the Lithuanian diaspora. Markelis employs gentle irony to describe the pride that many Lithuanians take in the belief that “Lithuanian language is considered to be the oldest surviving Indo-

44 Continuous text in the original: “Man ˛i delna˛ ˛ispraudzˇia Kenio laikrodi˛, kuri˛ kiek pavartau cˇiuopdamas marmuro stori˛, tada uzˇsimoju ir paleidzˇiu, kartu su juo paleisdamas ir baime˛ gyventi ar tai, jog mano baltas posovietinis hipsterisˇkas juokingas gyvenimas neturi jokios prasme˙s” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 296). 45 The original: “. . . kartais taip norisi ka˛ nors nuzˇudyti” (Grusˇaite˙, Stasys Sˇaltoka 297).

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European language” (Bezaraite˙).46 Foreign influences are regarded as a threat to the ‘purity’ of the language (Brazyte˙ Bindokiene˙ 24).47 The continuing presence of English in the language of Grusˇaite˙’s male protagonist, Stasys, stands for the freedom of mobility as a consequence of the country’s independence and the opportunities stemming from this fact. The horizontal orientation in Stasys’s identity construction evokes Christopher Barker’s statement that globalisation affects “[p]ost-traditional and translocal identity formation [which] involves the production of multiple identities or identifications many of which have little bearing on the question of national identity, but focus on issues of sexuality, relationships, age, work,” among other cultural categories (206). Hybridisation of identity, then, including diversification of meanings associated with cultural features such as language, religion, culture, and social practices, presents Grusˇaite˙’s character as what Catherine Gomes has described as cultural transient whose cultural belonging transcends national boundaries (119–147). The occasional flashbacks in the novel provide insight into the male protagonist’s past, haunted by unhappy family life in a post-soviet country on the fringes of Europe (cf. “Baltic Voices”). As Tomas Vaiseta puts it, the novel Cold East embodies “the effort of the younger generation to speak about itself in new language and form” (“Karsˇtoka naujiena”). It is important to mention that the novel has developed out of the blog with the same title that the author wrote as a student in Britain (“Gabija Grusˇaite˙”). Overall, Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s literary works showcase a general tendency that “[t]he history of any national literature mixes up with the history of its nation” (Da Rocha 68). The surge of the theme of migration in post-independence Lithuanian literature inscribes the introspective look of the characters in respect to ‘self ’-‘other’ dynamics and to the past of their homeland inasmuch as it affects their identity positions. The characters’ intellectual inclination and their striving for self-knowledge distinguish Grusˇaite˙’s work from much of post-1990 Lithuanian literature peopled by labour migrants who are frequently trapped in their ‘otherness’ resulting from being treated as ‘other.’48

46 Philip Baldi specifies that the Lithuanian language is considered “the most conservative living language of the Indo-European family.” It is “the noun morphology that provides the main impetus for [such a] claim” (100). 47 To explain the importance of preserving the Lithuanian language as a marker of ethnic identity among Lithuanians in exile, Brazyte˙ Bindokiene˙ refers to canon Mikalojus Dauksˇa’s Postile (Postilla Catholicka, 1599). In the book, Dauksˇa warns the Lithuanian nobility against using the Polish language instead of the native tongue: “. . . Nations survive not because of the soil’s fertility, the diversity of their clothing or the strength of their cities and fortresses, but primarily by preserving and using their own language which increases and sustains a common foundation, harmony and brotherly love” (qtd. in Brazyte˙ Bindokiene˙ 24). 48 The latter aspect has been discussed by the author of this chapter in “The Eastern European ‘Other’ in Literary Representations of Lithuanian Im/Migrants in Britain” (140–158).

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The Present and the Past of Belonging: Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙ and Zita Cˇepaite˙

Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s short story “Filomena vazˇiuoja ˛i Londona˛” (2012 ˇ epaite˙’s novel Londono ve˙jas (2013 [“Filomena Travels to London”]) and Zita C [The Wind of London]) feature migrant identity as re-drawing interpersonal boundaries, when identity is established in relation to the ‘other’ and differences are re-aligned within one’s self, as Jeffrey Weeks would have it (88), and as a function of the homeland’s soviet past. In “Filomena Travels to London,” this past resurfaces as ironising the restricted access to western sources of knowledge and to cultural practices. In The Wind of London, flashbacks establish a framework for understanding the soviet past as involving moral decisions to be taken concerning resistance to or conformity with the imposed ideology. The influence of the past, as I will discuss, complicates the hybrid position of the migrant not only in terms of belonging but also in respect to both ‘otherness’ as an aspect of identity and ‘othering’ as cultural and discursive practice. Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙, Doctor of Philosophy in art history, has lived in Britain since 2002. The author is best known for her baroque novel Silva Rerum (2008), set in the seventeenth-century Lithuania. The novel won multiple awards in Lithuania and was translated into Latvian and Polish. The original book was followed by sequels, the last one published in 2016 (“Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙”). The short story “Filomena Travels to London” depicts a Lithuanian middleaged woman who comes to London to visit her immigrant daughter and her family. Her understanding of Britain owes much to her reading of English classics such as, among others, Agatha Christie and the Brontës whose characters embody Filomena’s notion of Britain and Britishness. The beginning of the story intersperses descriptions of preparation for the journey with the female protagonist’s ideas about Britain and its cultural landscape that she had acquired from fiction. She envisions Britain, as embodied by “English gentlemen” wearing tweed and dinner jackets (42).49 Also, she associates Britain with “[l]ibraries with wood burning in the fireplace, rainy darkness out the window, whist and bridge, whiskey and tweed” (42).50 The description of the country, as Filomena imagines it, contains gentle irony to highlight historical differences between the character’s native land and Britain: Castles without defensive walls, sticking out like gray cakes amid green meadows—why walls in this beautiful kingdom whose land had not been trampled under the feet of any invaders for the entire thousand years? White London houses with front doorsteps, 49 The original: “anglu˛ dzˇentelmenai.” 50 The original: “Bibliotekos su besiku¯renancˇiais zˇidiniais, lietingos sutemos uzˇ lango, vistas ir bridzˇas, viskis ir tvidas.”

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wrought iron fencing, black or red doors with brass door knockers. Five o’clock tea with sponge cakes just like in Jane Eyre. Rain outside the window; inside—a window bench with soft pillows so comfortable for reading novels. . . (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Filomena vazˇiuoja ˛i Londona˛” [“Filomena Travels to London”] 42; ellipsis in the original)51

The window soon becomes a pathway between the Britain created in Filomena’s imagination and the actual Britain. Facing the reality of London shatters the image of Britain that Filomena had constructed in her mind. On her way to the underground, what she sees is anything but England, no tweeds and British waterproof raincoats —colourful sarees and red marks on foreheads; turbans—and there—some darkskinned man walks along wearing some white baggy underwear trousers and some funny crochet white cap, the kind our children wear during song and folklore festivals. . . . (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Filomena vazˇiuoja ˛i Londona˛” [“Filomena Travels to London”] 43)52

The multiculturality of the contemporary life is precisely what is thematised in Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the “ethnoscape” as one of the five dimensions of the “new global cultural economy . . . to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order” (296). “Ethnoscape” is defined as “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and persons [who] constitute an essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree” (297). The other dimensions, characterising the world having become more interdependent economically, politically, and culturally, identified by Appadurai, are “mediascapes,” “technoscapes,” “finanscapes” and “ideoscapes” (296). Filomena sees the multicultural London crowd in terms of cultural markers of identity. These markers are represented by traditional attire worn by the passers-by, representatives of specific cultures: for example, “sarees” or a “cotton crocheted white cap.” Filomena’s trying to relate these cultural markers to cultural frames familiar to her may be regarded as resorting to systems of representation by which

51 The original: “Pilys be gynybiniu˛ sienu˛, stu¯ksancˇios tarsi pilki tortai vidury zˇaliu˛ lauku˛ – nes kam gi tos sienos, toj grazˇioj karalyste˙j, netremptoj jokiu˛ svetimtaucˇiu˛ priesˇu˛ isˇtisa˛ tu¯kstanti˛ metu˛? Balti Londono namai, su laipteliais ir juodu˛ pinucˇiu˛ tvorele˙mis, juodos ir raudonos durys su zˇalvario belstukais. Penktos valandos arbate˙le˙ su biskvitais, visai kaip isˇ Dzˇeine˙s Eir. Lietus uzˇ lango, sˇiapus – plati pagalve˙le˙mis isˇklota palange˙, tokia patogi romanams skaityti…” 52 The original: “. . . ji mato viska˛ tik ne Anglija˛, ne tvidus ir anglisˇkus lietpalcˇius – spalvingus sarius ir raudonus tasˇkus ant kaktu˛, turbanus; sˇtai kazˇkoks tamsaus gymio eina su baltais ‘kalisonais’ ir juokinga balta va˛sˇeliu nerta kepure˙le, kokiomis Lietuvoj puosˇia mazˇus vaikus per dainu˛ ˇsventes ir folkloro festivalius. . . .”

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reality had been organised and constructed in her national culture.53 The reference to national cultural frames reflects what Appadurai has called “[t]he central problem of today’s global interactions [which] is the tension between cultural homogenisation and cultural heterogenisation” (295). Thusly read, the description of the cap as “funny” may be a sign of Filomena’s cultural seclusion and a lack of exposure to cultural heterogenisation. It can also be regarded as ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism, whether as expression of superiority towards other cultures or as a natural belief among all cultures in the superiority of their culture, according to Cristina-Georgiana Voicu, is a marker of “a particular cultural identity”: Whether ethnocentrism is that of a dominant or a marginalised culture, the term connotes an exclusive, ‘centred’ perspective. . . . [E]thnocentricism becomes a term for how the self or subject imposes itself upon or constitutes the other as alien to itself, in a relation of active antagonism. (Voicu 59)

In Filomena’s case, the “‘centred’ perspective” overlaps with her disillusionment about the failure to experience genuine British culture, of which she expects to be a part. In an attempt to imitate (her idea of) British culture, which for her is a desired cultural location, Filomena buys apparel for the journey in order to fit into the cultural landscape of Britain. With regard to the image of British culture that she develops through her reading, she buys second-hand shoes and clothes: “a tweed jacket with suede collar,” “two quality sweaters,” “a tie-neck silk blouse,” “a pure silk kerchief with partridges and hunting rifles” and “a genuine crocodile leather handbag” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Filomena Travels to London” 41).54 In this light, the ‘othering’ that manifests itself as Filomena’s reaction to the diverse cultural markers of identity that illustrate the multiculturality of London is based on difference—envisioned by her as a departure from her pre-formed image of Britishness. Simultaneously, her self-image as complying with some ‘pure’ British identity undergoes deconstruction. When Filomena’s daughter greets her by saying that she looks like she belongs to a previous era, she dates Filomena to the generation(s) of the British writers she has been reading. Still, Filomena cannot stop hoping that she will see Britain as depicted in the predominantly nineteenthcentury novels that she admires. However, what she sees among the London crowd is a Muslim woman wearing a burka and “a bald man who looks like coming from

53 This is in reference to Stuart Hall’s definition of culture as “shared meanings or shared conceptual maps” (“The Work of Representation” 18). 54 The original: “[t]vido sˇvarkas su zomsˇa apkrasˇtuota apykakle”; “du geriausi megztukai”; “natu¯ralaus sˇilko palaidine˙ sˇalike˙liu surisˇama apykakle”; “natu¯ralaus sˇilko skarele˙ su medzˇiotoju˛ ˇsautuvais ir kurapkomis”; “tikros krokodilo odos rankinukas.”

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the Inferno” with his tattooed body and metal spikes everywhere and with “two little metal horns” protruding from the hairless head (43–44).55 From a postcolonial perspective, Filomena’s engaging in mimicry56 of a culture of a country, associated with the Old Europe, suggests that she constructs her identity with respect to the ‘west and the rest’ dichotomy.57 She views people who have somehow affected the diversification of the British cultural landscape as the ‘rest.’ Thus, the ‘othered’ position of these characters is highlighted. Conversely, the approach taken by Filomena’s daughter and her husband, who are labour im/migrants in Britain, bears postnational overtones. They associate the host country with a place where globalisation-related heterogeneity presents both challenges and opportunities to accommodate their difference(s) within the globalised networks that function in the host country.58 For them, the “ethnoscape” of London seems to resonate with view that “the idea of culture as bounded by place is increasingly untenable in an era of globalisation when any given place is permeated by cultural discourses from elsewhere” (Barker 11). Generational differences between Filomena and members of her daughter’s family allude to different degrees of exposure to foreign cultures to point out that lack of exposure to cultural diversity gives rise to cultural stereotyping, as illustrated by the character of Filomena. Her reading material may show her preferences. She may be also rereading the same books that she has from her youth. Then, during the soviet times, access to foreign literature was restricted. The only literature available was that which did not contradict the ideology outlined by the soviet realism principle. For example, the character of Jane Eyre was then read as victimised by capitalist society, thus subjecting the capitalist system to critique. In her present situation, Filomena has limited financial resources. She buys cheap food and, most likely, cannot afford to acquire new books. By implication, she cannot broaden or ‘update’ her horizon or knowledge. Filomena eventually comes to a place where she finds the symbols of Britishness she had found in books. It is a restaurant close to the Ritz London. The restaurant 55 The original: “plikis, kaip isˇ pragaro”; “du metaliniai ragiukai.” 56 For the reading of the female protagonist’s relation to the host culture through the prism of mimicry, I am indebted to discussions at the conference “Britain in Europe, Europe in Britain” held at the University of Portsmouth, the UK, 2017. 57 For the meaning of mimicry, I am drawing on Bill Ashcroff, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s elucidation of Homi Bhabha’s concept (124–127). 58 The reading of this aspect draws on Mirriam O’Kane Mara’s interpretation of the multiculturality of London in the context of the contemporary Irish novel. O’Kane Mara states that “While postcolonial analysis might concentrate on the othered or exiled status of . . . characters [coming from countries abroad], a postnational approach reads them as building an effective community in the midst of their new location. They choose London as a place where national, ethnic, religious, sexual and gender differences are incorporated as constituting the ethnoscape of this global city” (66).

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attracts her because of the wrought iron ornaments on its windows, the decoration that Filomena recognises as part of British culture. Upon entering the restaurant, she is kindly addressed by a waiter as “‘Madam,’” and she ponders with relief: This is what real Britain is. True London. Just like in her detective novels. Just like in the films about Hercule Poirot—well, one might say, people are dressed a bit differently, but you can’t expect too much—sit Hercule Poirot here and he would fit perfectly. (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Filomena vazˇiuoja ˛i Londona˛” [“Filomena Travels to London”] 52)59

Watching people drinking tea from elegant cups and eating tea treats, she also orders high tea for herself. But when the waiter brings her the bill of 29.75 pounds, she becomes furious at the expense and promises she would never again be lured by any surface realities of British culture. Imitating (imagined) British culture does not yield the expected results. Ironically, when Filomena does have a chance to engage with the culture which, for her, embodies a cultural ideal, one aspect that causes her disillusionment is the financial one. And this arises from her limited knowledge of English: she does not know how to enquire about the meaning of high tea and its price. It is here that her dis-identification from the British culture begins: the financial boundary, together with the linguistic one, prevents her from identifying with the British as the same. Filomena understands that she can achieve symbolic identification with the British by buying second-hand clothes and by adopting practices that represent to her the (British) elegance and romance that she lacks in her home country. What she cannot achieve, she realises, is the economic, hence, social identification. And this instigates her to set strict boundaries marking the difference between ‘me/us’ and ‘them.’ The experience in the restaurant, thus, marks her complete reorientation regarding sources of identity Filomena turns back to cultural codes reminiscent of the soviet ideology. She starts to approach British realities relying on discourses that circulated during the soviet times. Filomena refers to what she initially perceives as the pleasant atmosphere of the restaurant as “capitalist deception to attract decent tourists” (54).60 On the contextual level, her change in attitude ironically comments on realities in the home country. There, some of the population (especially among the older generation) remain embedded in discursive formations of the past, an identification which they are reluctant to acknowledge. Filomena’s mimicry of a western culture and her swift decision to return to the homeland (culture) point to the complexity concerning forms of knowledge and practices of knowledge with respect to subjects produced by discourses at the intersection of political 59 The original: “. . . cˇia visisˇka, tikra Anglija. Tikras Londonas. Toks, kaip jos detektyvuose. Toks, kaip filmuose apie Erkiuli˛ Puaro – na, gal tik zˇmoniu˛ apsirengimas skiriasi, betgi nereik daug nore˙t – pasodink cˇia Erkiuli˛ Puaro ir jis puikiai pritiks.” 60 The original: “kapitalistine˙ apgaule˙ padoriems turistams.”

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systems. Filomena’s resorting to discourses of the soviet era is to suggest that the end of political regime does not imply the end of its ideological impact. In a way, Filomena’s initial identification with the characters of British novels (and the systems of images that they embody) point to her looking for avenues of escape into a culture that she associates with a continuity of cultural traditions and, by implication, cultural identities. Yet, Filomena’s concerns about the political situation in her own country are concealed by the character’s naïveté. Conversely, when she describes British castles as having no “defensive walls” because there is no need for protection from the enemy outside “in this beautiful kingdom whose land had not been trampled under the feet of any invaders” (43), she alludes to the fear of occupation that runs deep in her own country. When faced with the ‘real’ community of Britain as opposed to an “imagined community”—in Benedict Anderson’s sense—Filomena reveals her essentialist thinking about a culture as territorially-bound. When she visits Britain, she is unprepared to accept the realities of globalisation, described by Arjun Appadurai through the five “scapes.” This leads her to see her ignorance as part of her cultural identity, positioned by her country’s past. Therefore, the female protagonist’s decision to return to the homeland, by implication to re-connect with her ethnic nationality, comes to stand not only as an essential marker of her cultural identity. It also marks her generation as a ‘lost generation’ in the sense that many of the fellow citizens of her age may not be able to adapt to a host country because of the limitations that life behind the iron curtain in their formative years had brought. ˇ epaite˙ is a writer and a journalist, author of several novels and a Zita C famous piece of life-writing Emigrante˙s dienorasˇtis (2011 [Emigrant’s Diary]) ˇ epaite˙”). In her novel Londono ve˙jas (2013 [The Wind of London]), C ˇ e(“Zita C paite˙ employs the genre of crime fiction to delve into processes involved in the production and construction of im/migrant identity and its links to homeland. According to Shanna Catarina Fernandes Lino, the choice of “the codified genre of crime fiction” allows providing “internal views of the process of immigration as an alternative to the voyeuristic daily reporting” (iii). The Wind of London depicts a socially successful young woman who, after having been cheated financially by her boyfriend, comes to London to trace him. In her pursuit, she discovers immigrant criminal networks engaged in trafficking in human beings, smuggling, and murder. The networks include both her nationals and other descendants from the former Soviet Union who reside in different countries across the globe. The narrator emphasises her difference from those involved in crime not only in legal terms and value orientations, but also in terms of national and ethnic identification. Using literary conventions of the crime fiction genre, the novel establishes implicit links between “text and context,” as Amy Burge would have it (8). Burge holds that engagement with the context is a common feature in im/migrant crime

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ˇ epaite˙’s novel The Wind fiction (19). Since London provides the setting for Zita C of London, it may be pertinent to refer to statistics to gain insight into practices that constitute Lithuanian immigrant identities in Britain. As indicated by Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor for The Telegraph, “immigrants to the UK from countries that joined the EU in either 2004 or 2007 are the worst offenders” (“EU Migrants”). On the positive side, Lithuania, together with Latvia and Ukraine, is ranked among the countries “whose emigrants gained most in terms of labour market activity . . . ” (OECD). This is essentially the backdrop against which issues of Lithuanian identity have been granted attention by the media, politicians and other forms of public discourse influencing the constitution of im/migrant idenˇ epaite˙, a journalist herself, engages, tity. In her novel The Wind of London, Zita C as it were, with contextual factors, such as national histories of the characters’ home countries, objectives of immigration, and immigrant family histories, to shed light on im/migrant positions resulting from these factors, and on the identities assumed in these positions. At the onset, the novel introduces the female protagonist, Guoda, as coming from a family of Lithuanian deportees to Siberia, alluding in this way to her personal history, and implicitly, to her values and political orientation. Such a contextual element situates the reading of the novel within a particular historical and social framework encompassing facts, such as the following: “During Nazi and Soviet occupations, including 200,000 Holocaust victims, the losses of the population of Lithuania amounted to 33 per cent of the total number of the country’s population in 1940. Lithuania lost one million people to deportations, executions, incarceration, the murder of the political opposition and forced emigration” (Kuodyte˙). A major demographic change was caused by the soviet occupation “when a state-sponsored campaign resettled many people from other soviet republics to the newly built micro-districts surrounding major Lithuanian cities. Every new factory had many Russian workers and (especially) executives” (Zˇemaitis, “Russians”). In addition, property of Lithuanian citizens was nationalised, agriculture was collectivised, and, most importantly: The Soviet economy was plagued by the popular belief that ‘Everything belongs to everybody, and therefore everything belongs to nobody’ and stumbled well behind the Western European one. People were widely stealing from their workplaces and this was regarded as a normal practice by the society, therefore condoned by the peers and even many CEOs. (Zˇemaitis, “Soviet Occupation of Lithuania”)

After regaining independence in 1990, “Lithuania swiftly readopted capitalist economy and saw a massive economic growth.” However, the first years of “Lithuanian economy (1990–1995) had a frontier feeling with organised crime (especially extortion) burgeoning. Some people that stood in the ‘mafia’s’ way (businessmen, a journalist, prosecutors) were murdered. . . . By 1997 the lawless

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businesses gave way to modern developments . . . ” (Zˇemaitis, “Restored Independent Lithuania”). According to Lithuanian literature scholar, Laura Laurusˇaite˙, the novel The Wind of London responds, as it were, to these extratextual components by singling out a particular group of characters, “homo sovieticus” (232; italics in the original). The label signifies the mentality and the cultural identity of those who, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, contemptuously exploited the system to start illegal businesses and became rich. The businesses were transplanted to the West, becoming trasnational crime networks (231). By scrutinising these charˇ epaite˙’s novel, acters, members of these networks, the female protagonist of C Guoda, ponders the social stratification of the soviet society in relation to the beneficial social positions of leaders of the criminal networks. Many of the leaders are children of the former soviet nomenclature (Laurusˇaite˙ 231). As the female protagonist, Guoda, helps reveal a transnational crime, the trafficking of children, she performs tasks delegated by her national, Ruslanas, a man of Russian origins, whose father was an officer of the Russian army stationed in Lithuania. Watching the criminal activities and trying to understand the mentality of those involved in the crime, Guoda considers the impact of such mentality on the cultural identity of her compatriots. Against this backdrop, she juxtaposes the political standpoints and moral values of her parents who valued honesty above all else, and the values of her relatives with whom she would stay as a child during her holidays. The ironic description of her relatives’ way of life during the soviet period provides a social commentary on the impact of the soviet occupation on personal values and ideological positions. Guoda’s relatives secure their financial well-being by being loyal to the soviet regime. For this, they are given access to consumer goods that are unavailable to common citizens. For Guoda’s relatives, commodity is the ultimate value, whereas anything that cannot be commodified is devalued. The result of such upbringing is highlighted in the depiction of their daughter, Ju¯rate˙, who opens a shop in London and who is in relationship of convenience with Ruslanas, despite her knowing of his particiˇ epaite˙’s female protagonist relies on moral pation in international crime. C principles instilled by her family when helping to uncover criminal networks. In this role, she reveals qualities which Edward Said associates with an “intellectual in exile” who is able “to see things not simply as they are, but as they have come to be that way” (60). While unravelling mysteries related to crime, Guoda, an outsider to the British society, points out its ills. In this regard, The Wind of London bears similarity to what Vedrana Velicˇkovic´ identifies as literature serving as

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“educational tool” in that it “makes claims to alerting Eastern Europeans to the dangers” lurking in im/migration (59).61

4.

Conclusion

By and large, the probing into the complexities of cultural identity of post-1990 ˇ epaite˙’s novel The Wind of London provides Lithuanian e/im/migrants in Zita C an intertextual frame for understanding the nihilism that permeates the selfimage of central characters in Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s novels Unfulfilment and Cold East. It also reveals historical and social reasons that keep the female protagonist of Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s short story marginal in Britain. Finally, the analysis of cultural belonging in the selected fiction by Lithuanian women writers, who share the experience of migrancy, reveals that the characters’ self-definition oscillates between the discourses of globalisation and nationalism. The respective (self)positioning of characters with respect to the two poles impacts their understanding of difference and their sense of (cultural) belonging.

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61 Cf. Kristina Baubinaite˙’s Sle˙pyne˙s Anglijoje (2019 [Hide and Seek in England]). The novel depicts how im/immigrants become victims of organised crime (Ragaisˇiene˙ 151–154).

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Kiaupa, Zigmantas. The History of Lithuania. Trans. S.C. Rowell, Jonathan Smith, and Vida Urbonavicˇius. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002. Print. Kmita, Rimantas, and Ju¯rate˙ Sprindyte˙. “Sˇiuolaikine˙ literatu¯ra.” Sˇaltiniai info 2021, Literatu¯ra sec. Web. 17 Apr. 2021. . “Knyga: Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s Stasys Sˇaltoka: vieneri metai” (1 dalis).” YouTube. Literatu¯ra visiems, 15 Dec. 2017. Web. 4 Dec. 2021. . “Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙.” Lietuvos kultu¯ros gidas, Proza sec. Lietuvos kultu¯ros institutas, 6 Jan. 2021. Web. 1 June 2021. . Kucˇinskaite˙, Martyna. “Tapatybe˙s transformacijos naujausioje lietuviu˛ moteru˛ prozoje.” Oikos: Lietuviu˛ migracijos ir diasporos studijos 28.2 (2019): 125–140. Print. Kuodyte˙, Dalia. “The Tragic Story of How One Third of Lithuania’s Population Became Victims of Soviet Terror.” VilNews: The Voice of International Lithuania (2011): n. pag. Web. 30 May 2019. . Kuzmickas, Bronislovas. Tautos tapatumo savimone˙: lietuviu˛ savimone˙s bruozˇai. Vilnius: Mykolas Riomeris University Press, 2009. Repository.mruni.eu. Web. 25 Oct. 2021. Lacroix, Chantal. Immigrants, Literature and National Integration. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Print. Laurusˇaite˙, Laura. “Rytu˛ europiecˇio sindromas sˇiuolaikine˙s (e)migracijos naratyvuose.” Darbai ir dienos 62 (2014): 229–244. Print. Lazar, Michelle M. “Entitled to Consume: Postfeminist Femininity and a Culture of Postcritique.” Discourse and Communication 3.4 (2009): 371–400. Web. 12 June 2021. . Limontaite˙, Sigita. “Londona˛ ˛i Malaizija˛ isˇkeitusi rasˇytoja G. Grusˇaite˙: kelione˙s – mano priklausomybe˙.” Delfi. Tiesa 30 Sept. 2011, Lietuviai svetur sec. Web. 19 Nov. 2021. . Lino, Shanna Catarina Fernandes. “The Problem of Immigration and Contemporary Spanish Detective Fiction.” Diss. University of Toronto, 2008. Tspace. Web. 24 Feb. 2020. “Lithuanian Bread.” Lithuanian State Department of Tourism, The Food Travel Portal of Europe, n.d. Web. 1 Aug. 2021. . Markelis, Daiva. White Field, Black Sheep. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print. Martinkus, Vytautas. “Tautinis sa˛moningumas XX–XXI amzˇiu˛ sanglaudos lietuviu˛ literatu¯roje.” Lietuvisˇkumo ribos: tautiniu˛ vertybiu˛ kaita XX amzˇiaus pabaigos – XXI amzˇiaus pradzˇios lietuviu˛ (e)migrantu˛ autoriu˛ literatu¯roje. Eds. Virginija Balseviu¯te˙Sˇlekiene˙ et al. Vilnius: Edukologija, 2013. 17–94. Print. McRobbie, Angela. “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime.” Interrogating Postfeminisms: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. 27–39. Print. “Medina of Essaouira (formerly Mogador).” UNESCO. World Heritage Convention. UNESCO. World Heritage Convention, 13 Dec. 2001. Web. 2 June 2021. .

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Mejeryte˙, Laura. “Emigracija – Te˙vyne˙s isˇdavimas?” Delfi 20 June 2012, Delfi pilietis sec. Web. 6 Mar. 2021. . Minnaard, Liesbeth. New Germans, New Dutch: Literary Interventions. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2021. Morrell, Jessica Page. “Defining and Developing Your Anti-Hero.” Writer’s Digest. Writer’s Digest University. WDU Online Writing Workshops, 23 Apr. 2008, n. pag. Web. 9 Nov. 2021. . OECD. Connecting with Emigrants: A Global Profile of Diasporas 2015. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2015. Web. 3 Oct. 2021. . O’Kane Mara, Miriam. “The Search for Global Irishness in Nuala O’Faolain.” Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnational Approach. Ed. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, 63–84. Print. Poster, Mark. 1988. Introduction. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. 2nd ed. Edited and introduced by Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. 1–12. Print. Ragaisˇiene˙, Irena. “The Eastern European ‘Other’ in Literary Representations of Lithuanian Im/Migrants in Britain.” Brexit and the Migrant Voice. Ed. Christine Berberich. Abingdon, OX: Routledge, 2022. 140–158. Print. Richardson, Laurel. Writing Strategies: Researching Dierse Audiences. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 1990. Print. 21 Qualitative Research Methods. Sabaliauskaite˙, Kristina. “Filomena vazˇiuoja ˛i Londona.” Danielius Dalba & kitos istorijos. By Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2012. 41–56. Print. Sadowski, Piotr. The Knight on His Quest: Symbolic Patterns of Transition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Newark: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Press, 1996. Print. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Saldukas, Linas. “Sa˛ju¯dzˇio veikla isˇeivijos pozˇiu¯riu 1988–1991.” Kelias ˛i Nepriklausomybe˛: Lietuvos Sa˛ju¯dis 1988–1991. Ed. Bronislovas Genzelis and Angonita Rupsˇyte˙. Kaunas: Sˇviesa, 2010. 97–105. Print. Showalter, Elaine. “Ladlit.” On Modern British Fiction. Ed. Zachary Leader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 60–76. Print. “Soulless.” Cambridge Dictionary. Web. 18 Nov. 2021. . Stone, Philip R. “Dark Tourism: Morality and New Moral Spaces.” The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009. 56–74. Print. Stonkute˙, Roberta. “Gabijos Grusˇaite˙’s Neisˇsipildymas.” Vilniaus galerija, Menas. Kultu¯ra. Laisvalaikis, sec., n.d. Web. 8 Sept. 2021. . Sˇilbajoris, Rimvydas. “The Experience of Exile in Lithuanian Poetry.” Lithuania: In Her Own Words. An Anthology of Contemporary Lithuanian Writing. Ed. Laima Sruoginis. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 1997. 211–215. Print. Sˇiupsˇinskas, Matas, Indre˙ Saladzˇinskaite˙, and Rugile˙ Zˇadeikyte˙. “Idea of Collective Gardening and Its Materialisation in Lithuania.” Science: Future of Lithuania/Mokslas: Lietuvos ateitis 8.1 (2016): 102–111. Web. 6 Sept. 2020. .

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Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. “In Focus: Postfeminism and Contemporary Media Studies.” Cinema Journal 44.2 (2005): 107–110. Web. 7 Sept. 2021. . Vaiseta, Tomas. “Karsˇtoka naujiena.” Bernardinai 18 Oct 2017, Literatu¯ra sec. Web 28 Nov. 2021. . Velicˇkovic´, Vedrana. Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. Print. Verdugo, Richard R., and Andrew Milne. “National Identity: Theory and Practice.” Introduction. National Identity: Theory and Research. Ed. Richard R. Verdugo and Andrew Milne. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2016. 1–21. Google Book Search. Web. 19 Nov. 2021. Vienuolis, Antanas. “Paskenduole˙.” Vilnius: Vaga, 1982. Print. Voicu, Cristina-Georgiana. Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’s Fiction. Warsaw, Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2014. De Gruyter Open Poland. Web. 9 Sept. 2018. Weeks, Jeffrey. “The Value of Difference.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 88–100. Print. White, Paul. “Geography, Literature and Migration.” Writing across Worlds: Literature and Migration. Ed. John Connell, Russell King, and Paul White. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 1–7. Print. Whitehead, Tom. “EU Migrants Commit 500 Crimes a Week in UK. The Telegraph 10 June 2017, Law and Order sec. Web. 12 June 2017. . Woodward, Kath. Understanding Identity. London: Arnold Publication, 2002. Print. –. Introduction. Identity and Difference. Ed. Kathryn Woodward. London: Sage in association with The Open University, 2001. 1–6. Print. –. “Concepts of Identity and Difference.” Identity and Difference. Ed. Kathryn Woodward. London: Sage in association with The Open University, 2001. 7–50. Print. –. Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Ethnicity. London and New York: Routledge in association with The Open University, 2004. Print. Zinkevicˇius, Zigmas. “Lietuvos vardas.” Visuotine˙ lietuviu˛ enciklopedija, 2021. Web. 19 Nov. 2021. . ˇ epaite˙.” Geros knygos. gerosknygos.lt, n.d. Web. 9 Sept. 2021. . Zˇemaitis, Augustinas. “Russians.” TrueLithuania.com, n.d. Web. 7 June 2021. . –. “Soviet Occupation of Lithuania 1944–1990.” TrueLithuania.com, n.d. Web. 7 June 2021. . –. “Restored Independent Lithuania 1990 and Beyond.” TrueLithuania.com, n.d. Web. 7 June 2021. .

Part Three: (Inter)Cultural Dialogue in Lithuanian Literature in Translation

Aurelija Leonavicˇiene˙

Chapter 9 – Translation as Intercultural Dialogue: Intertextuality and Cultural Content in Lithuanian Literature Translated into French

1.

Introduction

As the chapters of this volume argue, cultural dialogue in Lithuanian literature takes many forms, ranging from thematisation of intercultural contacts to the discussion of intertextual dialogues that uncover cultural dynamics in different literary, social, and historical contexts. The present chapter looks at challenges that translators face when attempting to re-create these contexts functioning as cultural worlds shaping textual meaning.1 The concept of cultural worlds is used to signify both explicit references to cultural concepts2 and the intrinsic embeddedness of language in culture, defined by Ee Lin Lee as follows: “Language is an arbitrary and conventional symbolic resource situated within a cultural system.” As such, it not only “marks speakers’ different assumptions and worldviews” but also “creates much tension in communication” (“Language and Culture”). Thus viewed, communication of cultural content of the source text in the target language aligns translation with intercultural communication. As such and in the most general sense, translation is, as David Katan has it, a negotiation of meaning “between two different linguacultures” (75). An essential element in the understanding of culture encoded in language, according to José Ortega y Gasset, involves perceptiveness not so much to what is verbalised but to what is omitted: All peoples silence some things in order to be able to say others. Otherwise, everything would be unsayable. From this we deduce the enormous difficulty of translation: in it one tries to say in a language precisely what that language tends to silence. (Ortega y Gasset 104)

1 This is a paraphrase of Martha Cutter’s statement used in the discussion on the role of words in “preserv[ing] the world.” The discussion centres on problems related to rendering of cultural information encoded in literary texts (Cutter 9). ˇ utura 2 I am using the term “cultural concepts” in the same meaning as Vera Savic and Ilijana C who discuss strategies of translation of “ cultural references in the source texts” (125).

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In translation, the unsaid can only be conveyed through creating connotations and through capturing the emotional, intellectual, and cultural contexts of the original. To a great extent, as Ortega y Gasset suggests, the understanding of what constitutes the connotation is shaped by the way silence influences language, since “each language is a different equation of statements and silences” (104). And it is here, in the ratio between language and silence, that the cultural meanings to be identified by the translator lie (104).3 Javier Franco Aixelá holds that cultural meanings of texts that go unnoticed by the source language’s readership frequently become exposed in the process of translation. Specifically, translation exposes the difference in contexts within which meanings are negotiated (Aixelá 57). The dynamism and the social embeddedness of textualised cultural content, together with their axiological implications, poses a dilemma for the translator which Friedrich Schleiermacher has formulated as follows: to bring “the author to the reader [or] the reader to the author,” which is, to adopt either the target readership or the source culture-oriented approach (Hermans 77).4 In Theo Hermans’s reading, Schleiermacher suggests that in a hermeneutical sense, neither is effective in terms of re-creating of cultural content in translation. The translator, nevertheless, can “manipulate his language in such a way that the reader gains a sense of how the translator has understood the foreign work” (Hermans 104). The aim this chapter is to examine the ways of manipulation, in Friedrich Schleiermacher sense, in which translators of Lithuanian literature into French use to re-create cultural meanings in intertextual references. The term intertextuality is used, to borrow Robert Miola’s phrasing, “in the widest possible range of textual interactions including those of sources and influences” (13). The forms of intertextuality chosen for the analysis include quotation, allusion, and revision as per Robert Miola’s classification (13–15). Textual representations of these forms will be analysed in Section Three of the present chapter with reference to selected Lithuanian literary works translated into French. The analysis is preceded by an overview of Lithuanian literature translated into French. The research material comprises examples of Lithuanian literature and their respective translations into French. All of the works were translated during the post-indepedence period—between 1990 and 2017. The translations were made by native speakers of French: Marielle Vitureau, Jean-Claude Lefebvre, Muriel Puig, among others. The translations were published as collections of literary works and as books by individual literary authors. Examples in the former category include: an anthology of Lithuanian short fiction Des âmes dans le 3 The author is indebted to Pilar Ordóñez López for the discussion of the meanings attached to silence by José Ortega y Gasset (41–66). 4 See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Des différentes méthodes de traduire” 299.

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brouillard (2003 [Lith. Sielos ru¯ke; Eng. Souls in the Mist]); a collection of Baltic literature Littératures des pays baltes (1992 [Lith. Baltijos ˇsaliu˛ literatu¯ra; Eng. Literature of the Baltic States]); the periodical Cahiers Lituaniens (2000–2016 [Lith. Lietuvisˇkieji sa˛siuviniai; Eng. Lithuanian Papers); and a collection of poetry Poésie 92. Revue bimestrielle de la poésie d’aujourd’hui (1992 [Lith. Poezija 92. Sˇiuolaikine˙s poezijos dvime˙nesinis zˇurnalas; Eng. Poetry 92. Bimonthly Journal of Contemporary Poetry]). Among French translations of Lithuanian book-length fictional works, the following can be mentioned: Saulius Tomas Kondrotas’s L’ombre du serpent (1991 [Lith. Zˇalcˇio zˇvilgsnis; Eng. A Glance of the Serpent]) and Jonas Mekas’s Ma vie nocturne (2007 [Lith. Mano naktys; Eng. My Night Life]). For methodological validity, the research corpus does not include French translations of Lithuanian literature from intermediate languages like Russian, for instance. Examples of such translations are Juozas Baltusˇis’s La saga de Youza (1990 [Lith. Sakme˙ apie Juza˛; Eng. The Saga of Juza]); Balys Sruoga’s La forêt des dieux (1967 [Lith. Dievu˛ misˇkas; Eng. Forest of the Gods]) and Icchokas Meras’s La partie n’est jamais nulle (2003 [Lith. Lygiosios trunka akimirka˛; Eng. A Stalemate Lasts but a Moment]). The method for the study of translation of cultural meanings conveyed through intertextuality is a descriptive-interpretative analysis, coupled with quantitative and comparative approaches. The study is situated within the theoretical framework of French interpretive theory of translation represented by Marianne Lederer (1994). French interpretive theory of translation goes beyond a merely language-based approach and regards translation as the reformulation of a hermeneutically interpreted source text. According to Lederer, one of the founders of the interpretive model, “translation consists of understanding an original text, deverbalizing its linguistic form and then expressing, in another language, the ideas grasped, and emotions felt” (Translation: The Interpretive Model 1; emphasis added). An essential component in this tripartite process of translation as interpretation is understanding, defined by Lederer as “a process in which sense is extracted from an aural or graphic sequence through the combination of cognitive in-puts with linguistics meanings” (224). Understanding, the first step in interpretive translation, is determined by the translator’s cognitive knowledge (Fr. le bagage cognitif; Eng. cognitive baggage), comprised of “linguistic knowledge and extra-linguistic knowledge,” the latter including “thematic knowledge and general knowledge” (Qiang 237).5 An important dimension in cognitive knowledge is contextual knowledge (Fr. contexte cognitif). It is “text or discourse related knowledge” which conditions how meaning in relation to discourse strands is grasped (Lederer, Translation 6). The 5 See also Fortunato Israël, “Pricipes pour une pédagogie raisonnée de la traduction: le modèle interprétatif” 62–63; Marianne Lederer, La traduction aujourd’hui. Le modèle interprétatif.

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second phase in translation through interpretation is de-verbalisation, “a cognitive process,” which involves the solidification of meaning conveyed in the source language in the translator’s short-term memory, in the Freudian sense, and divesting the source text’s meaning of its original linguistic shape (13). In the final phase, these meanings are re-expressed in another language, “convey[ing] . . . the ideas and emotions designated by the [source] text” (33). Re-expression as rediscovery of textual meaning in translation is related to cognitive and affective equivalence (Fr. l’équivalence cognitive et l’équivalence affective). The former “is achieved when text semanticisms are combined with the notional input provided by the translator” (46). The latter refers to the totality of textual elements, including intertextualities, contributing to the emotive content of the text and its effects on the reader (Lederer, La traduction aujourd’huif 52, 54–55, 86). To reexpress the meaning of the text, as Lederer notes, “translators, using all the knowledge relevant to the text and remaining within the limits allowed by this text, must cling to [the text’s] meaning, the aim being to put their own readers in a position to give the text as many interpretations as readers of the original were able to entertain” (“Can Theory Help Translator” 10). The present chapter aims to analyse how understanding of intertextual references in the source text, in terms discussed above, affects translation solutions. Translation solutions are considered beyond the prescriptive paradigm emphasising linguistic equivalence. It is highlighted that translation of intertextual references, such as allusion, quotation, and revision, is affected by the source and target texts being comprised of multiple sociohistorical, cultural, and textual sources intersecting with discourses that surround them. To reflect on these intersections in the source texts, the present analysis includes details about sociohistorical and cultural contexts that shape the literary texts chosen for the present analysis. Before turning to the analysis of intertextuality in Lithuanian literature translated into French, it is useful to survey Lithuanian literature translated into French to point out the role of literary translation as a bridge between cultures (Lederer, La traduction aujourd’hui 128; Trotter and De Capua 447–462). The extent of cultural distance undoubtedly affects translation of intertextuality, especially in cases when the intertextuality of the source language text is comprised of references to local culture.6 As Geneviève Roux-Faucard has stated, it is usually in the first translations that the depletion of the translated text in terms of intertextuality is the highest (108).

6 I am drawing here on Kishori Nayak’s term “cultural textuality” which, in reference to Graham Allen’s notion of intertextuality, regards the text “not [as] an individual, isolated object, but [as] a compilation of cultural textuality” (58).

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2.

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Visibility of Lithuanian Literature in France

One of the major contributors to the visibility of Lithuanian literature in France is Ugne˙ Karvelis, a literary critic, translator and public figure of Lithuanian descent who lived in France. In La littérature lituanienne: Une lutte séculaire pour le droit d’écrire (1998 [Lith. Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ra: ˇsimtmecˇius trukusi kova uzˇ teise˛ rasˇyti; Eng. Lithuanian Literature: Hundreds of Years of Struggle for the Right to Write]), she surveys Lithuanian literature from widely different periods to show its unique national and linguistic characteristics and to point to links with European literature. Karvelis scans Lithuanian literary history, starting with the publication of Martynas Mazˇvydas’s Simple Words of Catechism (1547 [Lith. Katekizmo prasti zˇodzˇiai]), which is the first printed book in the Lithuanian language. She then lists the most enduring works of Lithuanian literature, which include works by the eighteenth-century writer Kristijonas Donelaitis, nineteenth-century writer Antanas Baranauskas, turn-of-the-century writer Zˇemaite˙, and twentieth-century writers Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, Jurga Ivanauskaite˙, Tomas Venclova, Saulius Tomas Kondrotas, Ricˇardas Gavelis, and others. Karvelis’s synopsis of Lithuanian literary history offers discussions about the legacy of myth, folklore and oral tradition in Lithuanian literature and situates it within historical and cultural contexts that shaped the development of literary trends and forms. Karvelis also wrote literary criticism on Lithuanian poetry in Poésie 92. Revue bimestrielle de la poésie d’aujourd’hui (Lith. Poezija 92. Sˇiuolaikine˙s poezijos dvime˙nesinis zˇurnalas; Eng. Poetry 92. Bimonthly Journal of Contemporary Poetry) and published her own translations of poetry in Cahiers Lituaniens (2003 [Lith. Lietuvisˇkieji sa˛siuviniai; Eng. Lithuanian Papers]). The main themes and literary traditions in contemporary Lithuanian literary prose, represented by twentieth-century writers Antanas Sˇke˙ma, Mariaus Katilisˇkis, Markas Zingeris and others, have been described to French readers by Lithuanian literary critic Loreta Macˇianskaite˙ (7–19). Theatre critic Ina Pukelyte˙ reviewed the features of contemporary Lithuanian theatre as manifested in the works of contemporary writers Sigitas Parulskis and Marius Ivasˇkevicˇius (7–13). The annual Cahiers Lituaniens (Lith. Lietuvisˇkieji sa˛siuviniai; Eng. Lithuanian Papers) published in Strasbourg, France, provides an important platform for publishing works of Lithuanian literature in translation, as well as Lithuanian literary criticism. Worthy of mention is Aldona Ruseckaite˙’s study of Lithuanian Romantic poet Maironis’s (37–40), an internationally acclaimed “Roman Catholic priest” and “the bard of the Lithuanian national renaissance” (“Maironis: Lithuanian Poet”), and her analysis of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s epic poem The Seasons (c. 1765–1775) (41–45), “the greatest narrative poem ever to appear in Lithuanian literature” (Klimas). Also of mention is Laimantas Jonusˇys’s comprehensive analysis of recent Lithuanian literary fiction (45–56). In the 2013 issue

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of Cahiers Lituaniens, Janine Kohler analysed literary works by Oscar Milosz (21–26), “a French-Lithuanian poet” (“Oscar Milosz: Biography”). Of particular interest is Des dieux et des hommes: Étude de mythologie lithuanienne (1985 [Lith. Tautos atminties beiesˇkant: Apie dievus ir zˇmones; Eng. Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology]) by Algirdas Julius Greimas, a Lithuanian-born Parisian semiotician. The book offers insight into pre-Christian Lithuanian mythology and its narrative structures. Another French language writer of Lithuanian descent, Oscar Milosz, a poet and writer of “drama, essays [and] fiction” is “an esteemed diplomat for Lithuania at the League of Nations” (“Oscar Milosz: Biography”), who published two volumes of Lithuanian fairy tales in French: Contes et Fabliaux de la vieille Lituanie (1930 [Lith. Senosios Lietuvos pasakos ir pasakojimai; Eng. Ancient Lithuanian Fairy Tales and Legends]) and Contes lituaniens de ma Mère l’Oye (1938 [Lith. Mano motusˇe˙s lietuvisˇkos pasakos; Eng. My Mother’s Fairy Tales]). The aforementioned works of literary criticism, mythology, and folklore serve as a repository of knowledge about Lithuanian literature and culture. The correlation between literature and culture to be transmitted in translation can be viewed from the perspective of the question posed by Jonathan Culler: “Is culture the effect of representations rather than their source or cause”? (48). In this regard, translations of Lithuanian literature into French have served as a link to Lithuanian culture.7 Philippe Edel, the editor-in-chief of Cahiers Lituaniens compiled a list of Lithuanian literature translated into French and literary works by Lithuanian writers written in French. The list covers the period of eighty-two years—from 1927 (when the collection of poetry Coupe de vents [Lith. Ve˙ju˛ taure˙; Eng. Cup of Winds] was published in French by Juozas Tysliava)—to 2009. The list of Lithuanian literary works translated into French between 2009 and 2017 was compiled by the author of the article. The number of translations during both periods, to the best of the author’s knowledge, totals 139. Most of the translations were published between 1990 and 2017. During this period, 127 literary texts of different genres were translated into French, which comprises 91 per cent of all French translations of Lithuanian literature known to the author of the article. Following Lithuania’s accession to the European Union in 2004, the number of literary works translated into foreign languages, including French, increased considerably. This may be seen as a national sentiment to circulate national cultural productions beyond state borders and, simultaneously, as a determination to participate in (inter)cultural dialogue as a cultural player in its own

7 This is a paraphrase of Anuradha Dingwaney’s statement that translations are “one of the primary means . . . by which cultures travel” (6).

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right.8 The analysis in the next section considers how recognising, interpreting, and re-expressing selected aspects of intertextuality implied in the French translations of Lithuanian literature contribute to this dialogue in the sense of providing cognitive knowledge for its participants, including literary translators.

3.

Cultural Content of Intertextuality in Lithuanian Literature and Its French Translations

The analysis of intertextual references and their cultural content is based on Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of intertextuality as the presence of “a permutation of texts” in any text, whence a text is viewed as a space where “several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another” (36). The particular categories of utterance that were chosen for the present analysis include (1) direct quotations, or literal borrowings from other texts; (2) paraphrases, consisting of borrowings of a lesser degree of literality than direct quotations, which are clearly recognisable and acknowledged; (3) literal borrowings without acknowledgement of a source; (4) allusions as per traditional definition of the term as “passing reference[s], without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage” (Abrams 5). The analysis also considers intertextuality as revision which imbues borrowings with alternative meanings. Within the research corpus, which comprises 1400 pages of literary fiction, a total of 315 instances of the four types of intertextuality have been identified to prevail. Allusions constitute the largest percentage of intertextual references (181 examples, 57.6 per cent), followed by literal borrowings (63 examples, 20 per cent), with direct quotations and paraphrases being the least numerous categories (42 examples, 13.3 per cent, and 29 examples, 9.1 per cent, respectively). The analysis of the 315 examples aimed to identify tendencies in the choice of translation solutions in rendering the four types of intertextuality from Lithuanian into French. The study of tendencies went beyond “the equivalence ideal” emphasised in the normative/prescriptive approach focusing on

8 I am borrowing the phrase “cultural player” from Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council “Towards an EU Strategy for International Cultural Relations” highlighting the role of national cultural products in “promoting culture and intercultural dialogue for peaceful inter-community relations” (European Commission, 2016). Literary translation as participation in the international cultural arena has been identified as the key area in the Creative Europe programme as delineated in the document of the European Commission “Creative Europe—Culture—Literary Translation”: “The objectives of the ‘Literary translation’ scheme are to promote the transnational circulation of literature and its diversity in Europe and beyond and to expand the readership of quality translated books” (European Commission, 2016).

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how translations “reproduce[e] in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style” (Naudé 47). Rather than analysing translation in view of its faithfulness to the formal aspects of the source language text, the present study highlights two tenets of interpretive translation theory as methodological priorities. First and foremost, translation is treated as the translator’s subjective interpretation—as Kang Qiang would have it—“of the original text through linguistic signals” aiming to reproduce “the sense or effects of the original text rather than the linguistic units” (236). Secondly, each translation choice is studied as a single case of reformulating the implied textual meaning, created by the relationship between the intertextual referent and the text as a whole. Needless to say, treating translation choices as individual cases in unique contexts complicated identification of tendencies in translation solutions. A comparative analysis of translation solutions revealed that retention of intertextual references prevailed. It was identified in 167 cases, comprising 53 per cent of the examples containing target groups of intertextual references. Explanation of intertextual references by footnotes or short in-text explanations was found in 84 cases (27 per cent). In 54 cases (17 per cent), literal translation was used. These were cases when the translator seems not to have recognised intertextual references and therefore decontextualised them. Omission occurred only in 9 cases (3 per cent). As mentioned above, retention of intertextual references constitutes the greatest majority of translation choices. Such choices prevail in the translation of allusions evoking links with commonly known cultural texts. The following excerpt from Ricˇardas Gavelis’s short story, “Berankis” (1989 [Fr. “Le manchot”; Eng. “Handless”]), serves as an illustration: Jos de˙ka jis isˇgyveno priesˇ trisdesˇimt su kaupu metu˛, isˇgyvens ir dabar, nes jo Penelope˙ laukia atstu¯musi jaunikius, laukia sugri˛zˇtancˇio nuo placˇios, niu¯rios upe˙s krantu˛. (Gavelis, “Berankis” 49; emphasis added)9 Grâce à elle, il avait survécu plus de trente ans, et il survivrait encore, car sa Pénélope l’attendait ; repoussant tous ses prétendants, elle attendait qu’il revienne des bords de la grande rivière sombre. (Gavelis, “Le manchot” 283; emphasis added)10 Thanks to her he had survived more than thirty years ago, he’d survive now too, for his Penelope had repulsed the young men and was waiting, was waiting for his return from

9 This and other examples of Lithuanian literature translated into French language, with a different focus, were discussed in the monograph Aurelija Leonavicˇiene˙, Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija ir vertimas (2014). In the monograph, these examples were not analysed in terms of French interpretive translation theory. 10 Translated from Lithuanian into French by Muriel Puig (283).

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the wide and somber banks of the river. (Gavelis, “Berankis” [“Handless”] 179; emphasis added)11

Within the broader context of the story’s emphasis on the relationship between “political and sociological factors” and “their psychological consequences for the individual,” the parallel between the archetype of the good, faithful wife, Penelope, and the wife of the protagonist, Elena, addresses hardships that families and individuals had to suffer during the soviet regime (Kelertas 9). In particular, as Violeta Kelertas argues, Ricˇardas Gavelis’s “Handless” “touches on some of the circumstances of deportation and exile to Siberia” (30). As a contextual note, it has to be mentioned that deportations to forced labours camps and gulags in the “Soviet interior” (Balkelis 47) took place between 1940 and 1953 and affected one-third of the Lithuanian population (Balkelis 47; Kuodyte˙ “The Tragic Story”). In Gavelis’s short story, the male protagonist Vytautas Handless is a deportee survivor, struggling to re-integrate into society after coming back from Siberia. As Kelertas notes, back in Lithuania, Handless “still refers to Siberia only as the Land of Miracles” (27). However, Vytautas Handless “can find no one interested in his past or himself as the embodiment” of misery and starvation in the Siberian camps (28). It is only “weekly visits to his wife’s grave and his communion with her soul” that help him to survive after the traumatic experience of witnessing his fellow men die under merciless and inhuman conditions in Siberia (28). In this respect, the intertextual link with the legendary story of Odysseus, established through the name of the protagonist’s wife, Penelope, may be read as involving a revisionary stance on classical mythology. Odysseus, to quote Jeremy Hawthorn, “lives in a society without history and knows that his fate is in the hands of gods” (8). His “efforts are directed towards returning home” to be integrated into the society he had left behind (8). In “Handless,” society’s indifference as the only reaction to the returnee may allude to the fear that existed in the pre-glasnost society to communicate with returnees from Siberia who were regarded as “enemies of the people” (Feest 100). Postcolonial readings of Gavelis’s short story point out its pessimism which is suggested by the fact that none of the characters who underwent deportation survive, whereas the archetypal waiting wife leaves Handless a widower. Almantas Samalavicˇius holds that the tragic fate of the characters symbolises “the destiny of a colonised nation, keeping in mind that at the time when Gavelis was writing his short story, Lithuanian society was mired in a gloomy atmosphere of ‘mature socialism’ and no illusions of regime change could be felt” (417). Viewed in this way, the revision of the classical myth in “Handless” may be read as suggesting a commentary on the cultural space re-presented in the short 11 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Violeta Kelertas.

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story. Cultural space has been defined by Michel Foucault as “the sedimentation of layers over time” (Foucault qtd. in St Clair and Williams 1). As explained, “sedimentation” stands for “the accumulation of social practices layered in cultural space” (St Clair and Williams 1). Such understanding of the relationship between time and space “differs from the linear model of time in that it argues that time is embedded in space: the present is embedded in the cultural past and the future is embedded in the cultural present” (1). The temporal planes are not “disparate categories” but interconnected: In the sociology of everyday life, one understands the present because it is embedded in the past. There are rituals, social scenarios, and social practices that constitute the practical knowledge that underlies everyday social interaction. The present and the past encounter each other in the co-present. It is here where one accepts the past in the context of the present and reformulates it into the new-past. Similarly, it is in the copresent that one modifies, redefines, or re-interprets the past as the new-present. Newly-emergent realities may also develop in the co-present and these form the basis for the future as the future is embedded in the new-present. (St Clair and Williams 1)

In Ricˇardas Gavelis’s story, the representation of moments designated by St Clair and Williams as “co-present” or the “emerging-present”—moments “when the present is emerging into a new level of consciousness” (1–2) extend over two spatial planes. One is Vilnius; the other is Siberia. When back in Vilnius, Vytautas Handless feels unable to develop a new perspective on the past and to integrate it into the present because of what St Clair and Williams designate as the “conflict with many of the more established patterns of the past” (3). For him, the notion of the past denotes the time before his deportation and, implicitly, before the imposition of a new political order on his country. As to deportation, an essential component that shapes the male protagonist’s understanding of the past in relation to space/culture is the event that makes him lose hope in “humanity’s innate goodness” (Kelertas 28). This loss refers to the episode in which Vytautas Handless, together with other prisoners of a Siberian forced labour camp, “were deliberately left in the snow” of the Siberian wilderness “with two weeks of rations” to die of cold and starvation (Kelertas 28). Believing that “such monstrosity is beyond the comprehension of the normal human mind” the prisoners make a raft to carry a plea for help to the world (28). In the absence of any means to communicate the message, the male protagonist, who is one of several characters who suffer from delirium, cuts off one of his hands and attaches it to the raft convinced that the hand would be noticed, and the men would be rescued from death. The world, however, shows no mercy, and only Handless and his friend, Aleksys, escape death. Upon returning to Vilnius, Handless and Aleksys often re-live their shared past, but they never reach what St. Clair and Williams define as “co-present” (1). Reaching this temporal/spatial point would mean

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reconciliation with the past and acquisition of a new perspective that better suits the contexts of the present. Otherwise stated, it would imply accepting a social change to have taken place. Accepting the new present involves, according to St. Clair and Williams, retention “of some cultural practices along with the modification, revision, and re-invention of events in the co-present” (1). Retaining the sanctity of the past, Handless chooses death as a way to regain wholeness by uniting with his wife who bears links with Penelope.12 The close intertextual affinity with the Odyssey narrative suggests identification with the cultural space of Europe. The change of the storyline surrounding the union of husband and wife, on the other hand, reinforces the pessimism that runs throughout the story. The ideology implied through twisting the plot of the original story suggests that reaching out to the narratives at the roots of European culture becomes the legacy of the past. The cultural space of the future, for which the co-presence should pave the way, as Ricˇardas Gavelis’s “Handless” reveals, is comprised of the cultural norms and social practices that aim to eradicate any scripts that go against the ideological agendas of the soviet rule. In view of the above, Ricˇardas Gavelis’s “Handless” may be regarded to belong to the category of texts designated in the Benjamin Translation Library Series 2018 volume as “key cultural texts” (Malmkjær, S¸erban, and Louwagie 1). The notion refers to texts that are “considered important in [their] source culture and had contributed to the shaping of that culture.” As translated texts, they “would have had influence on the target culture and changed that culture in some way” (2). Although the identification of texts as key in a culture is somewhat problematic in that it overlooks the question of power involved in the production and reception of texts, the view that certain texts can be particularly instrumental in “presenting and representing the culture to itself and in defining its cultural others (people, places, and customs)” (1) can serve as an important incentive for the translator. These texts are discussed as important in “help[ing] to define concepts” such as “citizenship, freedom and personal identity” and to show how “[t]he concepts typically vary across languages and cultures” and how “their variance comes to light especially clearly in translations” (1). Intertextuality, for that matter, as cross-referencing to “texts from another culture” create, to quote Douwe Fokkema, “double referentiality” in that it engages with the “social reality” of the incorporated text “and, mostly literary, pre-texts” (9). The two referential frames “alert readers to the necessity of a careful reading that allows them to see things in a new light” (10). Fokkema also states that “the creative assimilation of texts and ideas from another culture in new work indicates an ultimate form of cultural integration, an explicit sign of transcending cultural barriers” (8). Intertextuality as engaging with cultural concepts and contexts has 12 For a reading of the Odyssey narrative along such lines, see Howard Clarke 51.

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been discussed above with reference to Ricˇardas Gavelis’s “Handless.” The retention of intertextuality with the Odysseus’s story in translation has helped convey the semantic and affective content of the original in the target language text. An excerpt from Juozas Aputis’s short story “Horizonte be˙ga sˇernai” (1970 [Fr. “Les sangliers courent à l’horizon”; Eng. “Wild Boars Run on the Horizon”]) provides another example in this regard: Gvildys susirado kampe laisva˛ nudauzˇyta˛ staliuka˛ ir atsise˙do. Jei bu¯tu˛ kada mate˛s, jis tikrai pagalvotu˛, koks dabar graudzˇiai panasˇus ˛i dailininko autoportreta˛ be ausies. (Aputis, “Horizonte be˙ga sˇernai” 91; emphasis added) Gvildys trouva une petite table râpée dans un coin et s’assit. S’il l’avait connu, il aurait sûrement pensé qu’il ressemblait maintenant à cet autoportrait d’un peintre sans oreille. (Aputis, “Les sangliers courent à l’horizon” 26; emphasis added)13 Gvildys found an empty, banged-up table in a corner and sat down. If he had ever had occasion to see it, surely it would have occurred to him how sadly he resembled the selfportrait of the painter without his ear. (Aputis, “Horizonte be˙ga sˇernai” [“Wild Boars Run on the Horizon”] 85; emphasis added)14

The allusion to Van Gogh, suggested by the phrase “the painter without his ear,” provides a parallel between the emotional and the physical condition of the renowned painter and that of Gvildys, the male protagonist of Aputis’s story. The episode describes the confusion that Gvildys experiences after being “attacked by his wife, who without any warning tries to poke out his eyes with a broom” (Kelertas 15). Both Gvildys and his wife work on a collective farm, kolkhoz. This is a form of agricultural enterprise formed in Lithuania—and other soviet states—as an outcome of forced collectivisation following the occupation of the country (Feest 79–112). Aputis’s story reflects the wider social and political realities of life at the time by suggesting an implicit critique of forced collectivisation and its effects on the individual. As Violeta Kelertas states, “[h]usband and wife, the centre of the Lithuanian household, which has remained essentially patriarchal, are both ‘dehumanised’ to the point that the values traditional to an agricultural society (nature, livestock, family) become irrelevant” (15). The depiction of the characters as demotivated, overcome by inertia and prone to alcoholism, as Gvildys is, can be read through the lens of the history of collectivisation. The process is described as including the following: Under collectivisation the peasantry were forced to give up their individual farms and join large collective farms (kolkhozy). The process was ultimately undertaken in conjunction with the campaign to industrialise the Soviet Union rapidly. . . . But the 13 Translated from Lithuanian into French by trans. Giedre˙ et Loïc Salfati. 14 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Rita Dapkus, Gregory Grazevich, and Violeta Kelertas.

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peasants objected violently to abandoning their private farms. In many cases, before joining the kolkhozy they slaughtered their livestock and destroyed their equipment. (“Collectivisation: Agricultural Policy”)

Depriving the farmers of their possessions, as Edmund Padvaiskas holds, had a negative effect on work ethics and, by extension, on the endurance of old traditions because “the individualist-minded peasant” prefers “to own his own land and has no desire to become a mere labourer for the state.” Under the circumstances, “[t]he Lithuanian peasant, like the peasants in the rest of the U.S.S.R., will devote more time and energy to working his own small plot of land than he will to the communal kolkhoz fields” (Padvaiskas). In “Wild Boars Run on the Horizon,” the comparison of the male protagonist to the world famous artist, Van Gogh, on the one hand, and to Sisyphus, on the other hand, may be read as an attempt to disguise the social commentary in order to meet the principles of socialist realism, “the only acceptable form of writing” during the soviet period (Morson). The comparison of the male protagonist’s labours to those of Sisyphus suggests that, like Sisyphus before him, Gvildys envisions his day-to-day existence as toiling towards meaninglessness despite his aspiration for a more meaningful life. Such thoughts overcome him when, having left his tractor in a peat-bog, he climbs to the hilltop and contemplates human mortality and his own relationship to the transcendent. Shortly afterwards, he nearly loses his sight after being attacked by his wife. The injury physically harms him. Yet, as can be gleaned from the parallel with Van Gogh, it can also increase his perceptive capacities and inner knowledge to be communicated to the world. The comparison of a kolkhoznik to a world-famous artist emphasises the inner potential of the Lithuanian farmer who for centuries existed as a bulwark of Lithuanian cultural identity. As the story reveals, the former status of the Lithuanian farmer as a pillar of culture becomes challenged by destructive forces on Lithuanian soil. The forces are embodied by tractors compared to wild boars—animals associated with the destruction of crops. Gvildys’s blinding, then, as symbolic castration, can provide him with a pathway to evade the soviet realities, including the workforce. This thematic line in Aputis’s story recalls Antanas Andrijauskas’s statement that withdrawing into an alternative “antiworld” was a crucial survival strategy for many who “would not accept soviet reality during those years that were so difficult for people who refused to submit” to the regime (69). Juozas Aputis’s literary works are very much about such people and the inner conflicts that they undergo. The writer described “the Lithuanian story” as a form of “crying, holding a small person in its arms” (Sprindyte˙101). Frequently, his stories are written in Aesopian language (Jevsejevas 303). Intertextuality, as in “Wild Boars Run on the Horizon,” is one of its forms—retained in the target text.

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Intertextuality is also generally retained in rendering references to the Catholic Bible and other religious intertexts as in the example below: Mamute˙ tebesimelde˙. – Viesˇpaties Angelas apreisˇke˙ Marijai: Tu prade˙si isˇ Sˇventosios Dvasios. Sveika, Marija, malone˙s pilnoji! Viesˇpats su tavimi . . . ˇ ia Morta nutilo, galva˛nuleido. (Meras, “Kartus ru¯gsˇtyniu˛ skonis” 71; emphasis added) C Sa petite mère continuait de prier. – L’Ange de Seigneur est apparu à Marie: tu enfanteras par le Saint-Esprit. Salut Marie pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec toi . . . Ici, Morta se tut, baissa la tête. (Meras, “Le goût amer de l’oseille” 92–93; emphasis added)15 Mother continued praying. “The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary. And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . .” At this, Morta fell silent and lowered her head. (Meras, “Kartus ru¯gsˇtyniu˛ skonis” [“The Bitter Taste of Sorrell”] 71; emphasis added)16

The excerpt is from the short story “The Bitter Taste of Sorrell” by Icchokas Meras, a Holocaust survivor who, in Leona Toker’s words, “had been sheltered during the war by a heroic Lithuanian family and rose to literary fame in the 1960s” (126). His works are both “part of the Lithuanian national literary process and part of the conversation about the Holocaust in which the emphasis lays on heroism and self-sacrifice rather than on victimhood and the struggle for survival” (Toker 126). In the short story “The Bitter Taste of Sorrel,” the description of these existential human conditions illustrates to perfection Lawrence Langer’s statement that “the Holocaust experience challenged the redemptive value of all moral, community, and religious systems of belief” (“Preempting the Holocaust”). In Meras’s story, a young Jewish man visits his second mother, Morta, who had saved him from extermination and had given him the Lithuanian name Stepukas. She is now secretly sheltering the murderer of his parents to protect him from public condemnation and persecution. Morta’s understanding of goodness leads to a catastrophe: the sheltered murderer kills both Morta and Stepukas. The name of Morta links with the biblical Martha and the ideas that she embodies. The biblical Martha sought to find the balance between practicality and spirituality. Her encounters with God helped her to find the balance between the two (Fletcher). Both of these spheres of activity alternate in Meras’s story. When Stepukas visits his second mother, Morta, she is cooking sorrel soup for 15 Translated from Lithuanian into French by Marielle Vitureau. 16 Translation from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙. The English version of the prayer is from “The Angelus” (EWTN Global Catholic Network).

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Mykoliukas, a murderer of Jews, whom she hides under the floorboards of her house—in the same place where Stepukas had been hiding. Fearing an encounter between Stepukas and the murderer hiding in her house, Morta tries to pray, but her confusion over the situation hinders her prayers. Unlike the biblical Martha who experiences life-changing encounters with God (Fletcher), Meras’s Morta feels entangled in the dilemma of service/sacrifice and worship, but the overwhelming feeling of guilt precludes her from praying, that is, from reaching out to God. After Mykoliukas kills Morta and Stepukas, the house turns into a quasi fairytale place where a visitor can always find fresh food and a burning stove (Lansbergis). The emphasis on the service aspect and the excision of worship at the end of Meras’s narrative resonates with discourses on challenges to “the traditional views of God” in the face of crimes against humanity (Koppenman Ross). The idea of hopelessness created by an ideological slant on the biblical narrative is counterbalanced by the plea for prayer for innocent souls in the epilogue of the story. This plea, due to its engagement with ethic and religious dimensions, becomes an intermediate space, as it were, between the fairy tale/fantasy genres at the end of the story and the realist mode that dominates most of the narrative. Whereas the employment of the fantastic may stand for the impossibility of accepting reality and for the impossibility of representation, “when the human scene is something of the incomprehensible and inhuman in nature, when the reality of the Holocaust ‘transcends’ the imagination” (Workman 1),17 the closure of the story strikes an optimistic tone. The call to prayer for the innocent comes full circle to the episodes describing Morta’s inability to pray and the circumstances that determine a disruption of balance between practicality and spirituality inscribed in the biblical story. Therefore, it seems that the plea in the epilogue of “The Bitter Taste of Sorrell” implies a hope for restoration of this balance and, by implication, a restoration of balance to the world that Meras describes as “turned upside down.”18 The French translation retains the fragments of prayers appearing in the original, and so acknowledges their function as intertexts linking Meras’s story with the biblical narrative and its thematic concerns. From the perspective of interpretive translation theory, the target text presents a case of correspondence in translation (par correspondances). Such translation solution is applied, to quote Choi Jungwha “[w]hen correspondence is possible,” in which case the translator “can move directly from understanding to re-expression” (9). Otherwise stated, correspondence refers to translation of language when the source 17 I am drawing on See Sarah Workman’s discussion of the fantastic in Holocaust literature (“The Strange Play of Traumatic Reality: Enchantment in Jewish American Literature”). 18 Reference is made to the title of the collection of Meras’s short stories The World Turned Upside Down (1995) of which “The Bitter Taste of Sorrell” is a part.

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text is replaced with the corresponding text in the target language, as in the case of translation of prayers in Icchokas Meras’s text. According to Marianne Lederer, translation by correspondence is used only in a limited number of cases: when the word or text refers to “a well-defined object” or concept (les mots choisis délibérément); when translating technical terms (les termes techniques); when translating enumerations (les énumérations), especially in technical texts; when translating proper names and numbers (55, 67–70, 86). Otherwise, interpretive translation theory regards translation as “not simply a one-way process of decoding from the source language to the target one” (décocage de la langue originale), but rather as recreation of the overall sense/meaning invested in the original (Qiang 239). The analysed corpus also included examples of modified correspondence. To give an instance: Isˇsizˇade˙jo save˛s, vos triskart pragydo gaidys, pats vienas buvo ir Je˙zus, ir apasˇtalas Petras. Jam reike˙jo surasti save, gri˛zˇti ˛i save bent priesˇ mirti˛. (Gavelis, “Berankis” 41; emphasis added) Il avait renoncé à lui-même, au troisième chant du coq il était à lui seul Jésus et l’apôtre Pierre. Il fallait qu’il se trouve, qu’il retourne à lui-même, au moins avant de mourir. (Gavelis, “Le manchot” 272; emphasis added) The cock having crowed scarcely three times, he had denied himself, he himself was both Jesus and the Apostle Peter. He had to recover himself, return to himself at least before he died. (Gavelis, “Berankis” [“Handless”] 172; emphasis added)

Another is: Nubusk ir melskis: “Te˙ve nebe mu¯su˛, neduok daugiau jiems duonos kasdienine˙s, – pyrago duok.” Kasdien mazˇiau te˙vyne˙s. (Marcˇe˙nas, “Metai be zˇiogo” 54; emphasis added) Réveille-toi et prie : “Toi qui n’es plus notre père, ne leur donne plus leur pain quotidien, donne-leur du gâteau.” Chaque jour un peu moins de patrie. (Marcˇe˙nas, “Année sans sauterelle” 55; emphasis added)19 Wake up and pray: “Father, not ours any more, don’t give them this day their daily bread, give them pastry.” Give less homeland every day. (Marcˇe˙nas, “Metai be zˇiogo” [“A Year without a Grasshopper”] 54, emphasis added)20

The first text, a passage from Ricˇardas Gavelis’s short story “Handless,” discussed previously, alludes to the biblical episode concerning Peter’s disowning of Jesus 19 Translation from Lithuanian into French by Jean-Claude Lefebvre. 20 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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(Matthew 26:69–75). The second text, an excerpt from Aidas Marcˇe˙nas’s poem “Metai be zˇiogo” (1994 [“A Year without a Grasshopper”]), employs a modification of the Lord’s Prayer. In Gavelis’s “Handless,” the intertextuality with the biblical text develops the theme of trauma, caused by witnessing his fellow prisoners die in remote Siberia, and the survivor’s guilt. Throughout his life, Vytautas Berankis (Eng. Handless) perceives himself as being torn between two conflicting identities: that of a weak betrayer and that of the righteous man, suggested in the male protagonist’s identification with Peter and Jesus. In the final moments of his life, Handless wants to free himself from the tormenting duality by reaching into his self beyond the traumatic experience. The negativity and irony in the modified Lord’s Prayer as intertext to Aidas Marcˇe˙nas’s poem foregrounds a confusion about traditional values21 and the social consequences of such a confusion as a universal postmodern condition.22 The consequences include a consumerist orientation with regard to art and personal values, including the personal link with one’s homeland. In the French translations of Gavelis’s and Marcˇe˙nas’s texts, linguistic units from the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer are translated using correspondence. Problems related to the translation of meaning/sense, created by modification of religious texts in Gavelis’s and Marcˇe˙nas’s literary works, recall the statement by Lithuanian translator and critic Irena Balcˇiu¯niene˙ who holds that “split into many fragments, the Bible disseminates across the entire literary work, contributing to generation of meaning(s). Retrieving this meaning and rendering it into another language pose many challenges for translators” (12).23 What can be identified as a challenge in the French translation of Gavelis’s “Handless” is the re-expression of sense/meaning conveyed by self-identification of Vytautas Handless with “both Jesus and the Apostle Peter” (Gavelis’s “Berankis” [“Handless”] 172). In the source text, the idea of the two selves hinges on a parallel structure created by the repetition of the conjunction ir (Eng. and) and the proper nouns Jesus and Peter: “ir Je˙zus, ir apasˇtalas Petras” [back translated: and Jesus and Peter]. The parallel structure, as per definition, is used two show that all of its structural parts are of equal importance (Jeffries and McIntyre 33). In the French translation, the duality of identity is expressed using the phrase: “il était à lui seul Jésus et l’apôtre Pierre” [back translated: he envisioned himself as both Jesus and Peter] (Gavelis, “Le manchot” 272). 21 The reading of the poem along such lines has been presented by Audinga Pelurityte˙, Rita Tu¯tlyte˙, Viktorija Daujotyte˙-Pakeriene˙, and Regimantas Tamosˇaitis (“Naujausios lietuviu˛ poezijos skaitymai: Aidas Marcˇe˙nas”). 22 For the discussion of postmodernism and social contingency, see Phillip Brian Harper (4). 23 Quoted with modifications from Irena Balcˇiu¯niene˙, “Biblijos atspindzˇiai H. Melville’io romane Mobis Dikas, arba banginis ir ju˛ perteikimas” (12). Translation of Balcˇiu¯niene˙’s text from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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In Marcˇe˙nas’s poem, the Lithuanian adverb nebe (Eng. not anymore; different from the previous one) is used to modify the Lord’s Prayer. The modification signals a change in values that are encoded in the prayer. The Lithuanian nebe also stresses how a temporal dimension changes the relationship with God. Within the thematic network of the poem, the modification of the prayer implies a contrastive aspect, suggesting that the Judeo-Christian concept of God is replaced by consumerism as the new religion. Similar meanings, in the sense of cognitive and affective equivalence, are conveyed by the French phrase qui n’est plus, meaning not anymore. The analysis has demonstrated that explicitation of intertextual meaning, which is “making explicit in the target text information that is implicit in the source text” (Klaudy 80) was most often used when dealing with proper names. As indicated at the beginning of this section, such translation solutions constitute 25 per cent among the target types of intertextuality. To give an illustration: Tai atsitiko seniai, labai seniai, turbu¯t, dar tais laikais, kai pakele˙se bude˙davo gyvi akmenys, prie kuriu˛ samanotu˛ kru¯tiniu˛, sˇilumos iesˇkodamos, glausdavosi pamocˇiu˛ isˇ namu˛ isˇvarytos ir rudens darganu˛ skaudzˇiai nuplaktos nasˇlaite˙s Sigute˙s. (Biliu¯nas, “Pasaka apie knyga˛” 7; emphasis added) Cela se passait il y a longtemps, bien longtemps, dans ces temps peut-être où sur les chemins veillaient des pierres vivantes, et sur leur poitrine moussue se blottissaient, cherchant la chaleur, des Sigute˙ orphelines chassées de la maison par leur marâtre et durement fouettées par les pluies d’automne. (Biliu¯nas, “Le Livre du Destin” 51; emphasis added)24 All this happened long ago, in the distant past, at the time when living stones kept guard at roadsides. To their moss-coated breasts, orphaned Sigute˙s, expelled from home by their stepmothers and battered by autumnal mists, would cuddle up in search of warmth.(Biliu¯nas, “Pasaka apie knyga˛” [“A Tale about a Book”] 7; emphasis added)25

The fairy tale-like opening of Antanas Biliu¯nas’s short story “Pasaka apie knyga˛” [1970 Fr. “Le Livre du Destin”; Eng. “A Tale about a Book”]) includes a reference to Sigute˙, an orphan in a Lithuanian folktale of the same name. The theme of an exiled orphan in Biliu¯nas’s text imbued with determinist ideas resonates with similar thematic networks tackled in many folk tales and fairy tales such as, “Snow White,” for example. In these fairy tales, “[o]rphanage and exiled orphan mark the creation of identity and self-expression” (Al-Barazenji). Being in isolation helps the orphan “reach full recognition that [one’s] identity needs another kind of fulfilment” different from the one allowed at home (51). To link Antanas Biliu¯nas’s text to similar archetypal themes tackled in fiction and folklore of different cultures,

24 Translated from Lithuanian into French by Jean-Claude Lefebvre. 25 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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translator Jean-Claude Lefebvre explains the meaning of the name Sigute˙ in a footnote. It says that Sigute˙ is a character in a popular Lithuanian fairy tale ([Fr. “Personnage de contes populaires lituaniens”] 51). An additional example is an excerpt from Judita Vaicˇiu¯naite˙’s “Telefonu˛ knyga” (1996 [Fr. ‘L’annuaire téléphonique’; Eng. “Telephone Directory”]), which is part of her literary memoir26 Vaikyste˙s veidrody (Eng. In the Mirror of Childhood): Gimiau labai mazˇa, ilgais juodais plaukais. “Tikra Judita” – pasake˙ pirma˛kart mane pamate˛s te˙vas, o varda˛ jau buvo isˇrinke˛s Petras Vaicˇiu¯nas. (Vaicˇiu¯naite˙, “Telefonu˛ knyga” 8–9; emphasis added) Je suis née minuscule avec de logs cheveux noirs. “Une vraie Judith”, avait dit mon père dès qu’il m’a vue, même si le prénom avait déjà été choisi par Petras Vaicˇiu¯nas. (Vaicˇiu¯naite˙, “L’annuaire téléphonique” 4; emphasis added)27 I was born very small, with long black hair. “Real Judita,” my father said when he saw me the first time, and my name had already been chosen by Petras Vaicˇiu¯nas. (Vaicˇiu¯naite˙, “Telefonu˛ knyga” [“Telephone Directory”] 8–9; emphasis added)28

As the literary memoir of the poet, prose writer, and translator Judita Vaicˇiu¯naite˙ reveals, she grew up surrounded by famous literary and cultural figures of pre-war Lithuania. The vivid description of these people is not only a fictional account of how they contributed to the shaping of her identity. Her literary work also fictionalises the cultural life of independent Lithuania, and the life of the intelligentsia in particular. Many of the names mentioned in the memoir function as intertextual referents “embodying an intertextual play” as Michael Issacharoff puts it (35). In the French translation of Vaicˇiu¯naite˙’s story, the ground for such play is provided by the contextualisation of the intertextual referent, Petras Vaicˇiu¯nas, in a footnote. It explains that Petras Vaicˇiu¯nas is a Lithuanian author and the uncle of the author ([Fr. “Écrivain lituanien, oncle de l’auteur”] 46). Among 315 examples analysed in the present study, fifty-four cases of literal translation were identified. In effect, these were cases in which the translator did not recognise intertextual references, which deprived the target text from the connotations created by the intertext. The role of text and intertext in producing the text’s meaning evokes the notion of the hermeneutical circle explaining that “[t]he anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole” (Gadamer 291). The following passage from Algirdas

26 For the discussion on the controversies regarding the genre of this literary work, see Solveiga Daugirdaite˙, “Women’s Literature and Its Readings” 186. 27 Translated from Lithuanian into French by Liudmila Edel-Matuolis. 28 Translation from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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Landsbergis’s short story “Dainos gimimas” (1992 [Fr. “Genèse d’une chanson”; Eng. “The Birth of Song”]) contains phrases from the poem “Traku˛ pilis” (1892 [“Trakai Castle”]) by a prominent Lithuanian Romantic poet, Maironis: . . . ar kas ta˛ mamyte˙s rateli˛ dar pasuka? dulke˙m apnesˇtas, dulke˙m, pele˙siais ir kerpe˙m apaugus auksˇtai . . . pilis ant kalnu˛, kaip Lietuvoj. . . . (Landsbergis, “Dainos gimimas” 189; emphasis added) . . . quelqu’un fait-il encore tourner le rouet de maman? Couvert de poussière, de poussière, de moisissures, et on coupe ce qui pousse trop haut!!! Le château dans les montagnes, comme en Lituanie!!! (Landsbergis, “Genèse d’une chanson” 130; emphasis added).29 . . . does anyone still ever turn mother’s spinning wheel? covered with dust, with dust lichen and mould overgrown all around . . . a castle looms on hills, just like in Lithuania. . . . (Landsbergis, “Dainos gimimas” [“The Birth of Song”] 189; emphasis added)30

Landsbergis’s story features a compromised spy of the Soviet Committee for State Security during his visit to a choir festival in Wales. According to Tomas Venclova, Lithuanian writer and critic, “The Birth of Song” “is written in . . . modernist (even postmodern) technique.” The narrative depicts “a vapid person who has surrendered to the manipulations of the modern sociotechnical universe. In [Lithuanian] literature, no one has presented homo sovieticus so accurately” (Venclova). Most of the text is written as the unnamed spy’s monologue, directed to his love interest, Katryte˙, a young woman left behind in Lithuania (Kelertiene˙, “Algirdas Landsbergis”). In the monologue, the temporal frames oscillate between the present and the past to provide details about the character’s exaggerated sense of duty in his work as a compromised spy and the culture of Lithuania before the soviet occupation. The ironic description of the spinning wheel and Trakai Castle points to his faithfulness to the occupant ideology and its aim to eradicate any nationalist sentiments and nationalist claims embodied by these cultural symbols. Since the tsarist Russian occupation of Lithuania (1795–1915), which included ban on the Lithuanian press, the spinning wheel has become associated with “[s]eated at her spinning wheel . . . Lithuanian mother [who] taught her children to read in the native language. She told them stories and legends about the country’s great past when the land was free and powerful” (“The Lithuanian Woman in Legend and History”). The latter theme reverberates in Maironis’s poem depicting the dilapidation of Trakai Castle, a former abode of Lithuanian kings. The description of the castle as dilapidating has been read as engaging with the tradition of Sentimentalism to symbolise the country’s “spir29 Translated from Lithuanian into French by Muriel Puig. 30 The plain text from Lithuanian into English is translated by Irena Ragasˇiene˙; the text in bold is from Lionginas Pazˇu¯sis’s translation of the poem “Trakai Castle” (“Trakai Castle”).

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itual and emotional condition” under the tsarist rule (Lazdynas 312). The pretexts illustrate the ideological function of intertextuality.31 The intertexts implied in the source text, however, are not recreated in the target text. The bold text in the excerpt from Landsbergis text quoted above refers to the following lines from Maironis’s poem “Trakai Castle”: Pele˙siais ir kerpe˙m apaugus auksˇtai Traku˛ ˇstai garbinga pilis! Jos auksˇtus valdovus uzˇmigde˙ kapai, O ji tebestovi dar vis. Bet amzˇiai be˙ga, ir griu¯vancˇios sienos Kas diena˛ nyksta, apleistos ir vienos! (Maironis, “Traku˛ pilis” [Trakai Castle] 80; emphasis added) English: With lichen and mould overgrown all around A time-honoured castle there looms! Its true high-born rulers now sleep below ground, Yet Trakai outlasted their tombs. While centuries run, its grim ruins grow older, Deserted and lonely, they gradually moulder. (“Trakai Castle”; emphasis added)32

The bold phrases from the poem incorporated in Landsbergis’s short story “The Birth of Song” are translated as et on coupe ce qui pousse trop haut!!! (back translated: everything is cut that grows too tall). The translation solution may have been conditioned by the similarity between the Lithuanian words kerpe˙ (Fr. le lichen; Eng. lichen) and kirpti (Fr. couper; Eng. cut). Even if interpretive translation theory stresses “the autonomy of the translated text” and highlights that the totality of its parts “will enter a different intertextual field when it is translated into a different linguistic and cultural environment” (Batchelor 209), the obscuration of the intertextual reference to Maironis’s poem in Landsbergis’s “The Birth of Song” can hardly be regarded as showing fidelity to the source text (Fr. fidélité au sens) in terms of interpretive possibilities provided for the reader (Lederer, La traduction aujourd’hui 23–28; 122–128). The translation of the cultural content in the following excerpt from Landsbergis’s “The Birth of Song” serves as an illustration: . . . zˇiu¯ri kaip nekalti, tyli, o velniai zˇino, ka˛ jie galvoja? vakar tas tenoras raitytais plaukais, ir per ilgais, sukisˇe˛ nosis su cˇeke sˇnabzˇdasi, net kru¯ptele˙jo mane pamate˛s, asˇ ˛i knygute˛ ˛isirasˇiau, gal apie Kauno chuliganus pasakojo, ar tuos Prahos ir Kauno susi-

31 See, e. g., Mary-Anne Shonoda, “Metaphor and Intertextuality: A Cognitive Approach to Intertextual Meaning-Making in Metafictional Fantasy Novels” 81–96. 32 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Lionginas Pazˇu¯sis (“Trakai Castle”).

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deginusius pamisˇe˙lius lygino, supranti? (Landsbergis, “Dainos gimimas” 182; emphasis added) . . . ils regardent comme des innocents, ils se taisent, mais le diable sait ce qu’ils pensent? Hier, ce ténor aux cheveux ondulés et trop longs qui chuchotait, nez à nez avec une tchèque, il a même sursauté quand il m’a vu, je l’ai noté dans mon calepin, peut-être qu’il parlait des voyous de Kaunas, ou bien qu’il comparait ces timbrés de Prague et de Kaunas qui se sont immolés, tu comprends? (Landsbergis, “Genèse d’une chanson” 120; emphasis added) . . . look as if they are innocent, but only devil knows what they think? yesterday this man—tenor with curly hair, too long as a matter of fact—was talking secretively about something with a Czech woman, he gave a start when he noticed me, I noted this down in my pocketbook, was he talking about those Kaunas hooligans or were they comparing the Prague and the Kaunas psychos who blazed themselves, do you understand? (Landsbergis, “Dainos gimimas” [“The Birth of Song”] 182; emphasis added)33

The text in bold refers to the Kaunas youth revolt of 1972. Then, Nineteen-year-old Lithuanian student Romas Kalanta set himself on fire in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, in protest against the Soviet occupation. Kalanta poured petrol over himself from a three-litre glass jar and set himself on fire near the fountain at the Musical Theatre. Nearby, he dropped his notebook, in which he wrote, “Only the political system is guilty of my death.” It inspired an anti-Soviet two-day rebellion in Kaunas, on May 18 and 19. (Tracevskis)

In Algirdas Landsbergis’s “The Birth of Song” the narrative perspective complicates translation choices. The story uses internal focalisation, thus the description of the events during the Kaunas Spring, frequently compared to the Prague Spring, reveals the soviet spy’s judgement of the events. This explains the description of the situation in terms of hooligans and psychos, and the suspicion towards the length of the choir singer’s hair, given that the 1970s were “a time of revolution of hippie students throughout the entire world” (Tracevskis). In this light, glossing seems to be the only means to explain the cultural content of the text. The target text does include a footnote. However, the information provided in the footnote is insufficient to understand the connotations which are easily accessible to the source language reader: the information in the footnote is limited to the explanation that Kaunas is the former capital of Lithuania and the second largest city of the country (Landsbergis, “Genèse d’une chanson” 120).34 In addition to alterations of intertextual meanings in translation, as in the case of the French translation of Algirdas Landsbergis’s short story, some cases of omission (3 per cent) of intertextual references from the target text were found in the analysed corpora. An excerpt from the French translation of Sigitas Par33 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragasˇiene˙. 34 Fr. “Ancienne capitale de la Lituanie, deuxième ville du pays (N.D.T.).”

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ulskis’s “Sˇiaurine˙ kronika” (2008 [Fr. “Une chronique du Nord”; Eng. “Northern Chronicle”]), a literary essay employing postmodern fragmentation and pastiche, serves as a case in point. In the quotation below, the text in bold is omitted in the French translation: Te˙vas isˇ savojo sˇieno vezˇimo jau isˇpesˇe˙ viska˛, kas ˛imanoma. Asˇ dar laikausi ˛isikibe˛s kuoksˇto sˇiaudu˛. Manantis, jog pasaulis prasmingas tiek, kiek nespe˙ju jo uzˇrasˇyti. Rome˙nu˛ filosofai tiesiog liguistai dome˙josi savimi, ve˙liau paaisˇke˙jo, jog tai naudinga ir kitiems. Sale˙je taip sˇalta, kad lankytojai ilgai neisˇtveria, ir sˇeima liekame su te˙vu. Moterys linkusios graudintis, mano galva pilna nuozˇmaus absurdo gu¯siu˛, pasiu¯lau sulauzˇyti taisykle˛ “apie mirusius gerai arba nieko,” ir atmosferoje tvyroje˛s stroncio sˇvyte˙jimas kiek apmalsˇta. (Parulskis, “Sˇiaurine˙ kronika”62–63; emphasis added) Le père a déjà vidé son chariot à foin. Et moi, je résiste encore, et je me dis que le monde n’a pas plus de sens que je n’ai de temps pour le décrire… Il fait si froid dans la salle que ceux qui viennent s’incliner ne tiennent pas longtemps, mais nous, la famille, nous restons avec le père. Les femmes ont tendance à s’apitoyer. Dans ma tête, la terrifiante absurdité souffle en rafales. Je propose de briser la règle selon laquelle “on ne dit que du bien des morts, sinon rien”, et alors le rayonnement de strontium s’atténue un peu. (Parulskis, [“Une chronique du Nord”] 195)35 Father has drawn every straw from the hay cart. I am still clutching at a bunch of straws. Thinking that the meaningfulness of the world can be measured by what there remains unrecorded. Roman philosophers were sickly interested in themselves, it turned out later it was also useful for others. It is so cold in the funeral parlour that the visitors do not stay long, and eventually the family shrinks to include just my father and myself. Women are somewhat tearful, my head swarms with gusts of truculent absurd, I suggest breaking the law of “speaking no ill of the dead,” and the luminescence of strontium that had pervaded the atmosphere becomes eclipsed. (Parulskis, “Sˇiaurine˙ kronika”[Northern Chronicle] 62–63; emphasis added)36

Parulskis’s text engages with national and universal discourses to devise its own story of death and grieving. Traditional sayings about the relationship between death and life, such as to clutch at a straw and speaking no ill of the dead, surface and are simultaneously rejected as the narrator struggles to delineate the subjective perception of death when seeing it embodied by a loved one. The narrator somewhat self-ironically ponders whether his introspection can contribute to the existing meanings of death in the way those by the “Roman philosophers” did. At the same time, the singling out of the text about philosophers in a separate 35 Translated from Lithuanian into French by Vitas Kraujelis and Lily Denis. 36 Translated from Lithuanian into English by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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paragraph indicates the awareness of distance between the narrator and the philosophers. The paragraph is omitted in the French translation and thus turns the target text into a nearly realistic account of a wake, thus losing many of the source text’s postmodernist underpinnings.

4.

Conclusion

As the analysis of Lithuanian literature translated into French during the period of 1990–2017 reveals, retention of intertextuality is the prevailing translation solution leading to achieving cognitive and affective equivalence in terms defined by interpretive translation theory. The tendency to retain intertextuality can also be regarded as a source-text-oriented approach adopted by the translators to acquaint the Francophone readership with Lithuanian literature and to retain any traces of national culture as a unique source of knowledge about the culture of the source language culture. At the same time, translation solutions reveal the translator’s interpretation of the text. Such interpretation can be considered both as an outcome of the translator’s cognitive baggage and as an indicator of the degree of distance between the source and the target language cultures. Even in cases when translators opt for omissions or literal translations of intertextual references, the produced text in many ways becomes an important stepping stone in the development of intercultural dialogue, of which literary translation is an important part.

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Kelertas, Violeta. Introduction. Come into My Time: Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970–90. Ed. Violeta Kelertas. Trans. Rita Dapkus, Gregory M. Grazevich, and Violeta Kelertas. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 1–42. Print. Kelertiene˙ Violeta. “Algirdas Landsbergis: kompozitorius zˇodzˇiais (1980).” Sˇiuolaikine˙s lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros antologija. Web. 4 Aug. 2018. . Klaudy, Kinga. “Explicitation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. 80–84. Print. Klimas, Antanas. “Book Review: The Seasons. Kristijonas Donelaitis, The Seasons.” Trans. Nadas Rastenis. Ed. Antanas Klimas. Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 13.2 (1967): n. pag. Web. 27 July 2018. . Kohler, Janine. “Le poète Oscar Milosz et l’Alsace.” Cahiers lituaniens 12 (2013): 21–26. Print. Koppenman Ross, Lesli. “How the Holocaust Challenged Faith.” My Jewish Learning. Web. 25 July 2018. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/how-the-holocaust-chal lenged-faith /. Kristeva, Julija. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Print. Kuodyte˙, Dalia. “The Tragic Story of How One Third of Lithuania’s Population Became Victims of Soviet Terror.” VilNews: The Voice of International Lithuania. Web. 2 Aug. 2018. . Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Dainos gimimas.” Kelione˙s muzika. Vilnius: Vaga, 1992. 180–190. Print. Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Genèse d’une chanson”. Trans. Muriel Puig. Des âmes dans le brouillard, Anthologie de nouvelles lituaniennes contemporaines. Ed. Loreta Macˇianskaite˙. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2003. 115–131. Print. –. “Icchoko Mero Apverstas Pasaulis.” Draugas, 19 Oct. 1996. Web. 26 July 2018. . Langer, Lawrence L. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Print. Lazdynas, Gintaras. “Maironio ‘Traku˛ pilis’: tarp ‘aukso amzˇiaus’ ir griuve˙siu˛ motyvo.” Lietuviu˛ kataliku˛ mokslo akademijos metrasˇtis 37 (2013): 299–312. Print. Lederer, Marianne. La traduction aujourd’hui. Le modèle interprétatif. Paris: Hachette F.L.E., 1994. Print. –. Translation: The Interpretive Model. Abingdon, OX: Routledge, 1994. Print. –. “Can Theory Help Translator and Interpreter Trainers and Trainees.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 1.1 (2007): 15–36. Print. Lee, Ee Lin. “Communication and Culture: Language and Social Interaction.” Communication. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. 7 July 2016. Web. 26 July 2018. . Leonavicˇiene˙, Aurelija. Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija ir vertimas. Kaunas: Technologija, 2014. Print.

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Macˇianskaite˙, Loreta. “Sous une autre latitude.” Des âmes dans le brouillard, Anthologie de nouvelles lituaniennes contemporaines. Ed. Loreta Macˇianskaite˙. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2003. 7–19. Print. Maironis. “Traku˛ pilis.” Pavasario balsai. Lyrika. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 2012. 80. Print. Malmkjær, Kirsten, Adriana S¸erban, and Fransiska Louwagie. “Key Cultural Texts in Translation.” Introduction. Key Cultural Texts in Translation. Ed. Kirsten Malmkjær, Adriana S¸erban, and Fransiska Louwagie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018. 1–5. Print. Marcˇe˙nas, Aidas. “Metai be zˇiogo.” Cahiers lituaniens 10 (2009): 54. Print. –. “Année sans sauterelle.” Trans. Jean-Claude Lefebvre. Cahiers lituaniens 10 (2009): 55. Print. Meras, Icchokas. “Kartus ru¯gsˇtyniu˛ skonis.” Apverstas pasaulis. Chicago: Algimanto Mackaus knygu˛ leidimo fondas, 1995. 66–81. Print. –. “Le goût amer de l’oseille”. Trans. Marielle Vitureau. Des âmes dans le brouillard. Anthologie de nouvelles lituaniennes contemporaines. Ed. Loreta Macˇianskaite˙. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2003. 85–103. Print. Miola, Robert S. “Seven Types of Intertextuality.” Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality. Ed. Michele Marrapodi. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. 13– 25. Print. Morson, Gary Saul. “Russian Literature.” Encyclopaedia Britannica 2. Web. 13 Sept. 2018. . Nayak, Kishori. “Intertextuality and the Postcolonial Writer: An Analysis of Shashi Deshpande’s and Arundhati Roy’s Fiction.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL/ RCLC 3 (2004): 58–65. Print. Naudé, Jacobus A. “An Overview of Recent Developments in Translation Studies with Special Reference to the Implications for Bible Translation.” Acta Theologica Supplementum 2 (2002): 44–69. Print. Ordóñez López, Pilar. “Ugly Translations: Ortega y Gasset’s Ideas on Translation within Contemporary Translation Theories.” Core. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 1 Jan. 2008. Web. 10 Oct. 2020. . Ortega y Gasset, José. “The Misery and the Splendor of Translation.” Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Ed. John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. 93–126. Print. Padvaiskas, Edmund. “Agriculture under Soviet Control.” Lituanus 4.4 (1958): n. pag. Ed. P. V. Vygantas. Web. 12 Sept. 2018. . Parulskis, Sigitas. “Sˇiaurine˙ kronika.” Siuzˇeta˛ siu¯lau nusˇauti. Ed. Sigitas Geda. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002. 59–65. Print. –. “Une chronique du Nord.” Trans. Vitas Kraujelis and Lily Denis. Des âmes dans le brouillard. Anthologie de nouvelles lituaniennes contemporaines. Ed. Loreta Macˇianskaite˙. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2003. 189–198. Print. Pelurityte˙, Audinga, Rita Tu¯tlyte˙, Viktorija Daujotyte˙-Pakeriene˙, and Regimantas Tamosˇaitis. Naujausios lietuviu˛ poezijos skaitymai: Aidas Marcˇe˙nas. Web. 9 Sept. 2020. .

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Pukelyte˙, Ina. “Le théâtre lituanien contemporain.” Deux dramaturges lituaniens. Trans. Akvile˙ Melku¯naite and Laurent Muhleisen. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2003. 7–13. Print. Roux-Faucard, Geneviève. “Intertextualité et traduction.” Meta 51.1 (2006): 98–118. Print. Ruseckaite˙, Aldona. “Un grand poète Maironis.” Cahiers lituaniens 2 (2001): 37–40. Print. –. “Donelaitis, le géant de la littérature lituanienne.” Cahiers lituaniens 9 (2008): 41–45. Print. Samalavicˇius, Almantas. “Lithuanian Prose and Decolonization: Recovery of the Body.” Baltic Postcolonialism. Ed. Violeta Kelertas. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. 409– 427. Print. ˇ utura. “Translation as Cultural Transposition.” The Journal of Savic, Vera, and Ilijana C Linguistic and Intercultural Education 4 (2011): 125–150. Print. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Des différentes méthodes de traduire.” Les tours de Babel. Essais sur la traduction. Trans. Antoine Berman. Mauvezin: Éd. Trans-Europ-Repress, 1985. 277–347. Print. Shonoda, Mary-Anne. “Metaphor and Intertextuality: A Cognitive Approach to Intertextual Meaning-Making in Metafictional Fantasy Novels.” International Research in Children’s Literature 5.1 (2012): 81–96. Print. Sprindyte˙, Ju¯rate˙. “Lithuanian Prose: In Search for a New Identity.” Transitions of Lithuanian Postmodernism: Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period. Ed. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. Amsderdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011, 89–114. Print. “The Angelus.” EWTN Global Catholic Network. Web. 15 June 2018. . Toker, Leona. “The Holocaust in Russian Literature.” Literature of the Holocaust. Ed. Alan Rosen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 118–130. Print. Tracevskis, Rokas M. “The Legend of Kalanta.” The Baltic Times 10 July 2010. Web. 15 June 2018. . “Trakai Castle.” All Poetry. Trans. Lionginas Pazˇu¯sis. Web. 3 Sept. 2018. . Trotter, Evelyn, and Andrea De Capua. “The Role of the Literary Translator in the New Europe and the Literary Translator as Role Model.” Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1.3 (2005): 447–462. Print. Qiang, Kang. “Application of the Interpretive Theory of Translation in Interpreting Practice.” Canadian Social Science 9.6 (2013): 236–241. Print. Vaicˇiu¯naite˙, Judita. “Telefonu˛ knyga.” Vaikyste˙s veidrody. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996. 7–9. Print. –. “L’annuaire téléphonique.” Trans. Liudmila Edel-Matuolis. Cahiers lituaniens 4 (2003): 45–47. Print. Venclova, Tomas. “Saying Goodbye to Algirdas Landsbergis.” Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences. Ed. Stasys Gosˇtautas. 51.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 15 June 2018. . Workman, Sarah R. “The Strange Play of Traumatic Reality: Enchantment in Jewish American Literature.” Diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016. Carolina Digital Repository. Web. 15 June 2017. .

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank Associate Professor Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ for translating this paper from Lithuanian into English.

Jurgita Macijauskaite˙-Bonda

Chapter 10 – Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Literary Translations from Lithuanian to Italian

1.

Introduction

The close relationship between language and culture is especially important during the process of translation, when a text is transferred not only to a different language system but also, as Umberto Eco suggests, “from one culture to another” (162).1 Eco claims that translation is not merely a shift between two languages but also a shift between two cultures or “two encyclopaedias” (162). The translator, therefore, should not only deal with the question of language rules but should also be constantly aware of “cultural elements” (Eco 162). In the context of translation as a form of communication or dialogue between cultures, a significant role is also ascribed to intertextuality as one of the cultural components of the text. As Graham Allen states, “[i]ntertextuality is and will remain a crucial element in the attempt to understand literature and culture in general” (7). In this sense, “[t]he notion of intertextuality has become a marker of the world and self-perception for the modern person, who understands the world as a text and thinks that everything has already been said, and something new can be created only by applying the principles of a mosaic, which is laying out elements that are already known” (Melnikova 2). In his famous quotation, Roland Barthes claims that “the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture” (qtd. in Melnikova 53). Considering this specific textual feature from the perspective of translation, it is important to note that translation, especially translation of fiction, is a form of communication between languages, cultures, and texts (Leonavicˇiene˙, “Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija” 50). To convey the subtext and the cultural content of the source text, as Aurelija Leonavicˇiene˙ asserts, “understanding and interpretation of the intertextual elements are two notions fundamental to the task of the translator” (50; italics added). This dovetails with Bruno Osimo’s statement that “individuals [who are] gifted with 1 All translations from Italian into English and from Lithuanian into English, unless otherwise stated, are by the author of the chapter.

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metacultural consciousness and, consequently, [are] more aware of cultural differences, are the most fit to perform the function of translation” (48). For the purposes of the present discussion, issues related to translation of folkloric elements in literary texts, it is pertinent to refer to Cristina Bacchilega who argues that “an informed knowledge of both folklore and literature can help us to question and redefine their borders, to articulate how narrative rules are (re)produced: such an approach also has wide-ranging implications for an understanding of literary texts within a broader cultural dynamics” (“Postmodern Fairy Tales” 4). Alan Dundes identifies two basic steps in the study of folklore in literature and culture: “The first step is objective and empirical; the second is subjective and speculative. The first might be termed identification and the second interpretation” (136). In view of the above, translation of folkloric intertexts in fiction involves three steps: identification, understanding, and interpretation. This chapter focuses on a specific group of intertextual elements, namely, folkloric intertexts, which perform various functions in literary texts. On the one hand, proverbs, beliefs, songs, legends, and other examples of folklore in literary texts reflect the intrinsic nature of culture— fundamental values, worldviews, and ontologies. Folklore encodes cultural, mythological, and ethnographic folk knowledge that has been accumulated through centuries. In the form of intertexts, folklore adds authenticity and socially connoted meanings to literary texts since folklore by its very nature is a national-cultural component in a culture that reflects its collective experience (Skabeikyte˙-Kazlauskiene˙, Mitas; Sinkevicˇiu¯te˙; Harris). For example, folklorist Ju¯rate˙ Sˇlekonyte˙ notes that “tall tales are an excellent source of folklore humour, which has had a huge impact on works of contemporary artists” (215). On the other hand, as Kevin Paul Smith argues in The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction, the intertextuality of the fairy tale with its plurality of meanings makes it possible to be used for the “ends which can be called ‘postmodern’” (1). Drawing on Gérard Genette’s idea of intertexts, he conducts an analysis of a popular fairy tale used in a contemporary text, “Bluebeard,” and identifies eight different ways in which the fairy tale works as an intertext in postmodern fiction: 1) authorised: an explicit reference to the fairy tale in the title, which acts as an “authorial sanction,” an approval to link it to “a prior, pre-existing fairy tale” (Smith 12); 2) writerly: an implicit reference to the fairy tale in the title, which “allows more ambiguity” or freedom for the reader’s interpretation (14); 3) incorporation: an explicit reference to the fairy tale in the text when the links are obvious; 4) allusion: an implicit reference to the fairy tale in the text; 5) re-vision: “putting a new spin on an old tale” or “revising all that the hypotext implies in terms of structural similarities between the two tales” (34); 6) fabulation: creation of an entirely new, original fairy tale; 7) metafictional: a discussion of the fairy tale that “is tied thematically with the events

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that surround it within the text and helps highlight that the fabulated fairy tale which precedes it enacts the concerns of the realistic primary narrative” (47); 8) architectual/chronotopic: referring to the fairy tale setting/environment (10). In her study Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, Cristina Bacchilega observes that fairy tales are reproduced in a variety of discourses and exploited in a variety of ways by fiction writers, providing them with “well-known material pliable to political, erotic, or narrative manipulation” (3). Translation of intertextual elements in a literary text often is a challenge that the translator cannot avoid. As H. S. Komalesha holds, “when a translator chooses to translate such works in which there is a rich interplay of intertextual elements, s/he is invariably left with no better option than to bring in these elements, lest s/he should run the risk of reducing classics to works of mediocrity” (230). According to Lawrence Venuti, “intertextuality enables and complicates translation, preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening the translated text to interpretive possibilities that vary with cultural constituencies in the receiving situation” (157). Starting with the assumption that “discussing possibilities and methods of translation of the intertextual elements into another language/culture, it is necessary to assume that culture itself is intertextual, and translation (in the broad definition of this term) is a constant sign of connection between different texts within one culture and in intercultural communication,” Natalya V. Klimovich identifies three functions, stylistic, compositional, and pragmatic, that intertextual elements perform in fiction and claims that the most important task for the translator is to retain these functions in the translated text (258–260). In order to achieve this goal, translators apply different translation techniques. As indicated by the study of the interpretation and translation of intertextual meanings of Lithuanian literary texts into French carried out by Leonavicˇiene˙, the prevalent technique for translating intertextual elements is a) direct translation, applied when the intertextual meaning is clear and understandable both for the source and target culture reader, and when there is thus no need for additional explanation (“Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija” 51). Other, less common, translation techniques include b) explication, when the meaning implied by an intertextual element is explained in the target text or in metatextual notes; c) internal emphasis, when the element is highlighted (written in italics or in quotation marks) in the text; d) literal word for word translation, which decontextualises the intertextual element and neutralises the meaning that it implies; and e) omission (51). The first three techniques help to convey cultural meanings implied by culture-specific intertextual elements, whereas the latter two, namely, word for word translation and omission, neutralise intellectual and emotional connotations and sometimes maintain only the external aspect of an expression (63–64). In the present chapter, the above-mentioned classification of

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translation techniques proposed by Leonavicˇiene˙ is applied to examine how folkloric intertexts in Lithuanian literature are translated into Italian. In Lithuania, folkloric intertexts have received little scholarly attention, and the research on problems regarding the translation of these particular intertextual elements is even sparser (Baliulyte˙; Razauskas-Daukintas, Mitiniai vaizdiniai; Valotka; Sˇlekonyte˙). In her study of interpretation and translation of cultural meanings embedded in grammatical structures, Leonavicˇiene˙ discusses Lithuanian proverbs and extracts from folk songs as used in literary texts translated from Lithuanian into French (“Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija” 57–58). As she observes, even though skilled translators manage to transmit socially connoted meanings and to maintain their functions, folkloric intertexts translated into another language frequently fail to convey “the cultural sense and the emotional connotation which are part of the Lithuanian peasant’s life” (58). Other studies address phrasal expressions, curse words, cultural realia, and other textual elements related to folk culture in the translations from different source languages into Lithuanian and vice versa (Rapsˇyte˙; Kliosˇtorityte˙ and Spurgevicˇiu¯te˙; Deltuvaite˙ and Kliosˇtoraityte˙, to mention but a few). Egle˙ Deltuvaite˙ and Rasa Kliosˇtoraityte˙’s analysis of the translation of cultural realia from Italian into Lithuanian in The Adventures of Pinocchio [It. Le avventure di Pinocchio] by Carlo Collodi reveals a tendency to use the strategy of domestication rather than foreignisation. The researchers explain the preference noting that the translated text is a book for children, which “allows us to deduce that the translator wished to draw the source text closer to the target culture” (Deltuvaite˙ and Kliosˇtoraityte˙ 127). The aim of the present analysis is to discuss the ways translators, most of whom are native speakers of the target language, choose to translate folkloric intertexts in different literary texts, from classical poems to contemporary short stories, while translating them from Lithuanian into Italian. The key research questions addressed in this study are: What translation techniques are used in translating folk tales, belief legends, songs, and other folkloric intertexts which appear in different literary texts? What translation problems related to cultural transpositions do translators face, and how do they solve them? What influences their choices? The analysis includes contemporary Italian translations of Lithuanian literature published from 1990, the year of the re-establishment of the independence of Lithuania, to 2017. They are the following: two classical nineteenth-century poems, Metai (1765–1775 [It. Le stagioni; Eng. The Seasons]), first published in 1818, by Kristijonas Donelaitis and Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis (1858–1859 [It. La selva di Anyksˇˇciai; Eng. The Forest of Anyksˇˇciai]), first published in 1861, by Antanas Baranauskas; two twentieth-century novels, Ragana ir lietus (1993 [It. La Strega e la pioggia; Eng. The Witch and the Rain]) by Jurga Ivanauskaite˙ and Trys se-

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kunde˙s dangaus (2002 [It. Tre secondi di cielo; Eng. Three Seconds of Heaven]) by Sigitas Parulskis, and novellas, short stories, and essays by Saulius Tomas Kondrotas, Romualdas Granauskas, Juozas Aputis, Jurgis Kuncˇinas, Marius Ivasˇkevicˇius, and other contemporary writers. The chosen contemporary translations published over the past twenty-seven years include literary texts of different genres and periods, which allows for analysing translation of folkloric intertexts within broader literary contexts. All translations were made by well-known translators: Pietro Umberto Dini, Adriano Cerri, Guido Michelini, and Birute˙ Zˇindzˇiu¯te˙-Michelini. The research is based on comparative and cultural analysis methods, which are applied to a comparison of source and translated texts as well as to an examination of the specific use of translation techniques. In addition, the quantitative analysis method helps to examine folkloric intertexts and the quantitative distribution of the translation techniques. Various forms of folk expression are commonly divided into three categories, namely, verbal (oral and written texts, also referred to as “folk literature” or “oral literature”), customary (modes of behaviour, rituals), and material (physical objects) folklore (Brunvand 2–3).2 This essay focuses on the first one, defined as tautosaka in Lithuanian (Eng. ‘folklore’). In Lithuanian scholarship on the subject, verbal folklore is divided into two major categories: musical and narrative folklore. Folk songs, instrumental and choreographic folklore constitute musical folklore, whereas narrative folklore is divided into two groups. The first includes animal tales, tales of magic, religious tales, realistic tales, tales of the stupid devil, formula and other tales, anecdotes, and jokes, etiological, place, belief, and other legends or, in other words, the major genres of folklore. The second group covers minor genres, for example, proverbs, riddles, beliefs, and curse words (“Folkloro ru¯sˇys ir zˇanrai”). The present study focuses on the analysis of folkloric intertexts related to folk songs and narrative folklore, namely, tales, legends, as well as two other minor genres, riddles, and imitations of birds. Folkloric intertexts related to other cultures, for instance, Greek and Roman mythology are not addressed in this research. In this essay, the oral sources of intertexts are often denoted as traditional. In Lithuanian scholarly research, traditional culture usually refers to the rural lifestyle and worldview that existed until the end of the nineteenth century, or up to the beginning (or even the first half) of the twentieth century.3 Traditional folk narratives, transmitted from generation to generation, share the experiences of community members that were accumulated throughout many centuries. Traditional folk narratives also maintain genre canons, compositional structure, themes, 2 See also Sims and Stephens 1–2. 3 See Skabeikyte˙-Kazlauskiene˙, “Lietuviu˛ tautosaka” 9–10; Racˇiu¯naite˙ (2002).

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motifs, poetics, stylistics, and imagery, all of which refer to the indeterminate past (Skabeikyte˙-Kazlauskiene˙, “Lietuviu˛ tautosaka” 9–18; Sauka, “Lietuviu˛ tautosaka” 10–14). Dealing with folkloric intertexts in fiction implies certain restraints. Because common folklore features many variants and repetitions of images, working with folklore complicates the identification of any folklore units that may occur in literature; folk legends, beliefs, dream-telling, songs, and customs quite often share common images or a locus comunis. Lithuanian folklore scholar Bronislava Kerbelyte˙ admits that “[d]efinition and delimitation of the types and genres of long-lived and varying folklore units remains one of the most complicated problems in folkloristics” (“Lietuviu˛ tautosakos ku¯riniu˛ prasme˙s” 17). In his study of mythical images in The Seasons by Donelaitis, Dainius RazauskasDaukintas suggests that interpretation of folkloristic intertexts should go beyond “the hints left by [Donelaitis]” (“Mitiniai vaizdiniai Donelaicˇio Metuose: Pastabos parasˇte˙se” 14). However, from the translator’s perspective, determining the intertext’s genre is closely related to one of the main tasks that the translator has to deal with, that is, recognising the intertext and interpreting it. As mentioned above, the success of the translation of intertextuality depends on how well the translator comprehends the source and target cultures. Prior to the analysis of folkloric intertexts in selected contemporary translations, in the following section, an overview of Lithuanian literary translations into Italian since the beginning of the twentieth century until the present is provided.

2

Lithuanian Literary Translations into Italian

In Italy, the interest in Lithuanian culture and literature arose during the interwar period of the twentieth century. Folklore was among the first texts translated from Lithuanian into Italian. Folk songs stimulated interest not only in Lithuanian literature but also in texts from other Baltic countries (Dini, “Letterature baltiche in traduzione italiana” 24–25). The first and most important translations of folk narratives are considered to be Canti popolari lituani (1930 [Eng. Lithuanian Folk Songs]) by Gianni Morici, Storia, miti e canzoni degli antichi lituani (1930 [Eng. History, Myths and Songs of Ancient Lithuanians]) by Giuseppe Salvatori, and Fiabe Nordiche (1943 [Eng. Northern Tales]) by Paolo Toschi. The latter collection includes translated Lithuanian tales alongside the translations of tales of other northern European nations into Italian. The first journal of Baltic Studies, Studi baltici, first published in 1931 on the initiative of Italian linguist Giacomo Devoto, featured articles by Giuseppe Salvatori about Lithuanian literature (by Antanas Baranauskas, Vincas Kre˙ ve˙, and Maironis) and Lithuanian

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folk songs (Dini and Kliosˇtoraityte˙ 186).4 Salvatori also addresses issues related to Lithuanian literature in his book I Lituani di ieri e di oggi [Lith. Lietuva vakar ir ˇsiandien; Eng. Lithuanians Yesterday and Today], published in 1932 (translated into Lithuanian and published in Lithuania in 1992). As translation has always been related not only to culture but also to politics and certain social issues, Lithuania’s disappearance from “the European political map, also meant its disappearance from the Italian cultural horizon” (Dini and Kliosˇtoraityte˙ 188). For this reason, as translators and translation scholars Pietro Umberto Dini and Rasa Kliosˇtoraityte˙ point out, “the majority of Lithuanian literary texts translated into Italian were published in the interwar period or during the last decade of the twentieth century,” whereas the soviet period left a large gap in the history of translation (188). Among the publications of the latter period, the most significant are an article on Lithuanian and Latvian literature by Giacomo Prampolini, published in the Universal History of Literature in 1974, and extracts of various translations of Lithuanian literary texts, which were published in an anthology in the same year (Prampolini, “La letteratura lituana e lettone” 649–686; “Antologia di testi” 1089–1166). In Italy, Lithuanian literature, just as literature of other Baltic countries, was rediscovered in the late 1970s, but it is only after the re-establishment of Lithuania’s Independence in 1990 that the number of literary translations started growing rapidly (Dini, “Letterature baltiche in traduzione italiana” 23–29; Dini and Kliosˇtoraityte˙ 187–191). Poetry constitutes a significant part of Lithuanian literature translated into Italian. In 1989, an anthology of poems by ‘earth poets’ (Lith. zˇemininkai), post-war Lithuanian exiles, identifying themselves as existentialists, was published (Dini, “La nostalgia dei terresti”), followed in 2006 by an anthology of a wider selection of Lithuanian poetry (Ciplijauskaite˙ and Coco). Poems by Lithuanian poets are translated and included in different poetry collections (Guarracino). On the initiative of the famous Italian linguist and translator, Dini, individual collections of poems by various Lithuanian poets have been published. These include, to mention but a few, collections of poems by Vytautas Macˇernis, Vladas Braziu¯nas, Antanas A. Jonynas, and Sigitas Geda. Two Lithuanian poems of national significance have been translated into Italian as well: Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis [It. “La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai”; Eng. “The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai”] by Antanas Baranauskas (translated in 1990 by Guido Michelini) and Metai [It. “Le stagioni”; Eng. “The Seasons”] by Kristijonas Donelaitis (translated in 2014 by Adriano Cerri); the latter is also included in the UNESCO list of European literary masterpieces. Lithuanian prose translations into Italian are less numerous. Short stories, novellas, and essays have been published in two anthologies. Racconti lituani. 4 See also Sabaliauskas 232–233; Devoto (2004).

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Racconti dal mondo (1993 [Eng. Lithuanian Narratives, Narratives from the World]) includes short stories by Juozas Aputis, Danielius Musˇinskas, and Saulius Tomas Kondrotas. The second anthology is Altre voci. Nove narratori lituani del secondo Novecento (2006 [Eng. Other Voices. Nine Lithuanian Narrators of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century), which includes texts by Birute˙ Baltrusˇaityte˙ , Juozas Aputis, Bronius Radzevicˇius, Danielius Musˇinskas, Jurgis Kuncˇinas, Saulius Tomas Kondrotas, Giedra Radvilavicˇiu¯ te˙ , Renata Sˇ erelyte˙ , and Marius Ivasˇkevicˇius. These authors are representatives of Lithuanian writers from the second half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Aputis and Radzevicˇius belong to the group of writers who modernised Lithuanian prose. Aputis is sometimes described as a “silent modernist” of the soviet period, whose works concentrate on human values such as conscience, love, kindness, and forgiveness, and on memory. In this respect, his oeuvre is similar to that of Musˇinskas, who focuses on existential problems and the “silent daily existence of the human soul” (Musˇinskas). Saulius Tomas Kondrotas, whose novel Zˇalcˇio zˇvilgsnis (2006 [Eng. “Gaze of the Grass Snake”]) is one of the most frequently translated contemporary Lithuanian novels, is considered the most important Lithuanian magical realist. The translations of the aforementioned writers’ texts represent different literary trends and give the Italian reader a glimpse into Lithuanian prose. Other translations from Lithuanian into Italian include the novels Trys sekunde˙s dangaus (2002, [It. Tre secondi di cielo] (2005); [Eng. Three Seconds of Heaven]) by Sigitas Parulskis; Ragana ir lietus (1993, [It. La Strega e la pioggia] (2013); [Eng. The Witch and the Rain]) by Jurga Ivanauskaite˙, Zˇalcˇio zˇvilgsnis (2006, [It. “La solitudine dell’acqua”] (1993); [Eng. Gaze of the Grass Snake]) by Saulius T. Kondrotas, Gyvenimas po klevu (1988, [It. “La vita sotto l’acero”] (2007); [Eng. Life Under the Maple Tree]) by Romualdas Granauskas, and Lygiosios trunka akimirka˛ (1963, [It. “Scacco perpetuo”] (2007); [Eng. A Stalemate Lasts but a Moment]) by Ishaokas Meras. All of these texts, reflecting contemporary trends in Lithuanian literature, are analysed in this essay, except for the last one. Lithuanian children’s books are also being translated, even though the number of publications is still very low. Among recent translations, the most significant are “Tingine˙ ragana” (2004 [It. “La strega pigrona e altre fiabe”] ˇ eredejevaite˙, and (2007); [Eng. “The Lazy Witch”]), a book of tales by Aurelija C Ambrozijus, Purkius ir angelas (2007 [It. “Ambrogio, Fufi e l’Angelo”] (2007); [Eng. “Ambrosio, Purki, and the Angel”]) by one of the most popular present-day authors and illustrators of children’s books Sigute˙ Ach. In view of the above, it should be noted that even though the number of Lithuanian literary translations into Italian is growing, Lithuanian fiction remains to a large extent unknown and unavailable in Italy.

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This study is based on the analysis of around 1,500 pages of Lithuanian literary texts (poetry, novels, novellas, short stories, and essays) translated into Italian recently. Intertexts, comprising shorter and longer phrases (direct or indirect references, allusions, quotations, or paraphrases) related to Lithuanian folktales, etiological, belief, and place legends, imitations of bird voices, and riddles, were analysed, focusing on translation choices employed in their rendering into Italian. In this essay, translation choices are grouped and discussed according to the translation techniques used. The total number of folkloric intertexts that were found is 50. The majority of these, in 32 examples or 64 per cent of all cases, are in the poem The Seasons by Kristijonas Donelaitis. 5 examples were found in The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai by Antanas Baranauskas, and 4 in the novels Three Seconds of Heaven by Sigitas Parulskis and The Witch and the Rain by Jurga Ivanauskaite˙. For the other literary texts analysed in this chapter, only 1 to 3 folkloric intertexts were traced. Folkloric intertexts in the eighteenth-century masterpiece The Seasons have been discussed by various Lithuanian folklore scholars, for instance, Zenonas Slaviu¯nas who published an article on the relationship between Donelaitis and narrative folklore (“Kristijono Donelaicˇio rysˇiai su tautosaka”). The work by Ambraziejus Jonynas and Stasys Skrodenis has also contributed significantly to the field. Razauskas-Daukintas’s study of mythical images in Donelaitis’s The Seasons is significant in that it provides a survey of previous research, along with the insightful analysis of folkloric elements. This analysis indicates that while translating folkloric intertexts from Lithuanian into Italian, the most widely used translation technique is direct translation, that is translation of a folkloric intertext without additional explanation. This group includes 37 units or 74% of all examples. Another typical way of translating is explication with explanatory comments in notes by providing metatextual information in footnotes or endnotes. 9 examples of the analysed intertextual elements were translated this way, which comprises 18% of all cases. In two cases, direct word for word translation was used, which led to the neutralisation of the implied cultural meaning. In one case, the translator chose cultural actualisation and substituted a Lithuanian folkloric intertext with a corresponding intertext from the target language, functionally implying a meaning close to that in the source language. No cases of omission occurred, while internal emphasis was applied only once, together with explication, when the translator, who aimed to accurately convey the cultural meaning of the intertext, used two complementary translation techniques.

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The examples of direct translation, as was mentioned above, constitute the most significant part of the research material. This shows that the intertextual elements suggestive of a traditional Lithuanian worldview should be understandable to Italian readers without any need for additional explanation because of their relatively straightforward message as, for instance, in the cases discussed below. In the first example, an excerpt from the short story “Metuose 1666” (1985 [Eng. “In the Year 1666”]) by Birute˙ Baltrusˇaityte˙, a traditional etiological legend which explains why a human being does not know the time of his death is subtly woven into a short story and thus links the literary text with the traditional Lithuanian worldview suggested in the tropes related to death: Ligi zˇole˙s daug, o ligi karsto?.. Tiktai mano viesˇpats ir ponas tezˇino, o zˇmogui neleista zˇinoti, nesgi verktu˛ tada ir dejuotu˛ zˇmogus apleide˛s darbus savo ir sˇeimyna˛. (Baltrusˇaityte˙, “Metuose 1666” [“In the Year 1666”] 42; emphasis added; ellipsis in the original) Finché erompa l’erba, sono tanti e… fino alla bara?.. Soltanto il mio Dio e Signore lo sa, all’uomo non è dato sapere, giacché allora piangerebbe e si lamenterebbe l’uomo, e abbandonerebbe i suoi lavori e la sua famiglia. (Baltrusˇaityte˙, “Anno di grazia 1666” 25; emphasis added)5 There is a lot of time until the grass grows … but how far is it to the coffin?.. Only my God and Lord know it; a human being is not given this knowledge as he would cry and moan, and would abandon his works and his family. (Baltrusˇaityte˙, “Metuose 1666” [“In the Year 1666”] 42; emphasis added)6

The second example includes a reference to Kristijonas Donelaitis’s The Seasons. The writer alludes to a popular belief legend about bilduks, a mythical being bringing different goods and riches to its owner. In this excerpt, both the writer and the translator choose a more general name of the mythical being than those found in the traditional variants. The Italian translation uses the word spettro (a specter, a ghost, an apparition), which does not correspond to the Lithuanian bilduks (a spirit that makes noise at night, a devil). Nevertheless, the Lithuanian bilduks translated as spettro remains culturally connoted: Ne˙s priesˇ gaidgaidyste˛ vis jam bilduks pasirodo Ir jo skryne˛ su skarbais ˛i kamina˛ velka. (Donelaitis, Metai 204; emphasis added) 7 Pare che di notte gli compaia in sogno qualche spettro Che fa come per buttargli nel camino i suoi tesori. (Donelaitis, Le stagioni 205; emphasis added)

5 Translated from Lithuanian into Italian by Pietro Umberto Dini. 6 Translated from Lithuanian into English are by the author of the chapter. 7 All references to Donelaitis’s Metai are from Kristijonas Donelaitis, Le stagioni. Trans. Adriano Cerri (2014).

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Because he thinks a devil’s making off Up the big chimney with his treasure box. (Donelaitis, The Seasons 141; emphasis added)8

In the next example, a traditional imitation of the voice of the quail is provided in a descriptive form: O rytoj reike˙s pamazˇi dalgius pasiprovyt. Ar negirdit, kaip sˇienauti jau putpela sˇaukia Ir, kas zˇiemai reiks, sukraut ˛i kupeta˛ liepia? (Donelaitis, Metai 100–102; emphasis added) … e domani si dovrà iniziare a riparar le falci. Non sentite che la quaglia c’invita alla mietitura e a stivare in grandi cumuli le scorte per l’inverno? (Donelaitis, Le stagioni 101–103; emphasis added) Tomorrow there are scythes to hammer out. Do you not hear the quail bid mowing start And hay be stacked to meet our winter needs? (Donelaitis, The Seasons 101–103; emphasis added)

In the original folklore text, the quail addresses Jurgis (George) and urges him to take a scythe and to go to the meadow (Lith. Kelk, Jurgut, darbas krut. Dalge˛ plak, pievon kak. Darba˛ tu ten atlik, put pilik, put lilik!) (Razauskas, “Mitiniai vaizdiniai Donelaicˇio Metuose: Pauksˇcˇiai” 8). In Donelaitis’s text, the translation of the allusion to this urge, which people living in the countryside associate with the invitation to start haying, can seem quite exotic, in the sense of ‘unusual’ to the target language reader. However, its function and the meaning are understandable from the context, despite the fact that Italians might not be familiar with the imitation of the voice of the quail or the Lithuanian folk belief that the quail is the bird which urges to start haying. As discussed below, similar bird imitations become a more considerable challenge to translators when they have to find ways to translate imitations of bird sounds expressed in folklore in rhymed formulas. An analysis of cases of direct translation reveals that this translation technique is most frequently applied to the translation of intertexts which are implicit rather than explicit. These intertexts encode folk knowledge, beliefs, and worldview, as well as add a particular layer of meaning to the text. Direct translation frequently occurs when rendering allusions to folk tales that are wellknown all over the world as illustrated in the examples below. The examples are from the contemporary novels Meile˙ pagal Juozapa˛ (2004 [Eng. Love according to

8 All translations of Donelaitis’s Metai from Lithuanian into English are by Peter Tempest.

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Juozapas]) by Saulius Tomas Kondrotas and Trys sekunde˙s dangaus (2002 [Eng. Three Seconds of Heaven]) by Sigitas Parulskis: Mane˙ , kad didvyrisˇkai isˇvaduos princese˛ isˇ slibino guolio? Ryzˇtingai padarys gala˛ savo paties kancˇioms? Jis apsidaire˙ . Kur tas slibino guolis? (Kondrotas, Meile˙ pagal Juozapa˛ 235; emphasis added) Aveva pensato di andare a liberare eroicamente la principessa dalla tana del drago? Avrebbe con decisione messo fine alle proprie sofferenze? Si guardò intorno. Dov’era questa tana del drago? (Kondrotas, “L’amore secondo Giuseppe” 41; emphasis added) Did he think he would go and heroically save the princess from the dragon’s lair? Would decidedly put an end to his own sufferings? He looked around. Where is that dragon’s lair? (emphasis added)9 . . . Leninas, kazˇkur ten, mitologine˙je Maskvoje, miegantis stiklo karste, laikantis savo negyvuose gniauzˇtuose penkiolika nyksˇtuku˛, penkiolika socialistiniu˛ respubliku˛, laukiantis karalaite˙s ant balto zˇirgo, isˇsiilge˛s saldaus, paskutiniojo mirties bucˇinio. . . (Parulskis, Trys sekunde˙s dangaus 122; emphasis added) . . . Lenin, che chissà dove, nella mitologica Mosca, dorme in una cassa di vetro. Tenendo tra le sue grinfie morte quindici nani, le quindici repubbliche sovietiche, attendendo la principessa sul cavallo bianco, desiderando un dolce, ultimo bacio di morte. . . (Parulskis, Tre secondi di cielo 107; emphasis added) . . . Lenin, somewhere there in the mythological Moscow, sleeping in his glass coffin, clutching with his dead fists the fifteen dwarfs, the fifteen socialist republics, and waiting for the princess on a white horse, longing for the sweet, last kiss of death . . . (Parulskis, Trys sekunde˙s dangaus [Three Seconds of Heaven] 122; emphasis added)10

In Parulskis’s Three Seconds of Heaven, the intertexts allude to the context of the novel in that they refer to the country being occupied by the “dragon”—the soviet invader—thus becoming one among other occupied countries, referred to as “the fifteen dwarfs” whom Lenin clutches “with his dead fists.” In his study on the basic concepts of folklore, fairy tale, culture, and media, Jill Terry Rudy refers to folk tales as “fully formed thoughts and socially constructed expression” (6). He also suggests that “sometimes it seems that fairy tales move, fully formed, in some superorganic way through a variety of cultures. While tales shape-shift, transform, and adapt as they land in new situations, they seem recognizably whole and familiar—sometimes even psychic, as if tapping into some deeply human condition” (Rudy 6). This quality of tales that are popular across cultures has a considerable impact on the choice of translation strategies. As illustrated above, direct translation does not hinder the perception of the 9 The excerpts from Kondrotas’s and Parulskis’s novels are translated from Lithuanian into English by the author of this chapter. 10 Translated from Lithuanian into English by the author of this chapter.

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target text. Kondrotas’s novel uses the motif of liberating the princess from the dragon’s grip; Parulskis’s novel uses an intertextual link with the fairy tale “Snow White.” Fairy tales about dragons and the persecuted maidens, as in “Snow White,” became popular after they were published by German folklorists, the brothers Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm, in their famous collection of Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Grimm’s Fairy Tales, first published in 1812). In the classification of international folktales, they belong to the types “The Quest for the Vanished Princesses” (ATU 301A) and “Snow White” (ATU 709) (Uther). In the Lithuanian folk tradition, different variants of these narratives were recorded approximately 100 times (Kerbelyte˙, “Lietuviu˛ pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas”), even though in contemporary Lithuania these tales are better known not from the oral tradition but from various, often translated, fairy tale collections and contemporary film adaptations. It is noteworthy that in the second of the examples provided above, the writer uses an intertextual link with the fairy tale “Snow White” as an object of parody to provide direct historical-political allusions. The creation of parodies of wellknown and popular tales is often stimulated by the aim to “ironically mock and depreciate certain models of people’s behaviour, their actions, aims and values” (Anglickiene˙ and Grigonyte˙ 221–222). Thus, as current studies indicate, the folk tale can often be used for postmodernist ends in contemporary fiction that often include different forms of intertextual dialogue or parody (Smith 1).11 Translation using explication, that is, providing an explanation of the meaning implied by an intertextual element, is the second most common technique for translating folkloric intertexts. As was mentioned above, 9 examples of the analysed intertextual elements were translated this way, which comprises 18% of all cases. In these cases, the translators used explication with explanatory comments in notes. In nineteenth-century Lithuanian writer Antanas Baranauskas’s long poem The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai, in a note provided at the end of the book, the translator of the poem explains that “in this and six subsequent lines the text refers to a well-known tale of Lithuanian folk literature: ‘Egle˙, the Queen of Snakes’” (Baranauskas, “La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai” 31).12 In addition, it is further

11 See also Bacchilega (2013). 12 The Lithuanian fairy tale “Egle˙ zˇalcˇiu˛ karaliene˙” (Eng. “Egle˙, the Queen of Grass Snakes”) is about a young girl who promises to marry a grass snake that enters her clothes while she is bathing. The girl’s parents do not want their daughter to marry the grass snake and try to trick him by giving a goose as a bride. However, a cuckoo tells him that it is not his bride. Egle˙ goes to the grass snake’s home in the sea, marries him, and the latter transforms into a young man, Zˇilvinas. They live happily, have three sons and a daughter but Egle˙ longs for her family and wants to visit them. Her husband gives her impossible tasks, such as to wear out iron shoes. Egle˙ performs all the tasks, takes her children, and leaves. To come back to Zˇilvinas, she has to call her husband using secret words. Egle˙’s brothers learn the secret words, call the grass

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specified that this Lithuanian fairy tale is already known in Italy as its Italian translation was published in Vita e Pensiero in 1989. As a result, the explanatory comment in the note performs two important functions. On the one hand, it helps to convey the meaning of this intertext in the target language. On the other hand, the explanation helps to demonstrate the narrative’s importance in Lithuanian national culture. Excerpts from Baranauskas’s Anyksˇˇciu˛ ˇsilelis illustrate how intertextual links with this Lithuanian fairy tale are rendered in the Italian translation: ˇ ia visais lapais dreba epusˇe˙s nusgande˛, – C Kozˇnoj klaika˛ nekantrios zˇalktycˇios atrandi. Cˇia a˛zˇuolai ir uosiai prie egliu˛ sustojo, Lyg tartum cˇia zˇalktiene˙ pati˛ apraudojo, Kai pieno putos vietoj kraujo puta plu¯do Ir su vaikais isˇ savo motinisˇko su¯do Medzˇian gailysta virto – pati egle tapo, Jaunucˇiukus aptaise˙ vaikus ru¯bais lapo. (Baranauskas, Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis 14; emphasis added) . . . qui le alberelle spaurite tremano con tutte le foglie, – in ciascuna la viltà della figlia della serpe tu cogli. Qui accanto agli abeti le querce coi frassini han sostato, come se qui la sposa della serpe avesse pianto suo marito, quando la schiuma di sangue emerse, non quella di latte, e insieme ai figli per propria decisione di madre in albero si mutò dal dolore – un abete divenne lei stessa, mise indosso ai figli giovincelli vestiti fi foglia. (Baranauskas, La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai 11–12; emphasis added) With leaves all quivering the aspen quakes As did the frightened Princess of Grass Snakes. Round firs grow ash and oak trees, as if here The Queen for her dead King shed many tears When blood at sea, not milky foam, she saw And then decided that her children four Should trees become and she herself a fir, And all wear foliage green along with her. (Baranauskas, The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai 6; emphasis added)13

snake, and kill him. When Egle˙ calls her husband, she sees red foam at the seashore and finds out that he is dead. She turns her children and herself into trees. 13 Translation of Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis from Lithuanian into English by Peter Tempest (1997).

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The Lithuanian fairy tale “Egle˙ zˇalcˇiu˛ karaliene˙” (Eng. “Egle˙, the Queen of Grass Snakes”)14 is categorised as a tale of magic and labelled as the “Bathing Girl’s Garments Kept” (425M) type in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales.15 For more than a hundred years, this folk narrative has received special attention and has become one of the best known and most popular folk narratives in Lithuania. According to the data of Bronislava Kerbelyte˙’s catalogue of Lithuanian narrative folklore, this tale has 120 variants in the Lithuanian folk tradition (Kerbelyte˙, “Lietuviu˛ pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas” 202–205). Even though similar tales belonging to the type “Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative” are well-known and spread all over Europe, version M of the type 425 about the husband who is a grass snake is recorded only in Lithuanian folklore. According to Lithuanian folklorist Leonardas Sauka, who has dedicated most of his research to and has published a four-volume edition on the Lithuanian fairy tale “Egle˙, the Queen of Grass Snakes,” this tale carries a special meaning to Lithuanians and has become “one of the distinct markers of the nation’s identity” (Sauka, “Pasaka Egle˙ zˇalcˇiu˛ karaliene˙” 656). In Baranauskas’s The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai, the reference to the tale, which he incorporates into a literary description of the forest, helps him to reveal the relationship that Lithuanian people used to have with trees. In traditional culture, some trees were considered sacred or believed to be inhabited by the souls of the dead. The final motif of the tale “Egle˙, the Queen of Grass Snakes” that describes the transformation of people into trees connotes close links between humans and trees in Lithuanian folklore, the ancient worldview, and the activity of the logging of forests. In the same long poem, The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai by Baranauskas, the explication technique is used in the translation of an allusion to another famous folk narrative, a place legend about the Puntukas stone. However, in this case, the information provided in a footnote does not refer to the folk narrative on its own but to the natural heritage object it refers to: “Puntukas is a red granite boulder, the second-largest stone in Lithuania” (Baranauskas, “La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai” 31). Thus, the reader is introduced to a cultural object, the Puntukas stone, whereas the rest of the text is translated without changes as both the plot of the folk narrative and its meaning can be understood from the context: Nesˇe˛s velnias akmeni˛, didumo kaip grycˇios, Ir sudauzˇyt nore˙je˛s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ bazˇnycˇios Arba uzˇverst upe˙s; bet kaip tik isˇvyde˛s A˛zˇuolyna˛ pasˇve˛sta˛ ir gaidys pragyde˛s, 14 Even though in the source language Egle˙’s spouse is called Zˇaltys (Grass Snake), English translations most often render this character as a snake. Author’s comment. 15 See Uther (2004).

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Tuoj isˇ nagu˛ paleide˛s ir sme˙lin ˛imusˇe˛s Net zˇeme˙ sudrebe˙jus, senos griuve˛ pusˇys. (Baranauskas, Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis 40) Portò il diavolo la pietra, grande come casa, e voleva di Anyksˇcˇiai abbattere la chiesa o sbarrare il fiume; ma appena notò il sacro querceto e il gallo cantò, la mollò dagli artigli e l’infisse nella rena: caddero i vecchi pini e tremò perfino la terra. (Baranauskas, La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai 26) This giant boulder once a devil bore Intent to wreck Anyksˇcˇiai chapel or To dam a stream, but then he saw below An oak grove and cock began to crow. He dropped the rock. So heavily it fell Earth shook, it brought down aged pines as well. (Baranauskas, The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai 19)

However, the technique of explication with explanatory comments in notes is not only applied to the translation of intertextual meanings of longer and/or betterknown folk narratives but also to different other intertexts that might be of interest to an inquisitive reader of the target text. In this respect, the Italian translation of Donelaitis’s poem Metai is exceptional. The translation is very accurate, and the additional information provided in the notes also demonstrates that the translator is well-acquainted with research on the subject and has carefully studied the information about different phenomena of folk culture: Syveida kytra nulenkus uodega˛ be˙go; O sturluks, ausis isˇke˙le˛s irgi drebe˙dams, ˛I arcˇiausius kru¯mus vos nusikakino sle˙ptis. (Donelaitis, Le Stagioni 90) Con la coda tra le gambe corse via l’astuta volpe, e il coniglio, tutto tremulo, le orecchie ben drizzate, fuggì lesto a rimpiattarsi tra i cespugli più vicini. (Donelaitis, Le Stagioni 91) The fox ran off, her tail between her legs, The hare with long ears quivering from fear Fled to the nearest bushes there to hide. (Donelaitis, The Seasons 51)

Another example is: Ei kieksyk! deiviu˛ bauksˇtints isˇ patalo sˇokau, Kad man jos tamsoj su ragais margais pasirode˙ Irgi praryt mano du¯sˇia˛ vis ˛i patala˛ sieke˙; Tode˙l isˇ be˙dos nusipirke˛s didele˛ pu¯cˇka˛ Irgi paprovyje˛s ja˛ po galvu˛ paside˙jau. Sˇtai! Po tam mane jau daugiaus negandino deive˙s, Ir asˇ naktyj re˙kaut ir durnuot pasilioviau. (Donelaitis, Le Stagioni 98)

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Quante volte m’han sbalzato dal giaciglio spettri e streghe che apparivano nel buio con le corna scintillanti tutt’intorno al letto, pronti a divorar l’anima mia! Ho comprato allora, spinto dal terrore, un grosso schioppo e lo tengo sotto il capo, sempre pronto a fare fuoco. Da quel giorno – toh! – nessuna strega m’ha più tormentato e la notte non mi senti più gridare o delirare. (Donelaitis, Le Stagioni 99) How often ghosts would scare me out of bed When with bright horns they loomed at night and swarmed Into the bed to gobble up my soul! So in my plight I bought myself a gun Which I kept loaded underneath my head. Now no ghosts any more give me a fright And I’ve stopped shouting like a fool at night. (Donelaitis, The Seasons 57)

In the first example, regional names for animals, the fox (syveida) and the rabbit (sturluks), are translated into Italian by neutral nouns; however, not only does the translator explain that the author used unusual names for the animals in a note, but also indicates that they might have been borrowed from the repertoire of traditional Lithuanian riddles (Donelaitis, “Le Stagioni” 262). In the second example, the image of the deities with variegated horns is used. The translator explains their meaning in a note, drawing on a detailed description provided by the Lithuanian folklorist Zenonas Slaviu¯nas, even though there is no mention that this intertext is also an allusion to a traditional belief legend. Besides, it should also be noted that the unusual appearance of the deities with “variegated horns” is a result of an authentic interpretation of the tradition, because, as the Lithuanian mythologist Norbertas Ve˙lius argues, neither in Lithuanian folklore, nor in any ethnographic material are deities with horns ever mentioned (qtd. in Razauskas-Daukintas, “Mitiniai vaizdiniai Donelaicˇio Metuose” 185). This important information is not included in the translator’s note. In one of the examples, the translator not only explains the intertextual meaning but also marks out the intertext graphically by leaving a quotation of the text in the original language: Smuikai tau ir kanklys tur su ge˙da nutilti, Kad rykaudama tu savo saldu˛ pakeli balsa˛ Ir kinkyt, paplakt, nuvazˇiuot isˇbudini Jurgi˛! (Donelaitis, Le stagioni 50) Con vergogna debbono zittirsi kankle˙s e violini se tu, festeggiando, levi in alto la tua dolce voce e gridando “kinkyt, paplakt, nuvazˇiuot” risvegli Jurgis! (Donelaitis, Le Stagioni 51) In shame fiddle and zither silent fall When, sweetly twittering, your voice is heard Exhorting Jurgis to get to work. (Donelaitis, The Seasons 19)

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Imitations of sounds produced by animals or musical instruments are part of the folk tradition. Usually, they are sung or performed in recitative and do not have a developed plot. The example above is unique as the translator decided not to translate three verbs and two nouns of the source language: kankle˙s, kinkyt, paplakt, nuvazˇiuot, Jurgis; their meaning is explained in a note. They allow the reader of the target text to get acquainted with the Lithuanian version of a popular imitation of the nightingale’s voice. In the source text, the bird’s voice is praised as more beautiful than the sound of violins and kankle˙s, a traditional Lithuanian string instrument. In the note, the translator provides information about this musical instrument. The name of the addressee, Jurgis, is not adapted into Italian, even though the Italian reader would not read it in the same way as the Lithuanian one because the first letter “J” is pronounced “j” in Lithuanian and “dʒ” in Italian. Therefore, even though this case demonstrates the translator’s aim to familiarise the Italian reader with the Lithuanian language, the decision not to translate certain words also hinders the reader’s comprehension of the text, especially considering the fact that the translation is published as a parallel text edition, and the reader can read the source text and compare it with the translation in the same volume. In the next example, a different technique is applied to translate the imitation of the oriole’s voice in the original poem: Skamba tik, skamba misˇkas: cˇia volunge˙ Ieva˛ Trotina: “Ieva, Ieva! neganyk po pieva˛!” (Baranauskas, Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis 26) Risuona e risuona la selva: qui l’oriolo ad Eva Il verso rifà: “O Eva, Eva mia non pascolar nella prateria!” (Baranauskas, La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai 17) The forest rings. The oriole teases Eve: “Eve, Eve, believe me! You this field must leave!” (Baranauskas, The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai 13)

Considering this case, it is important to keep in mind that the folklore genre of imitations of birds’ voices is not as popular and widespread in Italian folk culture as it is in Lithuania, where children learn traditional imitations at a very early age. The addressee, Ieva, Eva in Italian, to whom the oriole speaks, is the name of the first woman, as described in the Bible, but is also a popular female name in Lithuania, whereas in Italy it is quite rare. Besides, in Lithuania, the line imitating the bird’s voice is also a common rhyme used to tease girls named Ieva. The noun pieva is rendered as prateria in the target language, even though most of the temperate grassland regions referred to as praterie in Italian are located in North America, where they are known as prairies. Therefore, translating the Lithuanian noun pieva as pascolo – meadow for pasture – would have been more accurate linguistically. Thus, the imitation of a specific bird’s voice is translated literally

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word for word and does not allow for maintaining the meaning implied by the folkloric intertext that, consequently, presumably remains unclear to the Italian target text reader. An application of explication with explanatory comments in notes would have probably been a more suitable translation technique, which would have helped to avoid the loss of the cultural meaning implied by the folkloric intertext. In the following example, the meaning implied by a folkloric intertext in the source language text is neutralised in the target language text: E˙ isˇ visu˛ virsˇesnis auga baravykas, Valig dainusˇkos zˇodzˇiu˛ – “grybu˛ pulkaunykas”: Platus, storas, paspu¯te˛s, lyg tartum uzˇklotas Ant kieto, dru¯to koto bliu¯das palivotas. (Baranauskas, Anyksˇˇciu˛ ˇsilelis 10) Ma è il porcino il più maestoso di tutti, in una canzone detto “il re dei funghi”: largo, massiccio, superbo, quasi fosse posato sul suo gambo duro e forte un catino smaltato. (Baranauskas, La selva di Anyksˇcˇiai 10) Exceptionally big the cep here stands, In folk song called ‘the mushroom who commands’. A doughty air has he, this sturdy chap Who bears on his thick stalk a weighty cap. (Baranauskas, The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai 4)

The dainusˇka of the source text, the noun suggesting a not very serious kind of song, belongs to the group of songs about nature and is a variant of the song about the war of mushrooms (Lith. “Baravykas pulkaunykas,” type G 207) (Dringelis). As the Lithuanian folklorist Grazˇina Skabeikyte˙-Kazlauskiene˙ claims, “in Lithuania, the texts of these songs have been known for quite a long period of time; the earliest recorded variant dates back to the year 1863. Some respondents called them mushroom collecting songs, whereas others said these were children’s or shepherds’ songs” (“Kode˙l ju¯s mane˛s nepavadinot”). In the given example, the very term dainusˇka makes an intertextual reference to a folk song. Special terms implying disdain, for instance, tausˇkalai (chatters), lojimai (barkings), blevyzgos, balabaikos (twaddles), were used to refer to folk songs with simple rhythmic and melodic patterns. However, in the target text, the noun dainusˇka is translated by the neutral canzone. An important connotation of the epithet grybu˛ pulkaunykas, “the colonel of mushrooms,” suggesting the motif of war, is lost in the translation by substituting the rank of the colonel with the rank of the king. Thereby the translator stresses that the boletus is the most valued mushroom in Lithuania, the king of mushrooms. Therefore, it may be claimed that the word for word translation technique was applied, which led to decontextualisation of the folkloric intertext; in the target text, it is not clear what kind of song the poem refers to.

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In view of the above, it should be noted that the technique of translation using explication, that is, providing an explanation of the meaning implied by an intertextual element, was applied only by the translators of the two classical nineteenth-century poems The Seasons by Donelaitis and The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai by Baranauskas. This suggests that translators are inclined to provide explanations when translating literary texts, which use archaic language and thus reflect the culture, history, specific everyday life realia and traditions of a specific historical period. As was already mentioned above, the analysed corpus included only one example of the use of the technique of cultural actualisation in the Italian translation of Lithuanian literary texts. The translator substituted the Lithuanian folkloric intertext with a corresponding Italian one, functionally implicating a similar meaning. The example in question is an excerpt from a twentieth-century novel, Ragana ir lietus (1993 [Eng. The Witch and the Rain]), by Jurga Ivanauskaite˙. ˇ iu¯cˇia liu¯lia su¯nuzˇe˙li˛, mazˇa˛, nedideli˛. –C Kad ir mazˇas, nedidelis – didis puikore˙lis. ˇ iu¯cˇia liu¯lia, su¯nuzˇe˙li˛… (Ivanauskaite˙, Ragana ir lietus 45) C Ninna nanna, bimba bella, picinnina. Se pur piccol piccolina, sei tanto bellina. Ninna nanna, bimba bella. (Ivanauskaite˙, La Strega e la pioggia 43) Hush-a-by baby. Even if you are tiny, you are bonny. Hush-a-by baby, my dear young son.

In the source text, a woman sings a lullaby to another female prisoner. It is noteworthy that the writer, who used a traditional folk lullaby text, recorded by the famous nineteenth-century collector and publisher of Lithuanian folk songs, Antanas Jusˇka, (number of the song in the collection is 639) did not adapt it to the situation described in the novel and maintained the addressee su¯nuzˇe˙li˛, “dear young son,” rather than the female dukruzˇe˙le˛, “dear young daughter.” In this context, it is important to note that folk lullabies are open to variation and improvisation, and can be easily adapted to specific situations. In the target text, the translator, maintaining the text’s aesthetical function and probably seeking to make it more comprehensible to the Italian reader, substituted the Lithuanian song with a stylistically similar Italian text, which addresses the protagonist of the novel as a beautiful young girl, bimba bella, picinnina. It can also be claimed that, in the example quoted above, the cultural transposition is applied purposefully, with a clear aim to create a closer relationship between the lullaby and the rest of the narrative.

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Conclusion

A quantitative analysis of the selected examples indicates that the translation techniques most frequently applied to the translation of folkloric intertexts from Lithuanian into Italian are a) direct translation when the intertextual meaning is rendered in a relatively straightforward way, without any need for additional explanation and b) explication, when the meaning implied by an intertextual element is explained in notes. These translation techniques help to convey the meaning of different folkloric intertexts and maintain their specific cultural connotations. Direct word for word translation, by contrast, leads to neutralisation of the implied cultural meanings and thus tends to restrict the understanding of the text or even to mislead the reader. A detailed analysis of all the cases of direct translation has revealed that this translation technique is often applied to the intertexts which are short fragments, thus, more difficult to recognise. They reflect certain folk knowledge, beliefs, worldviews that are organically linked to the text and which can be understood from the context. Therefore, even when such intertexts are translated directly, they maintain the implied meanings that are understandable both to the source and target language readers. Intertexts referring to internationally popular tales are translated directly as well, as this does not interfere with the perception of the target texts. Explication helps to convey the meanings of the intertexts that are specific to Lithuanian national culture and would not be understandable to the target text reader without an explanation. The present analysis also shows that the choice of translation techniques applied to the translation of folkloric intertexts depends on the following factors: a) the nature of the literary text and its closeness to national culture, that is, whether the text is more related to the local culture, in this case, that of Lithuania, or to a larger tradition, for example, European; b) the functions that the folkloric intertext performs in every specific case, that is, how culturally “capacious” it is and how important it is to convey the implied meaning or the specific nature of the literary text; and c) the expression of the folkloric intertext, that is, the form in which it is rendered (direct or indirect reference, allusion, quotation, or paraphrase).

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Leonavicˇiene˙, Aurelija. Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija ir vertimas. Kaunas: Technologija, 2014. Print. Macˇernis, Vytautas. Corte consonanze. Trans. Pietro Umberto Dini. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2010. Print. Manera, Danilo, ed. Racconti lituani: Racconti dal mondo. Viterbo: Millelire, 1993. Print. Melnikova, Irina. Intertekstualumas: Teorija ir praktika. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2003. Print. Meras, Icchokas. Lygiosios trunka akimirka˛. Vilnius: Valstybine˙ grozˇine˙s literatu¯ros leidykla, 1963. Print. –. Scacco perpetuo. Trans. Ausra Povilaviciute and Vogelmann Vanna Lucattini. Firenze: La Giuntina, 2007. Print. Morici, Gianni. Canti popolari lituani. Roma: Anonima romana editoriale, 1930. Print. Musˇinskas, Danielius. Diptichas apie kasdienybe˛. 1982. Tekstai.lt. Sˇiuolaikine˙s literatu¯ros antologija. Tekstai.lt. Web. 6 July 2021. http://www.tekstai.lt/tekstai/295-musinskas-da nielius/2958-danielius-musinskas-diptichas-apie-kasdienybe. Osimo, Bruno. Manuale del traduttore: Guida pratica con glossario. Milano: Hoepli, 2013. Print. Parulskis, Sigitas. Trys sekunde˙s dangaus. 2nd ed. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2004. Print. Parulskis, Sigitas. Tre secondi di cielo. Trans. Birute Zˇindzˇiu¯te-Michelini and Guido Michelini. Milano: Isbn Edizioni, 2005. Print. Petrulione˙, Lolita. “Translation of Culture-Specific Items from English into Lithuanian: The Case of Joanne Harris’s Novels.” Kalbu˛ studijos 21 (2012): 43–49. Print. Prampolini, Giacomo. “La letteratura lituana e lettone.” Storia universale della letteratura VII. Ed. Giacomo Prampolini. Torino: UTET, 1974. 649–686. Print. –. “Antologia di testi.” Storia universale della letteratura VII. Ed. Giacomo Prampolini. Torino: UTET, 1974. 1089–1166. Print. Racˇiu¯naite˙, Rasa. Moteris tradicine˙je lietuviu˛ kultu¯roje: gyvenimo ciklo paprocˇiai (XIX a. pabaiga–XX a. vidurys). Kaunas: Vytauto Didzˇiojo universiteto leidykla, 2002. Print. Rapsˇyte˙, Laima. “Frazeologizmu˛ vertimo be˙dos.” Meninio vertimo problemos: Straipsniu˛ rinkinys. Ed. Eugenijus Matuzevicˇius and Arvydas Valionis. Vilnius: Vaga, 1980. 367–375. Print. Razauskas, Dainius. “Mitiniai vaizdiniai Donelaicˇio ‘Metuose’: Pauksˇcˇiai.” Literatu¯ra 56.1 (2014): 7–20. Print. Razauskas-Daukintas, Dainius. Mitiniai vaizdiniai Donelaicˇio “Metuose”: Pastabos parasˇte˙se. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016. Print. Rudy, Jill Terry. “Overview of Basic Concepts. Folklore, Fairy Tale, Culture and Media.” The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy Tale Cultures. Ed. Greenhill Pauline, Rudy Jill Terry, Hamer Naomi and Lauren Bosc. UK: Routledge, 2018. 3–10. Print. Sabaliauskas, Algirdas. Noi balti. Ed. Pietro Umberto Dini. Vilnius: Istituto di lingua lituana. Livorno: Books & Company, 2007. Print. Salvatori, Giuseppe. Storia, miti e canzoni degli antichi lituani. Roma: Nuova Antologia, 1930. Print. –. I Lituani di ieri e di oggi. Bologna-Rocca S. Casciano: L. Cappelli Edit. Tip., 1932. Print. –. Dzˇ. Salvatoris. Lietuva vakar ir ˇsiandien. Vilnius: Mintis, 1992. Print. Sauka, Leonardas. Lietuviu˛ tautosaka. Kaunas: Sˇviesa, 1998. Print.

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Carmen Caro Dugo

Chapter 11 – The Translation of Cultural References from Lithuanian into Spanish: Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai (Las estaciones del año) and Antanas Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ sˇilelis (La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai)

1.

Introduction

The presence of specific cultural references or culturally relevant aspects of a text has been understood as one of the elements that make the process of translation particularly challenging, difficult, or even impossible. The bigger the linguistic, cultural or temporal distances between the source and the target texts, the more ambitious the endeavour of rendering that text appears to be. That is why Gerardo Vázquez Ayora states that translators have to be not just bilingual but also ‘bicultural’ (388). The contribution of Spanish translation theorists to the understanding of the translation process of literary texts, especially as regards cultural aspects, has been particularly significant since the 1980s. One of the classical texts in translation studies is the essay entitled “The Misery and Splendour of Translation,” written in 1937 by the prominent Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), which is actually one of the most widely quoted essays on translation written in the Spanish language. Pilar Ordóñez-López states that “a cursory review of translation literature is enough to appreciate the wide-spread personal mark that José Ortega y Gasset, who is considered ‘the most influential figure in Spanish thought,’ seems to have on contemporary Translation Studies” (73). Ortega y Gasset argues that languages have important limitations (they are characterised as much by what they cannot say as by what they can actually say) and explores the concept of ‘untranslatability’: “Isn’t translating itself an irredeemably utopian task?,” he asks himself (“The Misery and the Splendour of Translation I”). At the same time, this difficulty makes the task of translating all the worthier: “everything that is truly human is difficult, very difficult; so much so, that it is impossible,” but, according to the Spanish philosopher, “it is not a dismissal of the potential splendour of the translator’s task to assert its impossibility. On the contrary, this quality vests it with the most sublime of dimensions and reveals to us that it is meaningful” (Ortega y Gasset). He adds that what makes translation so challenging is not just a linguistic difference:

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Languages separate us and alienate, not because they are different languages, but because they grow out of different mental pictures, of disparate intellectual systems—ultimately, of divergent philosophies. I imagine, thus, a type of translation that is ugly, as science always is, that makes no pretences to literary grace, that is not easy to read, but is nevertheless very clear, even if such clarity requires copious footnotes. (Ortega y Gasset)

Ortega y Gasset’s insights into the translation process have had a great impact. Francisco Ayala, a friend of José Ortega y Gasset’s and, like the Spanish philosopher, a translator from German, did not fully agree with Ortega y Gasset as regards the best way to translate. However, in his Breve teoría de la traducción (Brief Theory of Translation, 1946) he also considers that the activity of translating cannot possibly be carried out in its fullness; not so much because human beings are incapable of achieving perfection, but because translation seeks to transfer spiritual and cultural products from one culture to another. However, he trusts each individual translator’s tact and sensitivity and thinks that it is up to each one to decide the best method to approach his/her task. The translator has to consider the type of text to be rendered and should not forget that every creation is inserted in the culture where it belongs and, simultaneously, seeks to achieve a universal and eternal character (Ordóñez-López 160). Discussing the contribution of Francisco Ayala to translation studies, Elisa Alonso Jiménez summarises: for Ayala translating is a demanding, thankless task, or even a desperate task, because it is sometimes almost impossible to transfer a spiritual object from one enclosed sphere to another and bring about a transposition between two subtly incommunicable worlds. Expanding upon this same idea, the author saw all literary works as the product of a specific cultural system. He believed that, when translating, the two cultural identities concerned must be very much taken into account by means of subterfuge, a conjuring trick, a deception. He even formulated the hypothesis that the perfect translation is unattainable. (Alonso Jiménez 206 )

Ayala deals with the weighty topics of translation studies—the profession of a translator, the two possible approaches to translation, the difficulties of communicating across cultures, among others, —with the additional merit of already having produced his theory back in 1946 (207). The understanding of the process of translation evolves substantially throughout the twentieth century to a perspective more centred on the target text. According to Julio César Santoyo, it is useful to distinguish between culture and civilisation. Culture, as opposed to civilisation, is related to the singularity and peculiarity of a well-defined community. In this community, there are ‘cultural zones’ that may or may not coincide with the ‘cultural zones’ of another community. And this is precisely what complicates the translator’s task as an

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intercultural mediator: the translation of all that which a specific culture keeps for itself and does not share (Santoyo 141–152). In his review of a publication on the cultural aspects of translation, David Marín Hernández reminds us that the relationship between translation and culture has been highlighted by many translation theorists, especially since the 1980s, as a result of the so-called cultural turn. In the global world, the specificity of different cultures remains and continues to be an issue for translation studies. What is specific and what is common to other communities can coexist in a single community. Such cultural diversity actually challenges translators, enriches their work, and justifies their existence (Marín Hernández 153–156). The Spanish theorist of translation Amparo Hurtado Albir agrees that the transfer of cultural elements in a text is one of the greatest problems that the translator encounters. Thus, some authors, like Catford, speak of cultural untranslatability (Hurtado 607). However, Hurtado advocates a more functional and dynamic perspective for the translation of the so-called culturemes, or culturally bound terms, and suggests a number of factors that should be taken into account, such as the type of relationship between both cultures, the nature of the translated text, the finality of the translation, its possible reader, and so on (614). Most recently Francisco Fernández Fernández and Ana Belén Fernández Guerra have also provided a dynamic view for the translation of culturally bound expressions, affirming that these gaps and inequalities between cultures are reduced to very specific areas and terms, which are not sufficient to proclaim the utopian nature of translation, or even the untranslatability of such cultural elements. Intercultural differences are becoming smaller, due to the generalisation of information and the increasing mobility of the population (e. g., tourism, academic or other exchanges, migration). These processes make us all, to some extent, inhabitants of the so-called global village (Fernández Fernández, Guerra and Belén 202). The authors consider that the lack of equivalence between languages and cultures, as well as the difficulties related to the limits of our knowledge have led some to consider that cultural references are untranslatable: The fact that a word does not have an exact equivalent in another language, however, does not imply that it cannot be translated. Kade had already clearly stated that, from the linguistic and communicative point of view, everything conceivable by the human mind should in principle be able to be expressed in any language and can therefore be translated. (Fernández Fernández, Guerra, and Belén 223)

Javier García Albero has published a review of some texts on translation studies published by Spanish researchers during the last decades. He states that the most widely studied field remains the humanistic and literary translation, a practically inexhaustible area in which Spanish researchers are doing a praiseworthy job worldwide (García Albero 183). Many of these publications, such as the series

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Relaciones literarias en el ámbito hispánico: traducción, literatura, cultura (published in five volumes by Peter Lang), for example, deal with cultural aspects of the translation process and stress the role of the translated text in the target culture, partly inspired by the Israeli Itamar Even-Zohar’s ‘Polysystem Theory.’ García Albero also discusses in detail the three volumes of another series coordinated by Pilar Martino Alba and published by Dykinson. García Albero′s study describes a small part of the Spanish contribution to the history of translation, which, according to the author, is being written gradually. Spanish scholars such as Francisco Lafarga, Luis Pegenaute, Miguel Ángel Vega, Anthony Pym, Julio César Santoyo, to mention but a few, have made a very significant contribution from both a theoretical and practical point of view (194).

2.

Translating Lithuanian Literature into Spanish

Notwithstanding the abundant contribution of Spanish researchers to translation studies in the last decades, it would be futile to attempt to find any detailed study about translations from Lithuanian into Spanish. Although Spanish is the official language of twenty countries, and there are more than four hundred million native speakers of Spanish in the world, Spanish readers, unfortunately, have not so far had the opportunity to read much Lithuanian literature in their own language. Compared to the corpus of translations to English, the number of Spanish texts is quite modest. This is partly due to the fact that the Lithuanian language has never been taught in Spanish or Latin American universities. Therefore, contacts with Lithuanian language or literature on an academic level have been very sporadic, which, inevitably, results in a shortage of translators. Despite this situation, the following works have already been translated into Spanish: Saulius Tomas Kondrotas’s Zˇalcˇio zˇvilgsnis translated into Spanish as El ojo de la serpiente by Pilar Giralt Gorina in 1992 (Eng. A Look of a Whipsnake), and Icchokas Meras’s Lygiosios trunka akimirka˛ (Spa. Tablas por segundos; Eng. A Stalemate Lasts but a Moment), translated by Macarena González in 2004. The most prolific translator has been the internationally known scholar and one of the greatest hispanists of the twentieth century, Birute˙ Ciplijauskaite˙ (1929– 2017). She rendered into Spanish the collection of contemporary Lithuanian poetry Voces en el silencio: poesía lituana contemporánea (1991), Vidmante˙ Jasukaityte˙’s Stebuklinga patvoriu˛ zˇole˙ ([Spa. La hierba de la raíz amarga; Eng. The Miraculous Weed along Fence Row] 2002); a collection of Janina Degutyte˙’s and Birute˙ Pukelevicˇiu¯te˙’s poetry, Entre el sol y la desposesión ([Eng. Between the Sun and Dispossession] 2002) and Nijole˙ Miliauskaite˙’s Uzˇdrausta ˛ieiti ([Spa. Prohibido entrar; Eng. Entry Prohibited] 2003). Balys Sruoga’s Dievu˛ misˇkas (Eng. Forest of the Gods) has been translated twice with the title El bosque de los dioses,

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first by J. Dijokas (1986, Moscow), and more recently by Akvile˙ Galvosaite˙ and Bautista Serigós (2008, Buenos Aires). The latter translators are also responsible for the Spanish version of Romualdas Granauskas’s Gyvenimas po klevu ([Spa. La vida bajo el arce; Eng. Life under a Maple Tree] 2011). El país de cristal, ([Eng. A Land of Glass] 2008), a collection of short stories by Vanda Juknaite˙, Bite˙ Vilimaite˙, Birute˙ Jonusˇkaite˙, Ema Mikule˙naite˙ and Renata Sˇerelyte˙ was translated by Carmen Caro Dugo (2008), who is also responsible for the Spanish version of two classical poetical works: Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai ([Spa. Las estaciones del año; Eng. The Seasons] 2013) and Antanas Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis ([La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai; Eng. The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai] 2017), as well as some poems by Kazys Bradu¯nas (2017). Apart from the edition of one poem by Maironis “Kur be˙ga Sˇesˇupe˙,” translated by Xaverio Ballester and Vilma Dobilaite˙ in 2015 (Eng. “Where the Sˇesˇupe˙ Flows”), La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai is actually the first bilingual publication where the Spanish reader has the possibility to see both the Lithuanian text and its Spanish version. Carmen Caro Dugo has also translated Sinfonía de primavera. Antología de poesía lituana del siglo XX ([Eng. Spring Symphony: Anthology of 20th Century Lithuanian Poetry] 2019). Dalia Grinkevicˇiu¯te˙’s impressive memoirs about Siberia, Lituanos junto al mar del Láptev (Eng. Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea), were translated by Carmen Caro Dugo and Margarita Santos Cuesta (2020). Alvydas Sˇlepikas′s novel Mano vardas Maryte˙ (Eng. My name is Maryte˙) was translated by Margarita Santos Cuesta with the title Bajo la sombra de los lobos ([Eng. In the Shadows of Wolves] 2021). Finally, the most recent literary translation from Lithuanian into Spanish is the compilation of short stories Con una mariposa en los labios: relatos lituanos contemporáneos ([Eng. With a Buttterfly on His Lips: Contemporary Lithuanian Short Stories] translated by Carmen Caro Dugo, 2023). I am now going to consider some aspects of the translations into Spanish of the two classical poetic works of Lithuanian literature: Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai (The Seasons), written in the second half of the eighteenth century, and Antanas Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis (The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai), composed a century later. These poetic works are the ones that are thought to best represent Lithuanian culture in the world and are the most translated texts. The first translation into Spanish of the poem Metai by the famous Lithuanian poet, Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780), was published in 2013. This publication coincides with the third centenary of the birth of its author and is also the first complete version of his work in a Romance language. Metai saw the light of day in East Prussia at the time of the Enlightenment; it occupies a prominent place in the history of Lithuanian literature. Donelaitis, a Lutheran pastor, did not pursue or experience any literary glory in life. After his death, the poem remained in manuscript form, known only to some friends, and was first published in Königsberg in 1818 by Liudwik Rhesa (1776–1840). Rhesa is also the initiator of the

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history of the translation of Donelaitis into other languages and edited the work along with his own translation into German. In the four songs of the poem, one for each season of the year, the author’s undoubted didactic intention does not diminish his interest in recreating the beauty of the language and to exploit all its expressive possibilities. Using the metrical pattern of the classical hexameter, the poet recreates the language of the peasants, with all its vivacity and richness. This language is sometimes crude yet full of images. In his descriptions of nature and seasonal changes, as well as of the life of the peasants such as agricultural tasks, celebrations, repeated condemnations of their vices, to mention but a few. The author frequently uses synonyms, hyperboles, synecdoches, personifications, alliterative effects, among other poetic devices. The long poem Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis (The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai) was written by Antanas Baranauskas (1835–1902) in his native Anyksˇcˇiai during the summers of 1858 and 1859 and first published in Vilnius in 1860 and 1861. This work by Baranauskas is considered to be an eminent expression of the relationship between man and nature, which is so typical of the Lithuanian cultural tradition, as well as one of the milestones of poetry in that language. It tells the story of the forests of Anyksˇcˇiai and it is like the poet’s cry of pain, not only for the lost forests, but also for the dramatic situation in his oppressed country. To describe these feelings and spiritual experiences, as well as the wonders of nature and the delight that it provides to all the senses, the poet draws upon popular vocabulary in a very creative way. In a letter to a friend, the poet elaborates on inspirations for his poem. Specifically, when he explains line 96, he notes that having heard his father describing the movement of the pine trees and comparing them with swaying reeds, his words seemed so beautiful that they provoked his desire to include them in a poem (Speicˇyte˙ 98). The poet is attentive not just to the sounds of the forest, but also to the richness of his own language.

3.

The Translation of Diminutive Derivative Forms from Lithuanian into Spanish

A language is not just a mere instrument to transmit the elements of a civilisation. On the contrary, it is the cultural patrimony of a particular community (Marín Hernández 155). Language itself shows a relationship with the world around. The use of diminutive suffixes and their derivatives is a very important stylistic element of the Lithuanian language. The translation of the meanings conveyed by these suffixes is a challenge, especially when translating into languages that do not possess such a wide range of diminutive suffixes or use this morphological device very seldom.

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The difficulty in translating the meaning conveyed by these Lithuanian suffixes in Romance languages has been mentioned in some recent studies (Caro Dugo, “B. Sruogos Dievu˛ misˇko vertimai” 54–63; “La traducción” 183–193; Leonavicˇiene˙, “Kalbiniai” 51–69; Leonavicˇiene˙, “Stratégies linguistiques” 211– 223). These studies suggest that diminutive derivatives, both in Lithuanian and Spanish, have undeniable axiological and cultural associations. Each language perceives the meanings and nuances expressed by the diminutives in a different way precisely because they are part of their culture (Caro Dugo, “La traducción” 191). In a comparative study on this issue Dorota Lockyer concluded that diminutives present translators with not only linguistic but also culture-related problems. Diminutives are more than their semantic meanings. . . . At the core of diminutives lies a deeply embedded cultural worldview. Perhaps further investigation into diminutives should search for a subtle but significant transposition of a worldview. (Lockyer 20)

It is objectively quite difficult to render the meanings and nuances conveyed by the diminutive suffixes in other languages, particularly in English and German (Maciene˙ 16). Referring to the English version of Donelaitis’s Metai by Peter Tempest, Dalia Vabaliene˙ affirms that in general, the translator succeeds in rendering the somewhat crude language, the democratic tone of the original, but not the lyrical nuances denoted by Lithuanian diminutive forms. Therefore, Donelaitis’s feelings of closeness to and compassion for his beloved parishioners are not so obvious (Vabaliene˙ 195–196). She had already pointed to this difficulty when translating Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis, noting that the task of translating the diminutives is so arduous and even impossible, that these nuances so typical of the Lithuanian languages are simply lost (Vabaliene˙, “Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis anglisˇkai” 179). The generous use of diminutives has been considered one of the reasons why it is possible to speak about the delicacy and lyricism of the language as one of the predominant traits of Lithuanian (Maciene˙, Deminutyvu˛ stilistika 15). I will examine the translation of these derivatives in the Spanish version of the first part of Donelaitis’s poem Metai, “Pavasario linksmybe˙s” (“The Joys of Spring”), as well as of Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis (The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai). In “The Joys of Spring,” fifty diminutive derivatives have been found among the 660 lines. Of these, only the following eleven have been translated as Spanish diminutives: zˇoleles/hierbitas (grasses), pauksˇteli/pajarito (bird), zˇolele˛/hierbita (grass), ponaitis/señorito (lord), vargeliais/trabajillos (tasks), saulele˙/solecito (sun), Mercˇiuk/Tinico (from Martin), versˇukai/becerritos (calves), visˇtycˇiai/pollitos (chicken), zˇa˛sycˇiai/gansitos (goslings), and gru¯delis/granito (grain). As for the remaining diminutive derivatives, three more have been compensated with epithets denoting positive or good qualities: saulele˙/dulce sol (sweet sunshine), zˇodelius/buen consejo (good advice), smagure˙liu˛/sabrosos manjares

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(tasty delicacies). For ponaitis, the gallicism petimetre (little lord) has been used here, which also compensates the meaning of the diminutive suffix and adds, in this case, a negative nuance. Only once in the four parts of The Seasons has this form been translated with the diminutive Spanish equivalent (señorito). The diminutive meaning is totally lost in the following thirty-four cases: three times pauksˇteliai/aves or pájaros (birds), pauksˇteli/ruiseñor (bird/nightingale), Jurgut/Jorge (George), velniu¯ksˇˇciu˛/demonios (fiends), ponatis/como un gallo (like a rooster), three times vaikescˇiai/niños (children), ˇsiltoms dienele˙ms/verano (warm days/summer), twice vargeliai/penas or males (miseries, woes), du¯ˇselei/alma (soul), mocˇiute˙/mujer (wife), lelate˙s/descendientes (offspring), liezˇuve˙lis/lengua (tounge), maldele˙ms/ruegos (prayers), ka˛sneli˛/bocado (bite), e˙rycˇiai/corderos (lambs), parsˇukais/lechones (piglets), riekeliu˛/rebanadas (slices), mazˇume˙le˙/nada (trifle), desˇrele˙s/salchichas (sausages), lasˇine˙liais/tocino (fat, bacon), parsˇuks/cerdo (pig), pinige˙li˛/dinero (money), auteliams/paños (footcloths), nabage˙liu˛/pobres (poor things), twice kuodeli˛/copo (tow, ball of fabric for spinning), ponaicˇiai/señor (lords), vindeliu˛/ruecas (spinning wheels), and spatelius/azadones (spades). Apart from two proper names (Marcˇiuks, diminutive for Martynas and translated with the diminutive Tinico, and Jurgut, the diminutive for Jurgis and translated as Jorge), most diminutive derivatives of the original refer to the types of food that are scarce in the spring, as well as the specificity of that season, which the poet describes with a particular emotion and lyrical tonality. The vast majority of the diminutives do not convey just a meaning of smallness, but also an appreciative value, expressing a certain emotion, pity, and commiseration for the peasants and their chores and, in a few cases, irony. It could be argued that lechón (piglet) y azadón (spade) are also diminutive compounds, but they are already lexicalised, and the suffix -ón does not add any appreciative nuances, as in the original Lithuanian. In cases where in Lithuanian the diminutive appears reduplicated and, therefore, effects increased intensity, in Spanish the preference has been to use only one diminutive form; for example, darbeliai su vargeliais (diminutive of tasks and miseries) was rendered as trabajillos y penas (only the first form is a diminutive derivative). In other cases, the diminutive form is not at all preserved in the translation, such as when the food that was abundant in autumn is remembered with emotion and the poet refers to desˇrele˙s su lasˇine˙liais (rich sausages and pork), which has been rendered as salchichas y tocino (sausages and bacon). Apart from the fact that duplication of suffixes in Spanish can be too repetitive, the translator must take into account the length of the lines, and the use of diminutives in this case would add two more syllables to nouns of four and three syllables. In addition to the eleven diminutive derivatives that translate Lithuanian diminutives, twelve more diminutive forms were used in the Spanish text that were not in the original: hijitos (children), todito (everything), jovenzuelo

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(youngster), twice golfillos (little rouge), huevitos (eggs), caballitos (horses), culito (bottom), tapadito (covered), pasito a paso (step by step), mujercitas (women), and veranito (summertime). In any case, the total results in twentythree diminutive forms compared to fifty of the original. Counting the four in which the meanings conveyed by the diminutive forms has been compensated, 54% has been preserved in the translation text. In The Forest of Anyksˇˇciai, there is a higher concentration of diminutive suffixes—partly due to the more lyrical tone of the poetic text. In the introductory study to the translation of Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis into Spanish, Brigita Speicˇyte˙ remarks that in this poetic work Antanas Baranauskas captures and preserves a non-instrumental approach to the natural environment typical of traditional Lithuanian culture: people do not only converge with the land where they live, which determines their habits and customs, they actually have a friendly relationship with their forest and its trees: Árboles y lituanos en santa armonía, desde la infancia juntos y así envejecían. (La floresta 277–278) Our folk have always lived at one with trees And know few closer lifelong friends than these. (The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai 277–278)1

Hence the forest is not merely the background of people’s lives or the source of their material resources, but also their life partner and neighbour (La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai 42). In the source language, this close and warm relationship is clearly reflected in the language itself, not just through the abundance of onomatopoeia or alliteration and other phonetic resources, but also through morphological means. Therefore, a ˇsilas (pine forest) is always ˇsilelis (dear/little forest), pauksˇcˇiai (birds) are pauksˇteliai and pauksˇtyte˙s (little birds), and so on. Not counting some lexicalised derivatives that have already lost the connotation conveyed by the diminutive suffix (they are found both in the original and in the translated text), the 342 lines of the original Lithuanian text feature seventy-three diminutive forms. Five of those derivatives have been omitted in the Spanish version (pauksˇteliai, ˇsileliu, pusˇeliu˛, miestelin, dievaicˇiams) (birds, pine forest, pine trees, town, gods), and the following nineteen have been translated with a diminutive Spanish form: pauksˇtyte˙s/pajarillos (birds), twice pusˇele˙s/pinillos (pine trees), minksˇtucˇiukai/blanditos (soft), burbuolyte˙/capullitos (buds), zˇiedeliu˛/florecillas (flowers), zˇoleles/hierbillas (grass), pusˇyne˙liu˛ and pusˇelyte˙s/pinillos (pine trees), twice lapelis/hojita (leaf), pauksˇtelis/pajarito (bird), ˇsakele˙s/ramajos (branches), linksmute˙ stirna/vivo cervatillo (happy fawn), genelis/carpinterito (woodpecker), upele˙/riachuelo (stream), balseliai/vocecillas (voices), asˇare˙le˙s/la1 All quoted translations of Baranauskas’s Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis from Lithuanian into English are by Peter Tempest.

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grimillas (tears), and ˇsilelis/pinarcillo (pine forest). In one of these, a Spanish noun takes a diminutive suffix, though in the original the suffix was attached to the adjective: linksmute˙ stirna – un vivo cervatillo (La floresta 141). The diminutive is not used in the translation of forty-nine diminutive derivatives: twice lapeliai/hojas (leaves), twice zˇve˙reliai/fieras (wild animals), urveliai/ madrigueras (lairs), twice ˇsakele˙s/rama (branch), leikele˙s/embudos (funnels), linksmute˙s/felices (happy), berzˇeliai/abedules (birch trees), jaunucˇiukus/hijos (youngsters, children), obele˙le˙/manzano (apple tree), sedule˙le˙/sangueña (cornel), zˇievele˙m/cortezas (bark), twice zˇmonele˙s/mortales and gente (folk, people), pusˇele˙s/ pinos (pine trees), three times ve˙jelis/aire, viento, brisa (breeze, wind), pieveliu˛/ prados (meadows), twice zˇiedelis/capullos (buds), ˇsakeliu˛/rama (branch), zˇvaigzˇdele˙s/estrellas (stars), zˇa˛sioka˛/ganso (gosling), voveryte˙/ardilla (squirrell), ˇsirmuone˙lis/comadreja (weasel), gegute˙le˙/cuco (cuckoo), balseliai/timbres (voices), strazdeliai/tordos (thrushes), zˇiedeliai/flores (flowers), five times ˇsilelis/bosque or pinar (pine forest/grove), twice ramume˙lio/reposo or ameno (rest, restful), zˇoleles/ hierba (grass), twice seneliai /ancianos and viejos (old people), dievaicˇiams/dioses (gods, idols), lygute˙s/enhiestos (erect), twice te˙veliai/padres (parents), pakrasˇte˙li˛/ palmo a palmo (every corner), and vaikeliu˛/niños (children). However, in three of those cases the meaning of the diminutive is compensated for by the use of these epithets: amado (dear, beloved), suave (soft, gentle), and pobre (poor): amado bosque (La floresta 177) (beloved woods), suave brisa (La floresta 180) (gentle breeze), pobre gente (La floresta 293) (poor people). Besides, four more diminutive forms are used in cases where the original noun or adjective is not a diminutive derivative: huertitos (garden, orchard), juntitos (together), manzanitos (apple trees), and ramito (branch). Therefore, in the translated text, the meaning of the diminutive suffixes is conveyed twenty-seven times (out of a total of seventy-three diminutive derivatives in the Lithuanian text), which equates to 36.9% of cases. As in the translation of “The Joys of Spring,” the reduplication of diminutives has been avoided in two cases: E˙ pusˇele˙s! pusˇele˙s tos nesurokuotos! (Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis 93; bold font added) ¡Ay, esos bellos pinos! ¡Pinitos sin cuento! (La floresta 93; bold font added) Those pines! . . . So numerous you cannot count them all! (The Forest of Anyksˇˇciai 93–94)

The first pinos (pine trees) is preceded by an epithet bellos (beautiful), and pinitos is a diminutive form. In the second case, the omission of a diminutive derivative has been compensated for by the epithet tiernos (sweet, tender), which also conveys the

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emotive meaning of the diminutive suffix and precedes the Spanish diminutive derivative pajarillos (little birds): Kur ju¯su˛ pauksˇcˇiai, pauksˇteliai, pauksˇtyte˙s…? (Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis 7; bold font added) ¿Do están las aves, tiernos pajarillos…? (La floresta 7; bold font added) Where are your birds and nestlings to be found…? (The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai 7)

The analysis of the translation into Spanish of both texts allows us to affirm that in Spanish it is possible to transmit the meanings of the original Lithuanian diminutives, but a direct equivalence cannot be established. In addition to having to take into account the number of syllables in each verse, to translate properly one must have a solid grasp of the meaning conveyed by the Lithuanian diminutive in each case. The translator must consider whether the Spanish language allows a diminutive derivative to be used, or whether it is preferable to use another means. In other words, the translator has to take into account both the nature of the Lithuanian language and that of the target language. Where the concentration of diminutive suffixes is higher, the proportion of diminutive suffixes used in the translation is smaller.

4.

The Translation of Proper Names in Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai

Another aspect that is culturally relevant is the translation of proper names. As Jonas Kabelka notes in his study about lexis in the works of Kristijonas Donelaitis, the author resorts to many archaisms, historicisms, as well as many words with a Slavic or German origin which, in a way, are references to the historical period during which Donelaitis lived and wrote (Kabelka 22–24). Obviously, most of this colourful vocabulary of Slavic and German origin cannot be rendered in the translation. However, these proper names, render part of the historical context and thus denote important information. Adriano Cerri, the translator of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai into Italian,2 has studied the approach of different translators when rendering the abundant proper names found in that poem. Cerri carries out a comparative analysis of translation strategies used in ten versions of the text in five languages (German, English, Latvian, Spanish and Italian). As he sees it, the proper names attracted the attention of translators and researchers from the very beginning, and translators had a different approach to the translation of proper names (Cerri

2 Kristijonas Donelaitis, Le Stagioni, translated by Adriano Cerri (2014).

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81). He speaks of more ‘creative’ and more ‘philological’ approaches to the translation process. The abundant proper names found in the text not only show the creativity of the poet, but also provide a general picture of the cultural and historical context in which the poem was composed, and so present some indication of the life and customs of Lithuanians in East Prussia. Jonas Kabelka provides a list of the proper names used by the poet and, in some cases, he explains their origin or etymology (270–72). Some explanations of the origin of these nomina propria (most of them are anthroponyms, but there are also toponyms) were also included in the endnotes of the 1977 edition of Kristijonas Donelaitis’s works (Lith. Kristijonas Donelaitis, Rasˇtai). Cerri states that it looks as if Donelaitis is not as interested in giving Lithuanian names as Christian names (82). He offers a classification of proper names that is more relevant for translation, and I will follow the same classification here. The first category would be that of proper names. They are easily recognisable (by most translators) as part of a common cultural patrimony, like Adomas, Ieva, Dovydas (the King of Israel), Kainas (Cain) and Kristus. The reader can understand them and knows whom the author is talking about. In the Spanish text, we find their equivalents Adán, el Rey David, Eva, Caín, Cristo. Within the group of proper names, one also finds some toponyms: Lietuva/ nuestra tierra/Lituania, Karaliaucˇius/Königsberg, Pru¯sai/Prusia, as well as the names of some festivities that are easily recognisable in the context of a Christian civilisation, which do not need any supplementary explanation for the reader: Joku¯bine˙s/Santiago (feast of St. James), Jonine˙s/ fiesta de san Juan (feast of St. John the Baptist, Midsummer), Mertynas/San Martín (feast of St. Martin), Mikiele˙s didele˙ ˇsvente˙/fiesta del Arcángel San Miguel (feast of St. Michael the Archangel), Sekmine˙s/Pentecostés (Pentecost), (Sˇventos) Velykos/Pascua (Easter). Among the anthroponyms there are those that are well known in other languages and therefore have an equivalent, like Joku¯bas (James), Petras (Peter), and so on. Other names are not recognisable by a Spanish reader and do not have an equivalent. Examples are Docˇys, Buzˇas, and others. In the Spanish text many anthroponyms belonging to the first category have been substituted by the Spanish equivalents. Lithuanian proper names Ans/Jonas (from Hans/Jonas)

Translation into Spanish Juan

Bendiksas (Benediktas) Diksas Ilzbute˙

Benedicto Benito Isabelita Jorge Gaspar

Jurgis Kasparas

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(Continued) Lithuanian proper names Katryne˙ Katryna Kubas Joku¯bas Mertynas /Mercˇius Mercˇiukas Mykolas/Mikas

Translation into Spanish Catrine Catrina Cobo Jacobo

Paulukas Petras

Pablito Pedro

Stepas

Esteban

Martín Tinico Miguel/ - - -

In the case of Katryna and Katryne˙, the most direct Spanish equivalent would have been Catalina, but the translator opted for a shorter, less frequent version of the proper name more similar to the original: Catrina is a rare proper name in Spanish, and Catrine is not used. Bendiksas (Benediktas) and the short form Diksas were translated using two Spanish forms for that name: the long Benedicto and the short form Benito. The diminutive forms Ilzbute˙, Mercˇiukas and Paulukas have also been rendered with diminutive equivalents Isabelita, Tinico (a short form invented by the translator for Martinico) and Pablito. As regards the short form Kubas (from Joku¯bas), the Spanish Cobo has been used, though this is actually not a first name in Spanish, but a surname (the short form for the name Joku¯bas/Santiago would have been Santi). As we can see, we cannot say that all proper names of this category were just automatically substituted by their equivalents. The second category of anthroponyms is formed by those that are not so easily recognisable by the Spanish reader, though in some cases their origin would be traceable. Consider the following: Proper names in Lithuanian Albas (from Albertas) Aste˙ (from Estera) Barbe˙ (from Barbora) Berge˙ (from Brigita) Buzˇas Dake˙ Docˇys

Translation into Spanish Albas Aste Barbe Brida Buzas Daque

Enskys (from German Hanschen)

Dochís Hansen

Gryta (from Margarita, Greta, German diminutive) Jeke˙ (from Jokime˙)

Greta Jeque

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(Continued) Proper names in Lithuanian Krisas (from Kristijonas) Lauras Maguzˇe (Magde˙?) Milkus

Translation into Spanish Crisas Lauro Magda Milcus

Obrys Pakulys /Pakuliene˙ Pime˙ (from Efemija?) Plaucˇiu¯nas

- - - - - - - - (omitted) Paculís

Plyckius Pricˇkus (from German Fricas/ Fridrichas)

Pliscus Frico

Pukys Selmas (from Saliamonas?) Selmyke˙ Tusˇe˙ (Darata?)

Puquis Salmas Salmita

Femi Plauchunas

Dorita

Only Magda (short form for Magdalena) and Dorita (a diminutive Spanish form) sound ‘familiar’ to the Spanish reader. The rest of these uncommon names has been orthographically adapted to avoid difficulties in reading, but some actually remain foreign to the Spanish ear. Hansen, Greta and Frico sound quite German (like the toponym Königsberg). The possible Spanish equivalents for some nomina propria whose origin can be traced (Alberto, Esther, Bárbara, Brígida, Juanito, Joaquina, Federico/Fede, and Cristiano/Cristian) have not been used. As in the former category of proper names, the short form or the diminutive form for proper names have been preserved. In the case of Buzˇas/Buzas, a phonetical effect has been created with the necessary phonetic adaptation in order to reproduce the defect of lisping, thereby imitating the original text: Tai jau vis tiesa, – sˇvepluodams isˇtare˙ Buzˇas (“Rudenio ge˙rybe˙s” 438; bold font added) Eso es cierto y verdad – ceceó Buzas (“Los bienes del otoño” 438; bold font added) “All spoken truly,” Buzˇas, lisping, said (“Autumn Boons” 438)3

Another component is character names, or ‘charactonyms.’ In other words, proper names that, besides identifying the person, actually provide some information about the character or habits of the person who bears the name. They usually point out a moral defect: laziness (Slunkius), drunkenness (Sˇlapjurgis) and so on. This category shows the most creative Donelaitis where one can 3 All quoted translations of Donelaitis’s Metai from Lithuanian into English are by Peter Tempest.

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discern the author’s contact with his parishioners and peasants (and their custom to use nicknames), as well as his sharpness and sense of humour in criticising their vices and bad habits, or his descriptions of their physical defects; for instance, Klisˇis (bowlegged) is the first to jump and dance in the wedding party. These character names have been translated into Spanish as follows: Bleberis/ Bláber (bla-bla-bla means claptrap), Ble˙kius/Morcón (blood sausage, stocky person), Daugkalba/Lenguaraz (gossipy, chatterbox), Durakas/Patiño (clumsy, foolish), Kairiukas/Zurdillo (left-handed), Klisˇis/Patizambo (bowlegged), Kurpiu¯nas/Próspero (prosperous, wealthy), Paikius/Pardillo (gullible, fool), Paikzˇentis/Pánfilo (dumb, sluggish), Pele˙da/Lechuzo (owl, fig. messy, negligent person; ugly devil), Sˇlapjurgis/Chispo and Achispado (tippler, drunkard), Slunkius/El Poltrón (idle, slacker), Susukate˙/Patrañera (fibber), Vausˇkus/El Roncero (slack, grumpy), and Zˇnairuks/Bisojo (cross-eyed). In the case of both invented toponyms (Taukiai and Vyzˇlaukis), they have been translated (El Lardo, Alborgal) so that their connotation is preserved, but they are both explained in the endnotes (Caro Dugo 212), because their meaning in Spanish would not be obvious. Taukiai (from taukai, fat or drippings, like the Spanish lardo) means a wealthy place, where meat is abundant. Vyzˇlaukis literally means a field where people wear bast shoes, in Spanish alborga (to which the toponymic suffix -al has been added). Where the poet has been creative (character names, toponyms), the translation has also been creative so as to transmit the connotation of those proper names. Where the author has used common and easily recognisable names, their equivalents have been used in Spanish. Where the names are not common, though some are traceable, they have just been adapted morphologically or phonetically in most cases. This last group of names actually sounds more foreign to the Spanish reader. At the same time, they contain no foreign letters and can be pronounced without any obstacle. Adriano Cerri established that the Polish and Spanish translators are the only ones who have provided a translation for most character names (Cerri 86). Although the Spanish and Italian languages and cultural traditions are considerably close, it is Cerri’s conclusion that the Italian and Spanish versions of the poem are actually very different, especially as the translation of these character names is concerned. The Spanish version, he remarks, is freer, more “Spanish centred” and creative, whereas the translation into Italian is more “Lithuanian centred” (88).

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Final Considerations

The observations that have been made about the translation into Spanish of proper names as well as of the meanings conveyed by the Lithuanian diminutive suffixes show that, besides the limitations imposed both by the source text and by the target culture and language, ultimately each translator makes his/her own decisions as to the method of approaching the text and his/her own task. Irena Praitis, a poet and translator of poetry from Lithuanian to English, has drawn attention to the subjective aspects of the translation activity. When exploring her own encounter with Lithuanian texts and her experience as a literary translator, she states that “translation . . . reflects the intricacy of interactions between people and especially between cultures,” but she realises that there are “personal, theoretical and ideological facets,” and that each one “impacts and shapes the others” (Praitis 128). “Inevitably,” she says, “a translator impacts and shapes the presentation of a text in the target language” (127). There are objective factors that determine the most varied approaches to the translation of a text, both in the source text itself and in the nature of the target language. The function and the addressee of the target text are to be taken into account. However, as it has been shown in the case of the translation of proper names and evaluating morphology, every translator has his/her own relationship with the text, his/her attitude to intercultural dialogue, and this can certainly be decisive. Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella claim that “the source text offers the starting point for a journey and becomes the space ‘into’ and ‘through’ which the translator is given the opportunity to explore creatively and perform his/her subjectivity” (10). Certainly “translation provides a place where cultures meet and interact, but in this place, the translator is the mediator” (Praitis 139). Regarding the translation of poetry, Praitis recalls Robert Frost’s saying that “poetry is what is lost in translation.” Although in a certain way she agrees with Frost, she adds that poetry is also “what’s found through translation. Poetry and translation have the same root. They both grow from a desire to understand and express” (Praitis 134). That is why Lafarga and Pegenaute, among others, argue that the work of the literary translator can be as creative as that of the writer, as creative as the translator decides (2).4 The analysis of two aspects of the translation of Lithuanian poetic works into Spanish suggests that in these instances, the translator does not opt for the style of translation advocated by Ortega y Gasset: a faithful and clear translation, an “ugly text” with “no pretences to literary grace,” and one that is “not easy to read” (“The Misery”). Instead, the translator strives to take the source text to the target 4 In the original: “Hacia una poética de traducción en la España del siglo XIX: sobre los estrechos límites entre creación y traducción.”

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culture while showing, as far as possible, the cultural space from which the source text emerged.

Works Cited Alonso Jiménez, Elisa. “Francisco Ayala and his Professional Approach to Translation Theory and Practice”. TRANS: Revista de Traductología 19.2 (2015): 195–209. Baranauskas, Antanas. Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis. Antanas Baranauskas. Rinktine˙. Ed. Regina Miksˇyte˙. Vilnius: Baltos Lankos, 1994. Print. Baranauskas, Antanas. La floresta de Anyksˇˇciai. Trans. Carmen Caro Dugo. Introduction by Brigita Speicˇyte˙. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2017. Print. –. The Forest of Anyksˇcˇiai. Trans. Peter Tempest. Vilnius: Vaga, 1981. Print. Caro Dugo, Carmen. “B. Sruogos Dievu˛ misˇko vertimai ˛i ispanu˛ kalba˛: raisˇkos priemone˙s.” Kalbu˛ Studijos 16 (2010): 54–63. Print. –. “La traducción de los derivados diminutivos lituanos en las versiones inglesas y española de Las estaciones del año, de Kristijonas Donelaitis.” TRANS: Revista de Traductología 19.2 (2015): 183–93. Print. Cerri, Adriano. “K. Donelaicˇio Metu˛ tikriniai vardai kitose kalbose: vertimo strategiju˛ palyginimas.” Vertimo studijos 8 (2015): 80–97. Print. Donelaitis, Kristijonas. Rasˇtai. Ed. Kostas Korsakas et al. Vilnius: Vaga, 1977. Print. –. Las estaciones del año. Trans. Carmen Caro Dugo. Prologue by Dainora Pociu¯te˙. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2013. Print. –. The Seasons. Trans. Peter Tempest. Vilnius: Vaga, 1985. Print. Fernández, Francisco, and Ana Belén Fernández Guerra. “Transparencia en la teoría, translucidez en la práctica: a vueltas con la traducción de los elementos culturales.” Lengua, traducción, recepción: en honor de Julio César Santoyo 1 (2010):199–230. Print. García Albero, Javier. “Traducción y cultura: estudios de traducción literaria en la Península Ibérica.” Iberoamericana 13.50 (2013):183–196. Ed. Amparo Hurtado Albir. Traducción y Traductología. Introducción a la traductología. 3rd ed. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2001. Print. Kabelka, Jonas. Kristijono Donelaicˇio rasˇtu˛ leksika. Vilnius: Mintis, 1964. Print. Lafarga, Francisco, and Pegenaute, Luis. “Hacia una poética de traducción en la España del siglo XIX: sobre los estrechos límites entre creación y traducción.” Autores traductores de la España del siglo XIX. Ed. Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2016. 1–12. Print. Leonavicˇiene˙, Aurelija. “Kalbiniai ir kultu¯riniai lietuviu˛ meniniu˛ tekstu˛ deminutyvu˛ ypatumai ir vertimas ˛i prancu¯zu˛ kalba˛.” Kalbotyra 65.3 (2013): 51–69. Print. –. “Stratégies linguistiques et socioculturelles de la traduction des diminutifs lituaniens en français.” TRANS: Revista de Traductología 19.2 (2015): 211–23. Print. Lockyer, Dorota. “Such a Tiny Little Thing: Diminutive Meanings in Alice in Wonderland as a Comparative Translation Study of English, Polish, Russian and Czech.” Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1.1 (2012): 10–22. Print.

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Loffredo, Eugenia, and Perteghella, Manuela. Introduction. Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies. Ed. Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella. London: Continuum, 2006, 1–10. Print. Maciene˙, Jurgita. Deminutyvu˛ stilistika. Sˇiauliai: Sˇiauliu˛ universiteto leidykla, 2005. Print. Marín Hernández, David. “Traducción y Cultura. El reto de la transferencia cultural.” TRANS: Revista de Traductología 7 (2003): 153–156. Web. 20 July 2018. . Ordóñez-López, Pilar. “The Misery and Splendour of Translation: A Classic in Translation Studies.” Skase: Journal of Translation and Interpretation 4.1 (2009): 53–78. Web. 15 July 2018. . –. “Ortega y Ayala: dos visiones de la traducción con dispar recepción en la traductología contemporánea.” Revista de Estudios Orteguianos 21 (2010): 151–68. Web. 17 July 2018. . Ortega y Gasset, José. “The Misery and the Splendour of Translation.” Diálogos. Intercultural Services, 5 Jan. 2015 Trans. Martin Boyd (1937). Web. 4 Sep. 2018. . Praitis, Irena. “Gathering the Grain: Translating Lithuanian Poetry into English”. Interculturality and Translation International Review/ Interculturalidad y Traducción II (2006): 127–48. Web. 8 September 2018. . Santoyo, Julio César. “Traducción de cultura, traducción de civilización.” Estudis sobre la traducció. Ed. Amparo Hurtado Albir. Castellón: Publicaciones de la Universidad Jaume I, 1994. 141–52. Print. Speicˇyte˙, Brigita. “La floresta perenne de la poesía.” Antanas Baranauskas. La floresta de Anyksˇcˇiai. Trans. Carmen Caro Dugo. Ed. Carmen Caro Dugo. Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2017, 9–46, 95–99. Print. Vabaliene˙, Dalia. “Anyksˇcˇiu˛ ˇsilelis anglisˇkai.” Pergale˙ 7 (1982): 177–79. Print. –. “K. Donelaicˇio Metai anglu˛ kalba.” Darbai apie Kristijona˛ Donelaiti˛. Vilnius: Vaga, 1993. 192–198. Print. Vázquez Ayora, Gerardo. Introducción a la Traductología. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1977. Print.

Sigita Barnisˇkiene˙

Chapter 12 – Cultural Codes in Lithuanian Archaisms and Historicisms: Analysis of Petras Cvirka’s Fiction Translated into German and Its Reception

1.

Introduction

Obsolete words refer to those which contain information about the early state of the nation, culture, everyday life, historical circumstances, things once used, and works done by its people. They resemble archaeological artefacts which serve as evidence of the life of one’s ancestors for later generations. Historians and archaeologists need to interpret the purpose and the function of historical artefacts, while both linguists and cultural researchers need to clarify the meaning of obsolete words to highlight their hidden cultural potential. Thus the role of the translator becomes very important, since it is a real challenge to render the meaning of archaic words in the target language for addressees from another culture. On the one hand, the translated text must reflect the original stylistic peculiarities (hence the use of archaic words); on the other hand, the translator must be certain that the target audience understands the translated text. Moreover, the task of the translator as an expert and mediator between cultures is complemented by another dimension—the need to know the history and the culture of the source language and how to be able to render these cultural meanings in the target text (see also Chapters 9–11 in this volume). In the course of history, one generation succeeds and replaces another. Traditions, cultural and moral values, and the experience of previous generations are absorbed and supplemented by new skills and new customs. Given this constant change and flow of time, our language—the bearer of cultural meanings—inevitably changes as well. Changes in living conditions and circumstances not only replace cultural realia and human relationships, but also push to the margins those words that are rarely used. Due to historical changes and demographic phenomena, even languages once spoken may completely vanish. The disappearance of a language is a loss for the culture of mankind; languages develop as living organisms and cannot be replaced once they become extinct.

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David Crystal writes about the loss of languages around the world and what causes this phenomenon; he notes that a language disappears only when but one user of that language remains: When you are the only one left, your knowledge of your language is like a repository, or archive, of your people’s spoken linguistic past. If the language has never been written down, or recorded on tape—and there are still many which have not—it is all there is. But, unlike the normal idea of an archive, which continues to exist long after the archivist is dead, the moment the last speaker of an unwritten or unrecorded language dies, the archive disappears forever. (Crystal 2)

The extinction of a language can be compared to the loss of words in a given language, although there is a fundamental difference: extinct languages disturb language diversity to the extent that we could end up with the existence of only several languages, whereas old words can often be replaced by new ones. Outdated words which are used only by a small number of users of that language and which become part of a passive vocabulary are called archaisms (Gr. archaı˜os ‘ancient’) (Wanzeck 56). Some authors distinguish lexical and semantic archaisms: lexical synonyms have new alternatives, for example, Lith. bu¯mene˙ (Eng. future), Lith. asˇva (Eng. mare), Lith. te˙vainis (Eng. inheritor); semantic archaisms are obsolete meanings of words such as Lith. elgtis (Eng. beg),1 Lith. gamta (Eng. virtue),2 and grynas (Eng. poor)3 (Jakaitiene˙ 216–217). Lexical scholarship describes not only archaisms, but historicisms as well. The latter refers to words that denote things or phenomena that are no longer in circulation. Historicisms are used to describe historical events, traditions and people’s lives in the past. As a result, the German linguist Christiane Wanzeck distinguishes three types of historic referents: historical things, obsolete social circumstances, and outdated traditions (57). An example of non-recurring items could be the kinds of weapons we now find only in museums, such as alebarda (Eng. halberd; Ger. die Hellebarde); arbaletas (Eng. arbalest; Ger. die Armbrust); arkebuza (Eng. harquebus; Ger. die Arkebuse). The social conditions of the past are reflected in such historicisms as baudzˇiava (Eng. serfdom; Ger. die Leibeigenschaft); kumetis (Eng. serf; Ger. der Fröner); siuzerenas (Eng. overlord, a feudal lord; Ger. der Lehnsherr); vasalas (Eng. vassal; Ger. der Lehnsmann, der Vasall); lenas (Eng. fief; Ger. das Lehen). Lithuanian linguist Juozas Pikcˇilingis states that, due to historical circumstances, archaic words used in Lithuanian literature very often are also loan words:

1 Present-day meaning of the verb elgtis is ‘to behave.’ 2 Contemporary meaning of gamta is ‘nature.’ 3 Contemporary meaning of grynas is ‘pure.’

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If using loan words borrowed from Russian and Polish as archaic words is a specific feature of Lithuanian literature, this can be explained by a complex of historical factors. These include the fact that the first writings in Lithuania were written in foreign languages, the situation during the ban on publications, the forceful russification of Lithuanian, and the way that Polish prevailed in the church and noble households. (Pikcˇilingis 152)4

Old traditions are also described by words which are used on a rarer basis today, like pirsˇlys (Eng. matchmaker; Ger. der Brautwerber); ˇsermenys (Eng. a wake; Ger. die Totenfeier); isˇimtine˙ (Eng. maintenance provided to parents by the children who have taken over their farms; Ger. das Ausgedinge); kraitis (Eng. dowry; Ger. die Aussteuer); pavainikis (Eng. bastard; German der Bastard). It must be noted that these historicisms contain cultural and historical knowledge. Once we have discovered their meaning, we increase the sum of our knowledge, and learn many historical and cultural facts. European historicisms are common in many languages and cultures, unlike archaisms, which may have a more recent synonym in a particular language, but do not have an equivalent in another one. For example, the French borrowings related to the railroad and trains have been replaced by other German equivalents, while in Lithuanian, the French borrowings have remained: kupe˙ (Fr. coupe; Ger. das Abteil; Eng. compartment); peronas (Fr. perron; Ger. der Bahnsteig; Eng. platform); bilietas (French billet; Ger. die Fahrkarte; Eng. ticket). In German these French terms are archaisms already, while in Lithuanian they are still often used and are not obsolete words. As Siegfried Heusinger’s research reveals, it is possible to study the fields of historicisms in the context of important social and political changes in a society. He presents examples of historicisms from medieval chivalry, the National Socialist regime, the Holocaust in Germany, the Second World War, and the socialist period in the German Democratic Republic. Even the names of the parties, medals, awards, and given names used in the GDR have already become history, witnesses to the previous system and ideology: Verdienter Lehrer des Volkes (People’s distinguished teacher); Meister des Sports (Master of Sports); Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany); LiberalDemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany); Medaille für vorbildlichen Grenzdienst (The Medal for Exemplary Border Service) (Heusinger 49). Heusinger concludes that each obsolete word directs our attention to the history of the nation, the development of knowledge and abilities. Therefore, in his opinion, it is impossible to unambiguously distinguish archaisms from historicisms (50). In the German dictionary Duden, there are indications provided with archaisms as to whether a word is obsolete or just aging, which is, used on a rarer basis. 4 All translations from Lithuanian into English are by Milda Danyte˙ unless otherwise stated.

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The Duden online dictionary gives additional information about the frequency of the use of a word, as it indicates the number of points out of five. However, the references to archaic words in dictionaries are different. For example, in the Duden dictionary, the word Dienstmädchen (Eng. maid) is described as veraltet für Hausgehilfin (an obsolete word meaning maid), and with the word Dienstmann (-männer, -leute) (Eng. the carrier) we find the reference veraltend für Gepäckträger (aging word for the carrier). However, Dudenonline provides both veraltend with the term ‘aging’ and two points indicating that both words are rarely used in the 100,000 most commonly used words recorded in the Duden online body (www.duden.de). Thus it becomes clear from these examples that ratings such as ‘obsolete’ or ‘aging’ are not used in a uniform way, because they are difficult to apply objectively. We will not find this distinction in Lithuanian dictionaries; the abbreviations psn. (outdated word/phrase) or arch. (archaism) are given to archaisms; historicisms are usually marked by the abbreviation of istor. (historical), or the description of the meaning indicates the era in which the word was used (Kruopas, Dabartine˙s lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas). An interesting phenomenon indicating the connection between language and social order is the revival of historicisms. Such words have appeared in the Lithuanian language after Lithuania regained its independence in 1990, fifty years after the soviet occupation and communist rule. For example, the names of administrative territorial units such as apskritis (district), valscˇius (small rural district), ure˙dija (forestry enterprise) and parapija (parish); titles of officials (policininkas/e˙ (policeman/ woman), meras (mayor) ure˙das (stewart), virsˇaitis (chief of a rural district), seniu¯nas (elder); names of associations and references to their members (skautas/e˙. (scout), korporantas (member of a corporation), ˇsaulys (home guard member/member of The Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union). These words, treated as historicisms during the soviet era, have since returned to official use. Some researchers make considerable efforts to preserve endangered words and compile dictionaries of archaisms and historicisms. A lexicon of German endangered words with witty comments is published by Bodo Mrozek, which is complemented by the online project “Rote Liste bedrohter Wörter” (“The Red List of Endangered Words”) (Mrozek). In addition, the “Der Verein Deutsche Sprache” (“The Society of the German Language”) launched an initiative to let an individual become the godfather or the godmother of a favourite endangered word for a fee, and thus create the largest database of the German language (Wortpatenschaft.de). A very informative and innovative doctoral thesis defended in 2006 at the University of Göttingen by Ae Yoon Jang deals with the use of German language archaisms in the weekly Der Spiegel in all the issues of 1999 (“Lexikalische Archaismen und ihre Verwendung in Pressetexten des heutigen Deutsch”). From

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the archaisms marked as veraltet (2000 items) and veraltend (1597 items) in the “Duden Universalwörterbuch 2001,” Jang selected 84 words and, on their basis, surveyed native German speakers of different ages to find out whether they regard these words as obsolete, whether they know them, and whether they can use their modern synonyms. Assisted by a computer programme, he examined the frequency of the use of the same archaisms in the texts of Der Spiegel. In addition to statistical data, Jang concluded that archaisms often perform stylistic functions that are ameliorative (the improvement of the image), pejorative (the diminishing of the image), or neutral (references to historical contexts). This part of the chapter has shown that archaisms can be studied from various perspectives and that new problems arise in exploring them. The next part considers the kinds of problems that arise translating literary texts that contain historicisms and archaisms, and whether these are understood by target language users.

2.

The Role of Connotated Lexicon in Fictional Works

Writing about the tasks and problems occurring in the translation of fiction, researchers emphasise the complexity of the content and form of the text in the target language, which arises from different reception conditions: Translation is the conceptual and structural form of the experience of works rendered in another language. The subject of this experience is the dialectical unity of form and content as a relation of the individual work with the given horizons of reception (language and poetry level, literary tradition, historical, societal, social and individual situations). In translation, this constellation is experienced as the difference between the translated text and the original. (Apel 8)5

Christiane Nord, a proponent of functional translation theory, categorises the translation of fiction as a documentary type of translation and exoticising translation, since the translator usually seeks to reflect the form, content and situation of the original text, unlike in cases of the translation of special technical texts, when it is important to achieve the same function as is performed by the original text. The latter type of translation is called instrumental translation (Nord 54).

5 In the original: “Übersetzung ist eine zugleich verstehende und gestaltende Form der Erfahrung von Werken einer anderen Sprache. Gegenstand dieser Erfahrung ist die dialektische Einheit von Form und Inhalt als jeweiliges Verhältnis des einzelnen Werks zum gegebenen Rezeptionshorizont (Stand der Sprache und Poetik, literarische Tradition, geschichtliche, gesellschaftliche, soziale und individuelle Situation). Diese Konstellation wird in der Gestaltung als Abstand zum Original spezifisch erfahrbar.”

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What kind of lexical features are significant in a text of fiction so that a translator should recognise and convey them? This question can be answered by distinguishing the variants of one language adopted in sociolinguistics by diatopic (dialectical), diastratic (sociolect) and diaphasic (stylistic) features (Schlieben-Lange 89–92) It might seem that the author’s style is the most important aspect of a piece of fiction, but character depiction as well as dialogues and monologues are created using diatopic and diastratic elements. In this article the object of research is the archaic and historical lexicon in the stories of Petras Cvirka and their translation into German; this primarily refers to diaphasic peculiarities. However, it can be assumed that this historically connotated lexicon can refer to both dialectal and special terms that are specific to the language users of a particular social group. The importance of these three lexical groups for translators is described by Jörn Albrecht, a German translation theorist. In his opinion, translators are particularly sensitive to cases in which the text is written in ordinary language and contains many other elements of the language. Then the connotations typical of these elements are especially noticeable. Albrecht illustrates this phenomenon by presenting a passage from the translation into German of Dario Fo’s Italian comedy, which contains numerous cases of the spoken language and jargonisms (240–241). The position of some theorists of translation is that translators should not try to translate dialect words, as this is impossible: “Summing up, dialect is always tied, geographically and culturally, to a milieu that does not exist in the targetlanguage setting. Substitution of an ‘equivalent’ dialect is foredoomed to failure. The best advice about trying to translate dialect: don’t” (Landers 117). However, I share the views of Lawrence Venuti who believes that a translator’s skill manifests itself most of all in the translation of non-standard language such as regional dialects, slang, vulgarisms, archaisms, neologisms and loanwords: The translator’s hand becomes visible in deviations from the most commonly used forms of the translating language. Social and regional dialects, slang and obscenities, archaisms and neologisms, jargon and foreign borrowings tend to be language-specific, unlikely to travel well, their peculiar force difficult to render into other languages. Thus they show the translator at work, implementing strategies to bring the foreign text into a different culture. (Venuti, “How to Read a Translation”)

The object of the present study, which is the archaisms and historicisms in the works of Cvirka translated into German, will be discussed with respect to the thematic and contextual meaning of the literary works chosen for the analysis. This lexicon will be considered as connotated, that is, as having additional meanings compared to other lexical units.

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3.

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Petras Cvirka, a Controversial Lithuanian Writer

Cvirka was born in 1909 in Klangiai, the district of Jurbarkas, and died in 1947 in Vilnius. He studied at Vilkija Progymnasium and at Kaunas Art School. In 1928 he published a collection of poems based on socialist ideology, Pirmosios misˇios (Eng. The First Mass), which was confiscated by the censor. In 1931–32 Cvirka lived in Paris; in 1936–1939 he visited the Soviet Union and in 1940, after the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, he went to Moscow as a deputy of the People’s Seimas to sign the treaty on the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union. During the war, he remained in Russia. After his return to Lithuania, he led the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. Cvirka is considered as “one of the pioneers of socialist realism in Lithuanian literature” (Kubilius et al. 95). In a series of stories like Saule˙lydis Nykos valscˇiuje (1930 [Eng. Sunset in Nyka County]) and Kasdiene˙s istorijos (1938 [Eng. Everyday Stories]) he emotionally depicts the living conditions of poor people in rural areas. In the satirical novel Frank Kruk (1934 [Frank Kruk]), he makes fun of American Lithuanians as businessmen, while in the novel Zˇeme˙ maitintoja (1935 [Eng. The Land that Feeds Us]), he depicts the diligence of peasant settlers and their stubbornness in seeking prosperity. Cvirka also wrote picturesque, artistic works for children, the best of which is the collection of tales Cukriniai avine˙liai (1935 [Eng. Sugar Lambs]). Although Cvirka treated social reality from the viewpoint of socialist ideology, his ability to create compelling artistic images which convey delicate and sensitive expressions of sympathy for suffering people and demonstrate an excellent use of the rich Lithuanian vocabulary is recognised by many literary critics. For example, in 2009, Petras Brazˇe˙nas in an introductory article “Perzˇenge˛s sˇimtmecˇio slenksti˛” (Eng. “Threshold of the Century Having Been Crossed”), published together with Cvirka’s Prose Collections, evaluates the mastery of the writer in the following way: You read [Cvirka’s works] and suddenly and unexpectedly some kind of invisible force takes you from the narrow space of your room to the boundless fields of the countryside, from the eternal noise and the scent-filled air to the magical morning silence, pierced by the sounds heard only by few. And if you then surrender to your imagination or education-related interests, within the space of a single page, you can collect examples to cover half of your Course on Stylistics (as a matter of fact, the two volumes of The Stylistics of the Lithuanian Language by Juozas Pikcˇilingis, a well-known Lithuanian researcher of stylistics, take most of their examples from the works by Petras Cvirka). (Brazˇe˙nas 11)6

In one of the most recent investigations of Cvirka’s literary work, its dual evaluation is emphasised. While putting aside his communist ideology and collaboration with the soviet occupiers, it is impossible to ignore his skilful depiction of 6 Quoted with minor adaptations.

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the simple and poor inhabitants of the Lithuanian countryside during the first half of the twentieth century. Rimantas Skeivys, a literary critic, states that the ethical and aesthetic principles of Cvirka’s works are based on his materialistic world outlook: The characters of Cvirka’s writings are ashamed of and troubled by their low social status. They try, as much as they can, to change their lives, to improve them. Some of them do this by honest work, others by exploiting those poorer than themselves. Moral principles cause either positive or negative images of characters. (Skeivys 14)

Other literary critics also emphasise that Cvirka focuses on social status, relationships between people of different social classes and moral values (Jasaitis 61– 62). They also praise the social ideology of Cvirka’s works, his rich, colourful language and skilful style. The History of Lithuanian Literature (1982) reviews Cvirka’s merits for the national literature: With his novels and short stories Cvirka introduced some new types of characters into Lithuanian literature, using them to depict new, previously unrevealed levels of reality. He was one of the most skilful stylists whose colourful folk language influenced the development of standard Lithuanian. Up to the present time his style serves as a good example for other writers. His talent combined a wide range of intonations—from mild and sad or cheerfully lyrical, from quiet epic to humoristic or bitterly satiric. (Lankutis 164)

In his monograph about children’s literature, the literary critic Ke˛stutis Urba writes that the selection of short stories by Cvirka Sugar Lambs (1935) was the most mature work in this field in the 1930s (Urba 22). Inspired by Cvirka’s work, contemporary writer Sigitas Geda wrote a poetic play for children “Kaip kisˇkis vilko namus serge˙jo” (“How a Hare Guarded the Wolf ’s House”) (312). Since the aim of this article is to analyse the use of archaic and historic words in selected works by Cvirka as well as their translation into German, the first question is why these words are typical of his works. His realistic manner of writing, combined with the subjects he chose to present, influenced his choice of vocabulary: the everyday life of Lithuanian villagers from the 1920s and 1930s, their agricultural work, social situation, relations to farm families and the community, their tools and simple household things—all these have totally changed or have different names. Therefore, many words used by Cvirka can be treated as outdated or even obsolete. They are not exclusively typical of his writings, since archaic and historic words were used by other Lithuanian writers that realistically depicted the way of life of their contemporaries. An example is the poem by Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780) where he describes in detail the lives of serfs of the eighteenth century. This is the reason for current editions of his poems to be supplemented by a dictionary of archaic words. The short stories of Zˇemaite˙ (1845–1921) are also famous for their archaic and historic words that appeared due to her focus on farm life that was different from present realia.

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Antanas Venclova, a writer and literary critic, and a contemporary of Cvirka, strongly praised his ability to picture realistically a countryman’s way of thinking and talking. Meanwhile Venclova criticised other Lithuanian writers such as Sˇatrijos Ragana (1877–1930), Lazdynu˛ Pele˙da (1867–1926), Vytautas Alantas (1902–1990) and Kazys Incˇiu¯ra (1906–1974) who were known for their idealising, sentimental, and romantic manner of writing: Many people dislike the way Cvirka depicts country life. They complain of the obscenity and cynicism that are said to be present in his works. If this is the case, then people should criticise not only the Lithuanian writer Cvirka but also a number of world-famous writers. Take the late Roman classic writer Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, or take hundreds of recognised works of world literature. (Venclova 18)

This praise for Cvirka’s realistic writings and his use of everyday colloquial language, even obscenities, provides a partial explanation for the use of archaic words, as these help to reveal the national flavour, and the specificity of characters’ speech and their living conditions. It can even be stated that archaic words add much to the depiction of the Lithuanian ethnic character. The next section discusses specific archaic and historic words in selected fiction by Cvirka translated into German. It should be noted that only fiction translated directly from Lithuanian and not work translated via Russian is used for the analysis.

4.

The Analysis of Archaisms and Historicisms in Petras Cvirka’s Fiction

The short story of “Bernas, nore˙je˛s amzˇinai joti zˇirgu” (1930 [Eng. “The Lad who Wanted to Ride a Horse Forever”; Ger. “Der Junge, der davon träumte, auf einem Pferd zu galoppieren”]) 7 tells the sad story of the shepherd Mikas, whose greatest dream is to ride a galloping horse. He sees some horse herds riding horses and asks his landlord to allow him to go horse-riding with them during the night. Put on the most unmanageable horse, he gallops off, but soon only the horse comes back. They find the half-dead Mikas dumped on the ground. Mikas’s body is carried to the village with the help of four men and by the same horse, but Mikas later dies. The storyline is simple, but the writer conveys the character’s adolescent passion and desire to control the wild horse to become a real man. The

7 All the short stories in this analysis are from Petras Cvirka, Apsakymai ir Zˇeme˙ maitintoja: Prozos rinktine˙ (2009), unless otherwise noted. German translations of the short stories are from Petras Cvirka, Nur zwei Kelche. Erzählungen (1978).

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fact that Cvirka knew pastoral life and could describe it accurately is evidenced by the memories of his contemporaries: Two shepherds met in the kitchen garden and talked all day long. Petras was a listener and Simas the grandfather was a story-teller. Petras and other children took great interest in the stories told by him. And later, Petras kept in touch with him and continued to meet him regularly until his death (1933). When writing the novel Master and Sons, Petras used many traits of his character and the stories he told. (Veverskis 18)

The story is full of archaic words which can usually be attributed to the semantic fields of horse-riding and shepherding. The words designating horseshoeing and restraining devices, such as kamanos (Eng. leather halters with snaffle; Ger. Zaumzeug, Zügeln); brizgilai (Eng. (1) snaffle, wrappers, (2) bridle with a bristle, usually made of twine; Ger. der Knebel, das Zaumzeug), may not be known to many contemporary readers: Lithuanian: – Eiksˇ! – viena ranka perpus paima piemeni˛ sˇeimininkas ir uzˇsodina ant arklio. Bet pats veda uzˇ kamanu˛ arklius. (Cvirka, “Bernas, nore˙je˛s amzˇinai joti zˇirgu” 18; italics added) German: “Na, komm mal!” Der Bauer faßt Mikas mit einer Hand und setzt ihn auf ein Pferd. Aber er führt die Pferde selbst an den Zügeln. (Cvirka, “Der Junge, der davon träumte, auf einem Pferd zu galoppieren” 28; italics added) Lithuanian: Arkliai kramto gelezˇinius brizgilus. (Cvirka, “Bernas, nore˙je˛s amzˇinai joti zˇirgu” 19; italics added) German: Die Pferde beißen auf die eisernen Knebel. (Cvirka, “Der Junge, der davon träumte, auf einem Pferd zu galoppieren” 8; italics added)

The electronic Lithuanian language dictionary defines kamanos as “odinis apynasris su zˇa˛slais” (leather halter with snaffle), brizgilai as (1) “zˇa˛slai, zˇabokle˙s” (snaffle, wrappers), (2) “apynasris su zˇa˛slu, padarytas paprastai isˇ virveliu˛, kamanos” (bridle with a bristle, usually made of twine, leather halter with snaffle) (Lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas). In the second meaning, this word is used in another place in the story and is translated into German by the word Zaumzeug: Lithuanian: Isˇ rato sˇesˇi, gal daugiau atsistoja, bet tas, kuriam po nosim daugiausia plauku˛, meta vienam brizgilus ir sumurma. . . . (Cvirka, “Bernas, nore˙je˛s amzˇinai joti zˇirgu” 21; italics added) German: Aus dem Kreis stehen sechs auf, aber der mit den Haaren in der Nase wirft einem das Zaumzeug zu und brummt. . . . (Cvirka, “Der Junge, der davon träumte, auf einem Pferd zu galoppieren” 31; italics added)

At this point we should explain the linguistic experiment that we conducted with the students of a German gymnasium in order to find out if they understand the archaic words. In February 2017, two English and German Philology 3rd year students had their pedagogical practice there. Senior class students (18-yearolds) and junior students (15-year-olds) were given a list of words with 22

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archaisms and historicisms from the works of Cvirka translated into German and definitions of these words were given in random order. The task was to find the proper definition for the archaism. It is interesting to note that none of the 15 juniors indicated the correct meaning of the word der Knebel, while 10 correct answers were noted for the word das Zaumzeug. However, for the senior students, the word der Knebel was better known as nine out of the eleven questionnaires were marked with the correct definition, and the meaning of the word das Zaumzeug was correctly identified by all eleven students who participated in the survey. It can be assumed that the latter German word is clearer because it is a compound whose parts are used more often than the simple noun ‘der Knebel.’ In addition, the students’ age, their life experience, the books they have read, and their education in the fields of history, literature, and culture are different, and this is clearly reflected in the final results of the survey. The questionnaire contained aging words from Cvirka’s stories and the novel Zˇeme˙ maitintoja (1935 [Eng. The Land That Feeds Us; Ger. Mutter Erde]) translated into German and their definitions from the Duden online dictionary which were given in random order. These words were considered archaisms in both Lithuanian and German. Below we present German words from the translated texts, indicating in parentheses the word used in the Lithuanian source text, along with the English word/definition: die Franse (Lith. kutosas; Eng. tassel) das Altenteil (Lith. isˇimtine˙; Eng. maintenance provided to parents by the children who have taken over their farms) schmarotzen (Lith. velte˙dzˇiauti; Eng. to scrounge) die Metze (Lith. gorcˇius; Eng. unit of measurement, approximately 3 litres) der Morgen (Lith. margas; Eng. unit of land measurement) das Spinnrad (Lith. ratelis; Eng. spinning wheel) der Küster (Lith. zakristijonas; Eng. sexton) das Amulett (Lith. ˇskaplieriai; Eng. scapular) der Holzklump, die Pantine (Lith. klumpe˙; Eng. clog) die Joppe (Lith. serme˙ga; Eng. coarse homespun overcoat) der Knebel, das Zaumzeug (Lith. brizgilai; Eng. bridles) das Brachland (Lith. pu¯dymas; Eng. fallow) der Schwaden (Lith. pradalgys; Eng. swathe) die Kruppe (Lith. stre˙nos; Eng. loins) der Speicher (Lith. biragas; Eng. hay shed) der Trog (Lith. gelda; Eng. trough) dreschen (Lith. kulti; Eng. to thresh) die Garbe (Lith. pe˙das; Eng. sheaf) die Miete (Lith. ku¯gis; Eng. haystack) die Truhe (Lith. skrynia; Eng. storage chest)

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The results of the survey reveal that the average of correct answers for the eleven senior students was 79%, while the average of correct answers for the fifteen junior students was 53%. According to the German lexicologist Inge Pohl, connotated words related to a certain historical era are usually interesting for students, since they want to know their origin and the reasons for their names (168). Horses and modes of riding are described in Cvirka’s stories with the help of borrowings from Slavic languages and so may be incomprehensible to current Lithuanian readers, because they are used only in dialects. In German, they were translated with the help of words used in the general language. For example, the Lithuanian word drigantas, a borrowing from Polish, (Eng. a stallion) is translated into German by the word der Hengst in the standard language, while the Polonism zovada (Eng. to gallop, to jump) is rendered by the standard language word galoppieren: Lithuanian: Kad taip gerai pajojus ant gero driganto! – galvoja jis, – tai paskum kad ir numirt. (Cvirka, “Bernas, nore˙je˛s amzˇinai joti zˇirgu” 18; italics added) German: Wenn ich nur einmal so richtig auf einem guten Hengst reiten dürfte! denkt er, dann könnt ich sterben. (Cvirka, “Der Junge, der davon träumte, auf einem Pferd zu galoppieren” 27; italics added) Lithuanian: – Mat, snarglius! Padaviau, kvailas, – ir plaka zovada, – isˇli˛sdamas pro vartus, sako sˇeimininkas. (Cvirka, “Bernas, nore˙je˛s amzˇinai joti zˇirgu” 19; italics added) German: “Guck einer die Rotznase an! Muß ich sie auch dem überlassen, dem Dummkopf, und der läßt sie noch galoppieren,” schimpft der Bauer, als er den Hof betritt. (Cvirka, “Der Junge, der davon träumte, auf einem Pferd zu galoppieren” 29; italics added)

The semantic field of terms for items in a shepherd’s household in the story is also quite broad: there are outdated words for items of clothing and footwear, for example, serme˙ga (Ger. die Joppe; Eng. coarse homespun overcoat), klumpe˙ (Ger. die Pantine, der Holzklump; Eng. clog), skranda (Ger. der Pelz; Eng. fur coat/ jacket). In the student survey, similar tendencies in the perception of archaisms are confirmed: the compound noun der Holzklump (clog) is correctly defined by more students (11 out of 15 of the juniors and 11 out of 11 of the seniors) than its synonym die Pantine (5 juniors and 8 seniors), though the word der Holzklump is not even listed in the Duden online dictionary. Only DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) gives an explanation that these are ‘shoes made from a single piece of wood.’ Consequently, this means that, if at least one element of a compound is understood in an archaism, then the whole word, although rarely used, can be correctly described and identified. The semantic fields of archaisms and historicisms are closely related to the realities of a town in the story “Saule˙lydis Nykos valscˇiuje” (1929 [Ger. “Sonnenuntergang im Bezirk Nyka” translated by Irene Brewing; Eng. “Sunset in the

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County of Nyka”] 1929). The semantic field is determined by the content of the story: two peasants come to the county office to apply for a state allowance, because the harvest was bad. Because they have arrived too late, at sunset, they are not admitted by the governor. But when they meet the governor at a town tavern, the peasants treat him to drinks and all of them get drunk. Both villagers go through the woods and swamps to return home. In the title of this story, the outdated word valscˇius (rural municipality/ county) is used; it refers to a territorial administrative unit used in interwar Lithuania, consisting of several neighbourhoods. In German, this term is translated by the modern and commonly used equivalent der Bezirk (Lith. rajonas; Eng. district). However, the governor of the county virsˇaitis is translated by the archaic German word der Amtsvorsteher: Lithuanian: Virsˇaicˇio veidas buvo aisˇkiai matyti prie didelio, ilgo valscˇiaus stalo. (Cvirka, “Saule˙lydis Nykos valscˇiuje” 28; italics added) German: Das Gesicht des Amtsvorstehers hinter dem großen langen Amtstisch war deutlich zu sehen. (Cvirka, “Sonnenuntergang im Bezirk Nyka” 18; italics added)

In this story one can find several archaisms which are borrowings from Slavic languages, as they are neighbouring countries and long related to Lithuania by unions or other ties of political dependence: for example, traktyrius (Eng. tavern) deriving from Russian; ˇsinkorka (Eng. the innkeeper) from Polish; kora (Eng. punishment) from Polish; bulka (Eng. a bun) originating from Polish (Lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas). They are translated into German as generic words: die Kneipe (Eng. inn), die Wirtin (Eng. the innkeeper); die Strafe, das Brötchen (Eng. a bun). Consequently, these German words do not have the connotation of being archaic and do not convey a connection with any Slavic languages. This linguistic peculiarity and the difference between the original and the translated text also determine a different perception of the work: the reader of the translation does not stop to ponder these words, while the reader of the Lithuanian text may need to find out the meaning of archaic words of foreign origin and thus extend their perceptual boundaries and language knowledge. The historicism margas derived from the German language (German der Morgen), meaning an area of land from 0.25 to 0.56 hectares, is used in both the original, “Saule˙lydis Nykos valscˇiuje,” and in the German translation: Lithuanian: Na, kai valdzˇia pazˇade˙jo susˇelpti badaujancˇius, prisirasˇe˙m ir mes pas seniu¯na˛, bet suzˇinojom, kad nesame ˛irasˇyti, o toks turtuolis, atsiprasˇant, bjaurybe˙ Vinksˇna Prancisˇkus, ant penkiasdesˇimties margu˛, pazˇyme˙tas. (Cvirka, “Saule˙lydis Nykos valscˇiuje” 32; italics added) German: Als die Regierung den Hungernden Hilfe versprach, da haben auch wir uns beim Dorfältesten eingetragen, inzwischen aber haben wir erfahren, daß wir gar nicht auf der Liste stehen. Dafür steht der Reiche, Verzeihung, dieses Scheusal Prancisˇkus

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Vinksˇna mit fünfzig Morgen drauf. (Cvirka, “Sonnenuntergang im Bezirk Nyka” 22–23; italics added)

Written in 1937, the short story “Uogele˙” (Eng. “Berry”; the original title “Uogele˙” retained in the German translation) describes the sad fate of an old village woman, her last days, and her death. The short story appeared in several of Cvirka’s collections of short stories. In the collection of short stories A ˛ zˇuolas: Apsakymai (Eng. “The Oak: Short Stories”) published during the soviet times, the female protagonist, Uogele˙, is portrayed as a hired worker dying at the home of her landlord, the evil and ruthless farmer Dulskis. However, in the collection Kasdiene˙s istorijos (Eng. Everyday Stories) published in 1938, when Lithuania was an independent country, and in the prose collection of 2009, Uogele˙ is not a hired worker, but a mother who has to suffer bullying by her brutal son and daughterin-law. This story, which depicts pre-war Lithuanian rural life, determines the use of archaisms which refer to rural household objects and the social situation of elderly people. The story uses words which refer to outdated phenomena, such as: karsˇinimo teise˙ (caring for an elderly person) and isˇimtine˙ (maintenance provided to parents by the children who have taken over their farms). None of the fifteen-year-old pupils marked the correct definition of the meaning of the German equivalent of isˇimtine˙ (das Altenteil) in the questionnaire; however, 9 out of 11 eighteen-year-olds knew the meaning of this word. The historicism karsˇinimas in the original and in the translated text is used (Lith. karsˇinimas; Ger. Fürsorge und Altenteil). In the original, Uogele˙ expects karsˇinimas from her son, while the translation highlights the country’s participation in the Russo-Japanese War. The landlord is called a Japanese: Lithuanian: Uogele˙, ture˙dama negincˇijama˛globos ir karsˇinimo teise˛, nebande˙ byline˙tis, amzˇiu˛ be bylu˛ isˇgyvenusi. Ji vyle˙si, kad su¯nus kada nors pasigaile˙s savo gimdytojos, o jei nepasigaile˙s – zˇmone˙s ji˛ sugraudins. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 37; italics added) German: Uogele˙ hatte sich durch ihre langjährige Dienstzeit ein Recht auf Fürsorge und Altenteil erworben und dachte nicht ans Prozessieren; hatte sie doch ihr Leben lang nichts mit dem Gericht zu tun gehabt. Sie lebte in der Hoffnung, der Japaner würde sich irgendwann der langjährigen Arbeiterin erbarmen; wenn nicht aus eigenem Antrieb, so würden die Leute ihm schon das Herz rühren. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 87; italics added)

Some of the outdated words are translated by paraphrasing. For example, kampininkauti (Eng. to live somewhere temporarily) is translated as ein Eckchen mieten (backtranslation: Lith. isˇsinuomoti kampeli˛; Eng. to rent a corner), although rent refers to a different, monetary relationship with the tenant. The obsolete word for the seniors’ shelter ˇspitole˙ in the translated text is replaced by the description of the place as being priesˇais bazˇnycˇia˛ (Eng. in front of the church). The aforementioned words are italicised in the texts below:

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Lithuanian: Sˇitais sumetimais Japonas sustabde˙ vezˇima˛ prie ˇspitole˙s ir bazˇnycˇios tarnams apdalino po gorcˇiu˛ dirse˙tu˛ rugiu˛, prasˇydamas pasimelsti uzˇ motinos sveikata˛. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 38; italics added) German: Auf dem Heimweg hielt der Japaner vor der Kirche an und teilte je eine Metze spelzigen Roggen an die Kirchendiener aus mit der Bitte, für die Gesundheit der Uogele˙ zu beten. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 88; italics added)

The text above includes a historical term for measurement, gorcˇius. This word is translated into German as die Metze.8 The electronic Lithuanian dictionary lkz.lt describes the meaning of this historicism as “skyscˇiu˛ ar biralu˛ saika˛ arti triju˛ litru˛” (Eng. a measure of liquids or dry bulk, close to three litres). The story contains historicisms that refer to tools for hand weaving and spinning and their products: ratelis (Eng. a spinning wheel; Ger. das Spinnrad); skietai (Eng. reed; Ger. der Weberkamm); pakulos (Eng. tow; Ger. das Werg). These words are rarely used today because their referents belong to the inventory of ethnographic museums. It is interesting to note that some archaic words such as zˇlugtas (Eng. clothes soaked before washing) and asla (Eng. clay floor in the house) are not translated into German; instead, paraphrases are used. Some archaisms are replaced by words close in meaning: for example, the religious artefact ˇskaplieriai (Lith. ant kaklo nesˇiojamos ˇsve˛stos medzˇiagos skiautele˙s; Eng. consecrated scraps of fabric worn on a neck) is replaced by the German word Amuletten. If backtranslated, an amuletas in Lithuanian refers to an object allegedly protecting against a disaster: Lithuanian: Isˇlipo isˇ lovos – viena oda, apsikarscˇiusi ˇskaplieriais, pasire˙me˙ drebancˇiomis rankomis lyg sˇakaliais. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 45; italics added) German: Uogele˙ ließ sich aus dem Bett gleiten, nur noch Haut und Knochen, mit Amuletten behängt, und stützte sich auf ihre zitternden, wie Holzspäne dünnen Arme. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 96; italics added)

Cvirka uses spoken language that features barbarisms and vulgarisms to depict the characters, their emotions, and their social status; this lexicon can be described as diatopically, diastratically, and diaphrasically connotated. For example, when Uogele˙’s daughter-in-law discovers that the old woman has given her own money to the priest for her funeral, she becomes angry and shouts at her husband, using low register words rokuotis (Lith. aisˇkintis; Eng. to discuss things); words of foreign origin durnas, Slavism, (Lith. kvailas, neisˇmintingas; Eng. stupid, unwise); brudas, borrowing from the Belarusian language, (Lith. nesˇvarumas, purvas; Eng. dirt). The aforementioned words can be considered 8 The meaning of the German word, as provided in the Duden online dictionary, is similar to that in the source language text, but die Metze also has another meaning, prostitute˙ (Eng. a prostitute).

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archaisms.9 In the translated version, these connotations disappear because of the use of neutral, modern words: Lithuanian:– Kas kaltas, kad ne tu. Durnas sake˙, nuo durno girde˙jai, durnium pats pasilikai. Rokuokis su ja! Asˇ jos brudo nevalysiu! – atsake˙ ˛itu¯zˇusi marti. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 4; italics added) German: “Wer ist schuld, wenn nicht du. Ein Dummer hat’s gesagt, von einem Dummen hast du’s erfahren, nun bist du selber der Dumme. Sieh zu, wie du sie los wirst. Ich mach ihren Dreck nicht weg!” sagte die Frau wütend. (Cvirka, “Uogele˙” 92; italics added)

It should be noted that the theme of a work may depend on the use of archaisms and historicisms and to which semantic fields they are attributed. In the short story “Tik pora˛ klebonisˇku˛” (Ger. “Nur zwei Kelche”; Eng. “Just Two Goblets”), written in 1938, the writer describes some gymnasium teachers’ excursion to a pine forest, and the desire of one teacher, Zigmas Sˇke˙ma, to tell the truth about his political convictions, as well as his cowardice and lack of decisiveness in the presence of his boss. Since these characters are intellectuals, not many outdated words are found in their language. It is possible to mention only a few historicisms that are not used today: masˇininke˙ (Ger. Maschinenschreiberin; Eng. typist) and rasˇtvedys (Ger. der Schriftführer; Eng. secretary), and objects associated with music that are rarely found in modern usage: patefonas (Ger. Grammophon; Eng. gramophone) and patefono ploksˇtele˙ (Ger. die Schallplatte; Eng. record). The hard life of peasants in Lithuania after it was proclaimed an independent state in 1918 is also portrayed in a celebrated prose work by Cvirka, the novel Zˇeme˙ maitintoja (1935 [Eng. The Land that Feeds Us]), translated into German as Mutter Erde by Irene Brewing in 1975 and published in East Germany. The main characters in the novel are the settlers Juras and Monika who were granted land by the state because Juras participated in battles for the freedom of Lithuania against Russian and Polish troops from 1918 to 1920. The novel begins with a scene depicting people working for a landlord on his estate. Among them is Monika, pregnant with Juras’s baby, trying to shear sheep. (For the analysis of this novel, see also Chapter 4). These workers are identified by a variety of terms: dvarionys, kumecˇiai (Eng. farmhands); baudzˇiauninkai (Eng. serfs); bezˇemiai (Eng. the landless). The translator also finds various equivalents: die Instleute, (farmhands); die Leibeigenen, (serfs); das Gesinde; die Landlosen (farmhands). These terms which identify the social status of dependent people are already historicisms, but it is important for the reader to understand what they mean. The meaning is evident in the context, especially if synonymous descriptions are used, as in these examples: 9 For the meaning of the Lithuanian archaic words, see Lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas.

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Lithuanian: Kumecˇiai, bezˇemiai, buve˛ baudzˇiauninkai, gyveno alkanas sˇventes laukdami teisingo, lygaus turtu˛ ir atkariautu˛ zˇemiu˛ dalinimo. (Cvirka, Zˇeme˙ maitintoja 178; italics added) German: Die Landarbeiter und ehemaligen Leibeigenen warteten auf die Verteilung des Herrenbesitzes und der Ländereien, die sie zurückerobert hatten. (Cvirka, Mutter Erde 35; italics added) Lithuanian: Pavasari˛, ate˙jus se˙jos metui, dvaru˛ valdytojai, pabe˙gusiu˛ ˛i uzˇsienius nuo karo ir revoliucijos sˇme˙klos ponu˛ ˛igaliotiniai, nei˛stenge˙ suburt kumecˇiu˛ darbams. (Cvirka, Zˇeme˙ maitintoja 178; italics added) German: Als die Frühjahrsaussaat begann, waren die Verwalter der ins Ausland geflüchteten Herren nicht mehr imstande, die Instleute zur Feldarbeit zu bewegen. (Cvirka, Mutter Erde 35; italics added)

In Cvirka’s novel, there are many terms related to agriculture that may seem archaic and incomprehensible to the modern reader such as a laidaris (Lith. uzˇtvaras prie tvartu˛ gyvuliams suvaryti; Ger. der Pferch; Eng. stockyard); prielaidiena (Lith. parsˇiena; Ger. der Schweinebraten; Eng. young pork); pe˙das (Lith. surisˇtu˛ javu˛ gle˙belis; Ger. die Garbe; Eng. sheaf). The word die Garbe was among the 22 German archaisms and historicisms, the meanings of which were identified by the German students. More than half of the fifteen-year-olds (9 out of 11) and about half of the eighteen-year-olds (5 out of 11) provided the correct definition of this word. It has been shown in this chapter that archaic and historic words from selected short stories by Cvirka can be classified into different semantic fields: horse riding, shepherds’ tools, administrative territorial units, units of measurement, words that define the social status of people, and the names for weaving and spinning tools. The lexical items in these semantic fields were translated by Irene Brewing and Idka Unger mostly with the help of German archaic words that preserve diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic connotations. Some words were paraphrased by the translators; others were described or translated with the help of standard German lexical items. A questionnaire was given to senior (18-year-old) and junior (15-year-old) pupils of a German gymnasium. They were asked to match archaic German words with their definitions. This survey showed that if the pupils were well-read and had linguistic sophistication they achieved better results. Thus, the average of correct answers among the group of senior pupils was much higher than the average of correct answers in the group of junior pupils. The language of Cvirka’s short stories and novels is mostly comprehensible for native speakers; however, the meanings of some archaic, historical and dialectal words, as well as borrowings from Russian and Polish, can be vague and hard to understand even for the source language readers.

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Conclusion

The analysis of archaisms and historicisms and their counterparts in the German translations of stories by Petras Cvirka reveals that the frequency of the use of archaisms and their relation to specific semantic fields is mostly determined by the themes of the texts. Since Cvirka’s prose describes the life of Lithuanian rural people during the interwar period, archaic words denote the household goods of the peasantry, their social status, their connection to the land, and their livestock. They can be sarcastic, vulgar or of foreign origin, which means that their connotations may not only be diaphasic (stylistic), but also diatopic (dialectic) and diastratic (sociolect). Archaic words are also often used in the characters’ direct speech and help to create their literary portraits. The comparison of Lithuanian texts with the translations into German has revealed that archaisms are not always translated into corresponding archaic lexical units, and that historicisms usually refer to extinct artefacts or social relations in both languages. A survey of ninth and twelfth grade students of a German gymnasium was conducted to find out if they are equally aware of the meanings of archaisms. It has been revealed that the average of the correct answers by older students is much higher than that of the younger students; the average of correct answers by eleven senior students is 79%; the average of the correct answers of fifteen junior students is 53%. It can be assumed that the higher erudition of senior pupils, the more profound knowledge of history, culture and literature, and their own life experiences and knowledge of the world lead to a better understanding of the meanings of outdated words. In addition, the meaning of compound archaisms is easier to identify than that of simple words, because in compound words, one of the components is often still used in contemporary language. An interest in archaisms and historicisms not only enriches native and foreign languages, but also extends the knowledge of cultural history. Language users need new words, but they do need outdated/obsolete words as well. The translators Irene Brewing and Idka Unger tried to convey for German readers the life in the Lithuanian countryside during the period between World War I and World War II as it was depicted in Cvirka’s works. With that in mind, they employed archaic German words, preserving the original stylistic and social connotations. Some of the Lithuanian archaic words were paraphrased, described or translated with the help of standard German lexical items. Archaic and historic words in both original works by Cvirka and their translations into German contribute to the vivid depiction of the Lithuanian countryside and the memorable characterisation of Lithuanian peasants.

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Works Cited Albrecht, Jörn. Übersetzung und Linguistik. 2. Aufl. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013. Print. Apel, Friedmar. Literarische Übersetzung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983. Print. Brazˇe˙nas, Petras. “Perzˇenge˛s sˇimtmecˇio slenksti˛.” Apsakymai ir Zˇeme˙ maitintoja. Prozos rinktine˙. Petras Cvirka. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ sa˛jungos leidykla, 2009. 5–14. Print. Crystal, David. Language Death. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Cvirka, Petras. Apsakymai ir Zˇeme˙ maitintoja: Prozos rinktine˙. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ sa˛jungos leidykla, 2009. Print. –. A ˛ zˇuolas: Apsakymai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1974. Print. –. Nur zwei Kelche. Erzählungen. Trans. from Lithuanian into German by von Irene Brewing and Idka Unger. Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1978. Print –. Mutter Erde. Roman. Trans. von Irene Brewing. Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1975. Print Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Web. 3 Nov. 2021. . Duden. duden.de. Web. 3 Nov. 2021. . Heusinger, Siegfried. Die Lexik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004. Print. Jakaitiene˙, Evalda. Leksikologija. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2010. Print. Jang, Ae Yoon. “Lexikalische Archaismen und ihre Verwendung in Pressetexten des heutigen Deutsch.” Göttingen, 2006. Web. 5 Dec. 2017. . Jasaitis, Juozas, Petras Cvirka. Kaunas: Sˇviesa, 1989. Print. Kruopas, Jonas. Dabartine˙s lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas. Vilnius: Mintis, 1972. Print. Kubilius, Vytautas et al. Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros enciklopedija. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 2001. Landers, Clifford E. Literary Translation: A Practical Guide. Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Sydney: Multilingual Matters, 2001. Print. Lankutis, Jonas. Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros istorija. Vol. 2. Vilnius: Vaga, 1982. Print. Lietuviu˛ kalbos zˇodynas. lkz.lt. Web. 11 Oct. 2021. . Mrozek, Bodo. Lexikon der bedrohten Wörter. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005. Web. 5 Dec. 2019. . Nord, Christiane. Fertigkeit Übersetzen. Berlin: BDÜ Fachverlag, 2010. Print. Pikcˇilingis, Juozas. Lietuviu˛ kalbos stilistika. Vol. 2. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1975. Print. Pohl, Inge. “Semantikorientierte Wortschatzarbeit.” Wortschatzarbeit. Deutschunterricht in Theorie und Praxis. Eds. Inge Pohl and Winfried Ulrich. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2011.159–224. Print. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. Soziolinguistik: eine Einführung. 3. Aufl. Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1991. Print. Skeivys, Rimantas. Petro Cvirkos prozos lyrizmas. Vilnius: Lietuviu˛ literatu¯ros ir tautosakos institutas, 1996. Print. Urba, Ke˛stutis. Auginancˇioji literatu¯ra. Vilnius: Lietuvos rasˇytoju˛ sa˛jungos leidykla, 2015. Print. Venclova, Antanas. “Privatine˙s skaitytojo nuomone˙s apie Franka˛ Kruka˛.” Literatu¯ra ir liaudis. Vilnius: Vaga, 1974. Print.

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Venuti, Lawrence. “How to Read a Translation.” Web. 5 Nov. 2019. . Veverskis, Jeronimas. “Grazˇiausioji kamieno atzˇala.” Atsiminimai apie Petra˛ Cvirka˛, Comp. Aldona Mickiene˙, ed. Antanas Venclova. Vilnius: Vaga, 1969. 18–24. Print. Wanzeck, Christiane. Lexikologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2010. Print. Wortpatenschaft.de. Web. 5 Dec. 2017. .

Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ / Adelheid Rundholz / Elizabeth Mary Cummings

In Place of a Conclusion: Dialoguing Identities in Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s Vilnius. Wilno. ‫ווילנע‬. Three Short Stories1

The city . . . does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (emphases added)2

As the writer Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙ has put it, “Vilnius is like a choir” (qtd. in Gimbutaite˙).3 Because of its inherently polyphonic nature, the trope of the choir stands for “the multicultural and multilingual history of Vilnius, which cannot be told through the prism of one nation (Sabaliauskaite˙ qtd. in Gimbutaite˙). The writer holds that “we are frequently too cautious—we turn language into an idol, but multilingualism has never in any way clipped the wings of Lithuanianism, nor has it interfered or does it interfere with the love for the Lithuanian language. Polish readers of the triptych Vilnius. Wilno. ‫( ווילנע‬Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna hereafter) have pointed out that the book undermines Polishness of the interwar Vilnius. Lithuanians, contrarily, underscored the prevalence of the Polish spirit in the representation of Vilnius” (Sabaliauskaite˙ qtd. in Gimbutaite˙). Sabaliauskaite˙ points out that she aims at truthful depictions of human life and being. Yet, “[i]n literature just as in the treatment of history, when the desired begins to be perceived as the actual, science becomes overshadowed by ideology (Sabaliauskaite˙ qtd. in Gimbutaite˙). The parallel between history and literature is not accidental. As discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume, Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙ is known as a best-selling author of historical fiction. In her narratives, history frequently gives way to other themes such as memory and identity, which come up to construct “the micro1 Vilna is a Yiddish version of Vilnius (Sadock et al.). 2 Starting the chapter with this epigraph was inspired by Mitzi Eunice Martínez Guerrero’s rereading of the city for its meanings of the local within the context of globalisation (322−334). 3 This and all other translations from Lithuanian into English, unless otherwise noted, are by Irena Ragaisˇiene˙.

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histories of individuals shaped (or crushed) by historical events” (“Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙,” Lithuanian Culture Guide; see also “Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙, Vilnius: Three Short Stories”). In the triptych about Vilnius, the relationship between individual and history, characteristic of historical fiction, as Mitzi E. M. Guerrero would have it, emerges as the characters’ exploration of their personal and collective identities in relation to “political and social transformation[s]” in regard to their impact on the characters’ experience of place, their social situation, and the use of language (327). Jerome De Groot describes the relationship between history and historical fiction in terms of establishing links between the past and the present: “History is other, and the present is familiar. The historian’s job is often to explain the transition between these states. The historical novelist similarly explores the dissonance and displacement between then and now, making the past recognisable but simultaneously authentically unfamiliar” (3). De Groot refers to nineteenth-century Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni who states that “the historical novelist is required to give ‘not just the bare bones of history, but something richer, more complete. In a way you want him to put the flesh back on the skeleton that is history’” (Manzoni qtd. in De Groot 3). Historical fiction, in this light, is concerned with representation of history as experienced by individual characters. By narrating their stories, historical fiction fills in “the gaps between known factual history and that which is lived to a variety of purposes” (De Groot 3). Representation of history in fiction raises questions such as “the subjectivism of narratives of History,” “authenticity,” and the links with the “historiographical convention” (2). Differently from the perception of historical fiction a source of objective knowledge, as in the nineteenth century, the contemporary historical novel foregrounds the subjective, just as it engages with “the premeditated ideas” of the reader (4–6). What is more, “[t]the historical novel has a quality of revelation in that it can change the past; it also encourages a particular set of responses and approaches” (10). Along similar lines David Cowart posits that the increasing prominence of historical themes in current fiction suggests that the novel’s perennial valence for history has acquired new strength in recent years. Produced by writers sensitive to the lateness of the historical hour and capable of exploiting technical innovations in the novel, this new historical fiction seems to differ from that of calmer times. A sense of urgency—sometimes even an air of desperation—pervades the historical novel since mid-century, for its author probes the past to account for a present that grows increasingly chaotic. To gauge the significance of this development, one must consider the claims of both art and history to insight into the past. In doing so, one finds the past often less accessible to history than to historical fiction. (1)

Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙ belongs to the category of contemporary writers who, to borrow Cowart’s wording, “has embraced the task of historical analysis, the task of gauging the historical forces responsible for the present” (2). The writer is

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regarded as “the only one who tells our own history so convincingly [that] we grab it as the blind people [grab] the probing cane, we devour it in huge bites and drink it in gulps of a thirsty traveller” (Nedzinskaite˙ qtd. in “Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙,” Reviews). Sabaliauskaite˙’s historical fiction resembles contemporary developments in the genre described by De Groot as not easily defined, “complex, dissonant, multiple and dynamic” (10). In her essay on the development of historical fiction in Lithuania in different historical periods, Sabaliauskaite˙ points out that, in Lithuanian historical fiction written after 1990, “the existential fuses with the philosophical” (“Uncovering Lithuania’s Hidden Relics”). The triptych Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna. Three Short Stories illustrates the diversification of form of historical fiction. It is important to note that the three stories were not published as a ‘triad’ in Lithuanian but were part of the short story collection Danielius Dalba & kitos istorijos (2012 [Danielius Dalba & Other Stories]).4 The stories, “Franco’s Black Pearls,” “The Return of Samuel Vilner” and “The Weathervanes of Vilnius,” were singled out from the collection and translated into English (2015, trans. Romas Kinka). The stories form a short story sequence. Robert Luscher defines the genre by establishing a parallel with “an open book, inviting the reader to construct a network of associations that binds the stories together and lends them cumulative thematic impact” (Luscher qtd. in Ferguson 2; emphasis in the original).5 Reading Sabaliauskaite˙’s ‘triad’ as a short story sequence, which is “a single entity,”6 foregrounds the dialogic nature of the Vilnius narrative, in Bakhtin’s sense, unfolding from the stories’ focus on the different historical snapshots of what Vilnius has been and is—depending on one’s viewpoint (for Bakhtinian thought inspired reading of the Vilnius narrative, see Chapter 1 in this volume). The inclusion of the Polish and the Yiddish versions of the place name, Vilnius, in the title of the short story sequence signals the multiculturality of the Lithuanian capital, hence, the multidimensionality of truth as to what constitutes the history of Vilnius and Vilnians (see also Donskis, “Foreword” 8). The stories showcase the world from the perspective of several of the ethnic groups, the Polish, the Jews, and the Lithuanians. Each of the stories focuses on a different period in the country’s history: the interwar period when Vilnius was part of 4 The meaning of the proper name Danielius Dalba in English is Daniel Crowbar (“Danielius Dalba”). All quotations from the three short stories in the original Lithuanian are from Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s Danielius Dalba & kitos istorijos. 5 For the controversy regarding the generic identification of narratives as short story sequences or cycles in terms of the author’s role in sequencing the stories and, thusly, affecting their interpretation, see Ferguson 1−9. 6 Ferguson is against reading short stories as a cycle, “a single entity.” Rather, she argues for “more attention rather than less to the special aspects of the short stories as stories” (23; emphasis in the original).

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Poland, World War Two and the Holocaust, and the Independence period with flashbacks to the time of the soviet occupation. This final essay in the volume (Inter)cultural Dialogue and Identity in Lithuanian Literature will analyse Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna. Three Short Stories focusing on the characters’ perceptions of the city as a physical place and a discursive space shaping individual and collective identities. The analysis will also consider how history and memory affect this perception. It will be argued—borrowing from Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson—that the city, just as any landscape, “is the visible and invisible meeting ground of culture, place and space—where identities are exchanged, performed and constructed” (21). The argument will draw on the conception of space as devoid of “neutrality” but “as contested terrain, filled with ideological struggles over political and poetical meaning as well as physical territoriality” (18). Regarding the latter aspect, “physical territoriality,” the discussion points out that the stories in question depict the Lithuanian capital changing hands between countries. Accordingly, the country that governs over Vilnius during a particular period (re)defines places to regulate the production of (social) space in Henri Lefebvre’s sense (8–9; 26–27). It is namely the analysis of the characters’ subjective perception of place as social space shaping their self-definition that is the primary focus of the present discussion. In this sense, identities emerging in response to place and the spaces produced within places will be considered as a product of history of the city and the country, and as a correlative of the characters’ personal history and memory. The discussion also recapitulates some of the salient points raised throughout the preceding chapters in this volume focused on the links between identity and dialogue, both as a mode of communication and a feature of language, as highlighted in, e. g., Chapter 2. To continue with the discussion of the tropes of identity and dialogue in the last essay of the volume, where the centre of attention is the characters’ perception of a locality as an important source of identity, the quotation from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) at the beginning of the chapter provides a useful entry point. The quotation has been read as “invoke[ing] the city as an archive” which “holds the past as a repository of traces, as material palimpsest that bears the vestiges of its former lives” (Menon 237). Describing this “palimpsest,” two of the novel’s characters, Marco Polo, and the emperor Kublai Khan, exchange their visions of “a model city” (Calvino 56). Their different preferences for an ideal city—based on ”the norm”—as for Khan, and—“made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions”—as for Marco (56) have been read as being in response to the “urgently needed” “social and urban renewal” in the post-1960s (Modena 2–4). The interlocutors present their utopian vision as “[s]cattered allusions to architecture and urban planning,ˮ reminiscent of a “Borgesian manual of fantastic urbanismˮ (Donnarumma qtd. in Modena 3). Yet,

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their conversations are implicitly dealing with “issues related to the crisis of the contemporary city” and with “the complexity of individual and communal perceptions of and interactions with the urban environment” (Modena 3–4). An ideal city in this regard, as Marco puts it, is an urban environment, “though . . . painstakingly regimented,” providing conditions for “productive industry” and “spiritual ease” (Calvino 117). To this end, the factor of subjectivity in experiencing the city is emphasised, as approaching the city through “memories, feelings, hopes [and] dreams” allow those involved “to create alternative vistas in the inner city of their imagination, and, later, [hopefully], in the object world” (Modena 13; cf. Coluccy and Sacco 4–5). Along similar lines, an implicit exchange of views provides subtext for Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s multilayered narrative of Vilnius. According to Leonidas Donskis, it “allows one to look at Lithuania in the historical perspective of several epochs, while at the same time putting oneself into the situations of completely different people and getting under their skin” (“Foreword” 8). By revealing differences in the characters’ perceptual experiences of Vilnius, the stories reveal that the meanings of place and identity evolve from the characters’ ‘mental mapping’ of the city which shapes the relationships with the urban space and its people.7 The stories also show how change of the political rule of the country alters the characters’ sense of belonging to the place. “Franco’s Black Pearls” depicts Polish-speaking characters who identify Vilnius as their homeland and who feel culturally displaced when Vilnius is transferred from Poland to Lithuania in 1939 (see Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of the capital’s history). For the central character of “The Return of Samuel Vilner,” Vilnius embodies memories of the Holocaust and the loss of his family members. Vilnius is also a site where personal and cultural identity of many Litvaks is rooted, but, as Vilner discovers upon his return to the place of his childhood, the traces of his ethnic culture are either re-signified or erased from the cityscape. In “The Weathervanes of Vilnius,” the characters define themselves in terms of an ‘us’/ ‘them’ oppositional duality, represented by an aging former KGB agent and a hospital nurse who regards herself as part of those who were persecuted by people like the ailing agent. 7 The reading of the stories in terms of mental mapping of the city draws on David Ley’s notion of “mental map.” In his view, any role of the city-user “impl[ies] a bias in knowledge of the city [since] the objective map is an abstraction that does not correspond with any personal or group mental map” (Ley qtd. in Hurm 67). Elaborating on the meaning of mental mapping, Gerd Hurm states that, in “urban fiction,” “mental maps” frequently stand for individuated understanding of the character(s)’s world/place. A study of such mapping can show “the frequency and the extent of movements, the width of the characters’ radius and the predominant perspective in the fictional city [that] may indicate the specific urban lifestyle and the peculiar fragmentation of the city image” (Hurm 67).

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In the latter story, the ailing former soviet fonctionnaire perceives the nurse as a physical threat since he thinks she may exact revenge on him for having destroyed human lives. He views her complete disregard for the positions that he holds in the independent Lithuania—“a habilitated doctor of philosophy,” “the chairman, and a member of state committees . . . [a]s well as international ones” as a signal that he no longer can exercise social control by fear (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 109).8 On the other hand, the story pinpoints that the relics of the soviet past and the power that it generates are still very much part of the present. To reveal how the past affects the present, Sabaliauskaite˙ uses an unnamed character, a former KGB agent, “who focalise[s] and mediate[s] [the reader’s] engagement with the represented past,” to borrow from Hamish Dalley’s discussion on the relationship between fictional forms and re-construction of “contested pasts” in historical fiction (ch. 1). By way of invoking historical reality, Sabaliauskaite˙’s story includes numerous references to ideological institutions, such as “the Committee for State Security,” “the Central Committee,” “the Museum of Atheism” (“The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 128–130),9 the functions of which resemble Louis Althusser’s concept of “ideological state apparatuses” (693–702). The concept stands for the workings of ideology directed at the control through imposition of ideology on society. The factor of force is a marker of difference between the soviet ideological indoctrination and that described by Althusser. As Ian Buchanan tells us, Althusser’s concept of indoctrination, aimed at inculcating ideology in individuals to make them internalise it and to become interpellated subjects, “is known in contemporary political discourse as ‘soft power,’ i. e., the form of power that operates by means of ideological persuasion rather than violent, physical coercion” (242). The quotation below showcases Sabaliauskaite˙’s ironic take on the use of ideology by the soviets to produce an indoctrinated subject: It was also his [the former soviet fonctionnaire’s] wise idea, approved by the Committee for the Preservation of History, that, in photographing the old Vilnius, elements of the new Vilnius absolutely had to be prominent. In photographing St Catherine’s Church, the new school with the name of the female Soviet poet should also be visible. By St Casimir’s Church—the new “Moscow” cinema, by St John’s Church—the new block of flats built for Soviet citizens, by the former town hall—the new Art Exhibition Centre; the new, bright districts with high-rise blocks of flats should be prominent in the panoramas of the city; where old buildings unavoidably dominated then photomontage

8 The text in the original: “Asˇ habilituotas daktaras, asˇ esu valstybiniu˛ komitetu˛ pirmininkas ir narys! Ir tarptautiniu˛!” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 131). 9 Original Lithuanian: “Saugumas,” “Centras,” “Ateizmo muziejus” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 139).

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should be used and the new, Soviet Vilnius made to look larger. (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 135)10

The quotation evokes Althusser’s statement that ideology is “representation of the world whose imaginary distortion depends on [individuals’] imaginary relation to their conditions of existence” (695). Ideology, in order words, is intended to create “misrecognition” of reality, that is, succumbing to ideological indoctrination played out to represent and intended to reproduce the dominant order (698). The above quoted excerpt from “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” illustrates how representation, “photomontage” of Vilnius, is used to manipulate truth to indoctrinate subjects with the soviet ideology. The fictional filtered through the lens of the zealous former KGB informer alludes to the historical, which is, state atheism in the former Soviet Union.11 The character recalls how in the course of sovietisation of the country churches as mediators of a world-view informed by religion and moral codes have become supplanted by institutions involved in the ideological indoctrination of the “Soviet Man”12—the cinema, the school, and the Art Exhibition Centre (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 138, 135). In the character’s ideology-oriented recollections of the soviet times, he also hints at the fact that the soviet system used housing as a form of social control. Therefore, in the photographic representation of the soviet indoctrination-infused “panoramas of the city,” “high-rise blocks” “should be prominent” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 135). This is because, according to the soviet propaganda of the time, they evidence modernisation of Lithuania: its transformation from the culture of “wooden cottages” to that of “five storey silicate brick apartment buildings” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 116).13 On the factual level, housing in urban areas in particular “belonged to the government [and] was distributed by municipal authorities or by governmental departments” (“Housing in the USSR”). Those loyal to the system could expect better conditions for the acquisition of a place to live, including a better location of a dwelling place, despite emphasis on egalitarianism 10 In the original: “Isˇmintinga ide˙ja, patvirtinta Istorijos saugumo komiteto nutarimu, jog fotografuojant Vilniaus senienas bu¯tinai ture˙jo dominuoti naujojo Vilniaus elementai, priklause˙ taip pat jam. Fotografuojant Sˇventosios Kotrynos bazˇnycˇia˛ bu¯tinai ture˙jo matytis tarybine˙s poete˙s vardu pavadinta nauja mokykla, Sˇventojo Kazimiero – naujas kino teatras “Maskva,” Sˇventojo Jono – naujas tarybiniu˛ zˇmoniu˛ daugiabutis gyvenamasis namas, buvusia˛ Rotusˇe˛ – nauji Daile˙s parodu˛ ru¯mai, miesto panoramose ture˙jo dominuoti nauji, ˇsviesu¯s daugiabucˇiu˛ daugiaauksˇcˇiu˛ gyvenamieji rajonai; ten, kur neisˇvengiamai vyravo senienos, reike˙jo panaudoti fotomontazˇa˛ ir nauja˛ji˛, tarybini˛, Vilniu˛ padidinti” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 142). 11 For the discussion of state atheism see, e. g., Victoria Smolkin (2018). 12 Original Lithuanian: “tarybinis zˇmogus” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 147, 143). 13 The complete sentence in the original: “Kad vietoj mediniu˛ baku¯zˇiu˛ miesteliuose atsirado silikatiniu˛ plytu˛ penkiaauksˇcˇiai” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 134).

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in all spheres of life, including that of space (see Morton 235–259; Hess and Metspalu). The former soviet fonctionnaire cannot accept that, in the independent Lithuania, being loyal to the system as a guarantee of a quiet and well-provided life is no longer something that can be state controlled. Feeling excluded from any spheres of influence, he contemplates about the changes he had intended to make in Vilnius to enhance the processes, following Althusser, involved in “‘transform[ing]’ the individuals into subjects . . . by . . . interpellation” (699). By extension, interpellated subjects, internalising ideologies of the “Law,” are indispensable for sustaining and reproducing a particular social or political order (696). To ‘help’ his compatriots become interpellated subjects, the former servant of the soviet regime had devised a plan “to replace all the crosses on top of the churches of Vilnius with weathervanes” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 138).”14 As he puts it, “it had always been important for Soviet Man to know where the wind was blowing from and to adapt accordingly to the direction of the wind” (138).15 Those who would not form “an ideologically correct attitude” (133),16 as the story reveals by implicitly engaging with the factual, would be crushed by the system—socially, psychologically, and physically. The character of the former agent shows that the soviet ideology has become an integral part of his mentality, and he sees it as his duty to force his fellow citizens to lose their individuality and to become subject to ideology. This idea is particularly pronounced in the episode when he describes how the city can be reconstructed making use of Michurin’s theories of inheritance and hybridisation: The city was like a tree that had to be properly pruned, for the old branches to be lopped off and whatever to his eye was beautiful to remain, and in places something new to be grafted on, something that had not been there before but which could take root like a new strain introduced by Michurin. (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 134–135)17

In a nutshell, “Michurin’s theories of hybridisation . . . were adopted as the official science of genetics by the soviet regime, despite the nearly universal 14 In the original: “visu˛ Vilniaus bazˇnycˇiu˛ kryzˇius pakeisti ve˙trunge˙mis” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 143). 15 Original Lithuanian: “Ve˙trunge˙s . . . ture˙jo didele˛ ir svarbia˛prasme˛ ir puikiai atliepe˙ tarybinio zˇmogaus reikmes. Juk tarybiniam zˇmogui visuomet buvo gyvybisˇkai svarbu zˇinoti, isˇ kur ve˙jas pucˇia, ir spe˙ti atitinkamai prisitaikyti prie jo krypties” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 143). The meaning of the Lithuanian idiom ‘to know where the wind was blowing from’ stands for avoiding ‘swimming against the stream.’ Authors’ comment. 16 Original Lithuanian: “ideologisˇkai teisinga nuostata” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 141). 17 Original Lithuanian: “Miestas buvo lyg medis, kuri˛ reike˙jo gerokai nugene˙ti, nupjauti senas sˇakas ir palikti tai, kas jo akiai buvo grazˇu, ir vietomis ˛iskiepyti sˇio to naujo, ko niekada nebuvo, bet kas gale˙tu˛ prigyti lyg Micˇiurino priauginta nauja veisle˙” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 142).

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rejection of this doctrine by scientists throughout the world” (“Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin”). In the quotation above, the high emphasis on the character’s self-perception as an important agent in ‘the state apparatus’ is shattered by presenting him as a simplistic, blind follower of a system of which he feels to be an integral part. Accordingly, his failing physical condition implies the end of the past area, even though he still has much power in the new, independent state in the capacity of “the most senior [university lecturer] with the highest academic titles,”18 “also a member of a whole host of boards, committees, commissions, subcommittees, and expert groups,”19 and many other decision-making bodies that Sabaliauskaite˙ ironically lists (“The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 151, 146). He can impact important decisions not by reporting on people who are “blow[ing] against the wind”—as he used to do during the soviet times—but by “not sign[ing] something” or “just rais[ing] his old bony hand in a vote against” (141, 147).20 He finds it difficult to recognise, though, that times are changing. In postindependence Lithuania, his students, brought up in a society striving for democracy, make a complaint about him. They call “the course he was teaching” “‘morally obsolete, insufficiently interactive’”; his teaching is reported to be ineffective in that it “‘does not encourage critical thinking and understanding’” (149).21 The fact that the former agent loses his teaching position testifies to dialogue and diversity-oriented approaches to ideology/(cultural) values taking centre stage in society, hence, paving the way to indoctrination compatible with democracy.22 Destroyed lives of those who were critical of the system provide one of the themes in the story. Most attention in this regard is given to the destruction of a woman artist who “undoubtedly belonged to those former times—she had studied at the arts academy before the war, she had even studied in Paris under a famous sculptor for several years” (123).23 She takes photographs of the old

18 Original Lithuanian: “buvo vyriausias, su auksˇcˇiausiais moksliniais titulais” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 149). 19 Original Lithuanian: “buvo daugybe˙s tarybu˛, komitetu˛, komisiju˛, pakomitecˇiu˛, ekspertu˛ grupiu˛ narys” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 147). 20 Continuous text in the original: “Priesˇingai – dabar jam pakakdavo ko nors nepasirasˇyti. Kartais – pakelti savo sena˛ isˇdzˇiuvusia˛ ranka˛ balsuojant priesˇ . . . ” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 147). 21 Continuous text in the original: “. . . jo skaitomas kursas ‘moralisˇkai pasene˛s, nepakankamai interaktyvus, profesorius ne vien atsisako polemizuoti, bet ne˙ nesiteikia atsakyti ˛i tikslinamuosius klausimus, nesiru¯pina kritinio ma˛stymo ir suvokimo skatinimu’” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 148). 22 For the discussion of indoctrination and democracy in education, see Ira Steinberg 68. 23 In the original: “Ji neabejotinai priklause˙ aniems laikams – priesˇ kara˛ studijavo menu˛ akademijoje, netgi kelis metus moke˙si pacˇiame Paryzˇiuje, pas garsu˛ skulptoriu˛” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 137).

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Vilnius before it is demolished by the soviets in order “to preserve history” (125).24 For her, the history of the city is not life in communal apartments that she shares with a soviet fonctionnaire. Rather, life in the old city includes “ten-room flats, plaster mouldings, candelabras and bouquets of flowers” (125).25 Because of her “[c]ompletely bourgeois and anti-Soviet”26 mentally, the former agent reported on her. She was issued “a ‘wolf ’s card,’ which meant that she was not able to get work anywhere or register to live anywhere and so she had to enter into a pretend marriage with some alcoholic who did not have to pretend to beat her” (128).27 The fact that the nurse who looks after the former agent in the hospital says that there is a group of people in the hospital, offsprings of those whom he had persecuted and tortured, and most of these offsprings “have a university education, in spite of everything” suggests that, despite the efforts of his kind to crush the nation, it survived (110).28 (For more on this point, see references to deportations to Siberia, e. g., in Chapter 5). In “The Weathervanes of Vilnius,” the theme of physical and national survival is depicted by foregrounding the workings of the soviet ideology, specifically, what Susan Fainstein and Norman Fainstein would call “master planning and urban renewal design” seeking “to change society through manipulation of the physical environment” (341). In keeping with this theme, the second story, “The Return of Samuel Vilner,” sustains the notion that the changes to Vilnius have made it unrecognisable even to those so familiar with it. Their hopes and dreams to return, laced with the sensory memories evocative of their youth, are shattered. However, unlike the shared confidences of coming-of-age schoolgirls in the Poland-occupied Vilnius depicted in the first story, “Franco’s Black Pearls,” in “The Return of Samuel Vilner,” Sabaliauskaite˙ drip-feeds the truth about the central character’s negative perception of his hometown throughout most of the story. Humour and irony serve to add potency to the deeply sad realisation that, on his return to Vilnius, Samuel Vilner finds Vilnius not the same. Time and again throughout this story the horror of war and the Holocaust is told simply and in such a matter-of-fact tone that it impresses as brutal in its delivery. (Cf. depiction of WWII from the 24 The original text: “. . . tam, kad isˇliktu˛ nors nuotraukose, juk tai istorija” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 138). 25 In the original: “Jos miestas buvo su desˇimties kambariu˛ butais, lipdiniais, sietynais ir ge˙liu˛ puoksˇte˙mis” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 138). 26 In the original: “Visisˇkai burzˇuazinis, ne tarybinis” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 138). 27 In the original: “. . . ji gavo visisˇka˛‘vilko bilieta˛’ – niekur negale˙jo ˛isidarbinti ir prisiregistruoti gyventi, tode˙l teko fiktyviai isˇteke˙ti uzˇ kazˇkokio alkoholiko, kuris visisˇkai nefiktyviai ja˛ musˇdavo” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 139). 28 Continuous text in the original: “Matot, tiek daug zˇmoniu˛ jus prisimena, o jie dar pasidaugino, ir ju˛ vaikai, ir anu¯kai, nepatike˙site, bet dauguma – vis tiek su auksˇtaisiais, nezˇiu¯rint visko” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 132).

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perspective of the child narrator in Alain Stanke’s So Much to Forget: A Child’s Vision of Hell, Chapter 6). The memories that Samuel has, such as “[t]hen the Germans plucked all the Jews who had been left in the First Ghetto one by one, like raisins from a fruit loaf, and took them to the Great Ghetto” (100)29 or “he [Vilner] had hid in the cellar like a rat, like a non-human”(98),30 convey the fear and power that the Germans commanded over the people of Vilnius. At the same time, the story tells us that the history of occupation is multifaceted. Focusing the narration through the eyes of Vilner, who comes back to visit Lithuania after decades of living in the United States, where he fled to escape the Holocaust, the author intermittently moves in close to the character to entwine the fictional and the factual. Such a strategy creates a narrative space for alluding to historical facts related to complexities and contradictions regarding the question of who is responsible for the tragic fate of Lithuanian Jews.31 Only 20,000 out of approximately 250,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania “[p]rior to the Second World War . . . survived the Holocaust” (Donskis, “Preface” x). It is reported that “around 95 per cent” of Lithuanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust (Bubnys, The Holocaust in Lithuania 51). Yet, Aru¯nas Bubnys states that “[i]t is very difficult to answer the question of how many Lithuanian Jews were killed in all during the years of Nazi occupation. Historians differ markedly on this issue. Numbers of Holocaust victims in Lithuania vary from 165,000 to 254,000” (“The Holocaust in Lithuania: An Outline of the Major Stages and Their Results” 218). To foreground the aspect of the subjective in history, Sabaliauskaite˙’s narrative centres on events as experienced by specific people. Since most of the Jewish people are dead, Vilner tries to uncover their stories. His speculation on what happened to the family of a Jewish girl, Esther, to whom Vilner was attracted as a young boy serves as a case in point: Who told the Germans, who made up the lists, how—was it from a list of inhabitants living in a particular quarter? From a list of property owners? Who told them that there in that house lived a Jewish family—after all, they were not very religious, they spoke Polish, Esther went to a Polish school until the Poles began forbidding the Jews from attending their schools. And later the Russians closed down the schools attended by the Poles. During that period Esther went out very rarely. . . . He could have kissed the ground under her feet. He would have saved her. But then one morning he saw how 29 The original language is: “Tada isˇ miesto, kaip razinas isˇ bulkos, po viena˛ isˇrake˙ visus, isˇrakine˙jo, isˇrinko ir isˇvezˇe˙ ˛i Didi˛ji˛ geta˛ . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 126). 30 The original language is: “Sle˙pe˙si ru¯sy kaip zˇiurke˙, kaip nezˇmogus” (Sabaliauskaite˙, Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 125). 31 Numerous studies have addressed the question of Lithuania’s complicity in the nazi genocide and the question of the country’s participation in the extermination of Lithuanian Jews: e. g., Manfred Gerstenfeld (2009); Dov Levin (2000); Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Suzˇiede˙lis (2006); Alfonsas Eidintas (2012); Aru¯nas Bubnys (2004; 2005); Stanislovas Stasiulis (2020), to mention but a few.

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initially the Lithuanian police, then their minions with their white armbands, then just city dwellers carrying things out of her empty home. It was said later, when the Russian Bolsheviks arrived in 1939, that the wealthy Jews who had large apartments with a lot of rooms, voluntarily took in lodgers, mostly newcomers to Vilna, and it was they most probably who informed on their landlords… But Vilner did not want to believe that, not even now, not even today—after all, Esther’s family were very much members of the intelligentsia, very cultured, they had so many books. Esther played the piano so well, what lodger and for what reason would have informed on such good and enlightened people? What sort of executioner standing at the execution ditch in Ponary32 could have ordered women to undress and take off their silk stockings so they could sell their clothes in a nearby village or take them to a girlfriend as a gift? (Sabaliaukaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 100–102; ellipsis in the original)33

By showing disbelief and by asking questions he seems to be probing into the question of what it means to be human in situations denouncing the very notion of humanity, a motif that reverberates in Holocaust literature. Visiting Jewish history sites causes more disbelief. In general, Vilner’s ambiguous reaction to the city left behind long ago, foregrounding disillusionment, rather than regaining wholeness upon returning to the native place, resembles feelings of returnees depicted in many narratives about ‘going back’ (Polouektova 432–468). While walking along the streets of his childhood city, Vilner sees the changes there from the perspective of Jewish history, which he finds nearly non-existent or changed beyond recognition in the present-day Vilnius: 32 Ponary is the Polish version of Paneriai, a site where “nearly 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were shot and buried in mass graves between 1941 and 1944.” “The Ninth Fort outside Kaunas” is the other of “[t]he two most notorious sites” of mass killings of Jews. “An estimated 30,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered during the occupation at the Ninth Fort.” As reported, a Lithuanian unit “of between 50 and 100 men” were involved in the killings “under the supervision of the German Security Police” (Suzˇiede˙lis, Historical Dictionary of Lithuania 127−128). 33 In the original: “Kas jiems pasake˙, kas sudare˙ tuos sa˛rasˇus, kaip – pagal kvartala˛? Isˇ ipotekos? Kas jiems pasake˙, kad ten, bu¯tent tam name, gyvena zˇydu˛ ˇseima – juk nebuvo labai religingi, kalbe˙jo lenkisˇkai, Estera e˙jo ˛i lenkisˇka˛ mokykla˛, kol lenkai neprade˙jo drausti zˇydams lankyti ju˛ mokyklu˛. O paskui ir pacˇiu˛ lenku˛ mokyklas uzˇdare˙ rusai. Tada Estera retai jau isˇeidavo. . . . Bu¯tu˛ gale˙je˛s bucˇiuoti zˇeme˛ jai po kojom. Bu¯tu˛ ja˛ gelbe˙je˛s. Bet paskui tik viena˛ ryta˛ mate˙, kaip isˇ pradzˇiu˛ lietuviu˛ policija, paskui ju˛ pakalikai su baltais raisˇcˇiais, paskui sˇiaip miestiecˇiai nesˇa daiktus isˇ jos tusˇcˇiu˛ namu˛. Ve˙liau kalbe˙jo, kad turtingi zˇydai, kurie ture˙jo didelius butus su daug kambariu˛, ate˙jus rusu˛ bolsˇevikams trisdesˇimt devintaisiais, bijodami nacionalizavimo, savo noru prisie˙me˙ ˛i butus kvartirantu˛, daugiausia nauju˛ atvyke˙liu˛, ir esa˛ paskui tai jie ir skunde˙ namu˛ ˇseimininkus… Bet Vilneris nenore˙jo tuo patike˙ti, net ir dabar, net ir sˇiandien – Esteros ˇseima buvo tokia inteligentisˇka, tokia kultu¯ringa, ture˙jo tiek knygu˛, Estera taip skambino fortepionu, koks gi kvartirantas ir de˙l ko bu¯tu˛ gale˙je˛s ˛isku˛sti tokius gerus ir sˇviesius zˇmones? Koks gi budelis priesˇ stojant prie egzekucijos griovio Paneriuose gale˙jo liepti moterims isˇsirengti ir nusimauti sˇilkines kojines, kad gale˙tu˛ visa tai parduoti priemiescˇiu˛ kaimuose ar nunesˇt dovanu˛ kokiai savo mergsˇei?” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 126– 127; ellipsis in the original).

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Was it not an irony of fate—up to the war all Jewish life was in German Street, and when the war began the Germans closed them off in the ghetto in Butchers’ Street—reflects Samuel Vilner. How ironic, how symbolic: with the arrival of the Germans, the Jews from German Street found themselves in the Butchers’ slaughterhouse. The Germans in Vilna destroyed German Street—was that not ironic? . . . [A]ll of the buildings had been swept away, it was now like a boulevard, like a desert. (Sabaliaukaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 89–90)34

That Vilner sees German Street “like a boulevard” suggests its foreignness. At the factual level, German Street “got its name from the German craftsmen and traders [in the fourteenth century] and soon became a lively centre of Jewish and German culture” (Gasteiger). It is, then, but “an irony of fate” that the street which had been marked by common interests between the nations became a site marked by suffering of Jews, given that a ghetto was founded near it. Paul Connerton states that “our experiences of the present largely depend upon our knowledge of the past, and . . . our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order” (3). The past and the knowledge inherited from the past is habitually re-lived and re-contextualised with people having similar social memories through participation in “performative . . . commemorative ceremonies” to ensure sustainability of memory, by extension, continuity of culture and the social order (4–5). Vilner, however, sees the place as empty, looking “like a desert” (90). By comparing the place to “a desert” Vilner univocally associates the changes in the cityscape with the aftermath of the Holocaust. His mocking disbelief stems from the incongruity between the streets as social spaces as he experienced them in the past and their changed signification at present (cf. Lefebvre in Chapter 4 [78– 79]). The description of the place engages with historical facts. Before World War Two, “Jews lived in the very heart of the Old Town [of Vilnius], on age-old streets”: German Street, Butchers’ Street, Glassmakers’ Street, the Jewish Street and Gaon Street, among others (Lith. Vokiecˇiu˛, Stikliu˛, Me˙siniu˛, Zˇydu˛ and Gaono Streets, respectively) (Laucˇkaite˙-Surgailiene˙ 30). These streets were part of the Jewish Quarter (Katz 114–115). The pre-war Vilnius Jewish Quarter has been described “in terms of three ‘concentric circles’: the densely populated, mainly poor, and traditional core in the middle of the Old Town; a second circle in the Middle of the Old Town, featuring businesses and extending to the more spacious (and expensive) residencies of wealthier and often less traditional Jews; and finally an outer circle, 34 In the original: “Argi ne likimo ironija – juk iki karo visas zˇydu˛ gyvenimas buvo Vokiecˇiu˛ gatve˙je, o karui praside˙jus vokiecˇiai juos uzˇdare˙ gete Me˙siniu˛ gatve˙je – ma˛sto Samuelis Vilneris. Kaip ironisˇka, kaip simbolisˇka: ate˙jus vokiecˇiams, zˇydai isˇ Vokiecˇiu˛ gatve˙s atsidu¯re˙ Me˙siniu˛ skerdykloj. Vokiecˇiai Vilniuje sunaikino Vokiecˇiu˛ gatve˛ – ar ne ironija? . . . [N]uo jos krasˇto nusˇluoti kvartalai, ji dabar lyg bulvaras, lyg dykuma” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 121).

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only loosely connected with the core, of Jewish housing (usually poor) on the edges of the town” (Kahan qtd. in Weeks 147). The great majority of the Jewish population (approximately 60 percent) were traders and artisans, 25 percent worked in “factories or workshops,” and “around 10 percent in services or unemployed. . . . Despite differences in education, piety and wealth . . . social differentiation among Vilnius Jews lacked rigidity” (147). Soon after the German occupation on June 22, 1941, the Little Vilnius Ghetto was established “in the historical Jewish [Q]uarter” (“The Big Jewish Ghetto in Vilnius”). The Big Ghetto was built “in the nearby Oldtown territory.” The Little Ghetto existed only for two months. Most of the people there were annihilated. The survivors “were moved to the Big Ghetto” which existed until September 23, 1943. The Jews “who could not escape from the Ghetto were sent to concentration camps outside Lithuania or murdered locally” (“The Big Jewish Ghetto in Vilnius”). Vilner re-constructs fragments of the Jewish Quarter when he recalls what the place used to be and reflects on what it has become. Self-ironically, he regards the new uses of place—”cafes with umbrellas outside” instead of “the former paint shop,”35 a Lithuanian folk art gallery instead of a neighbour’s stocking shop, and, most importantly, a children’s nursery instead of the Great Synagogue—as the “proof of the existence of God, since only God, only a Jewish God could have such a refined sense of humour” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 84– 85).36 Samuel Vilner notes that the place looks “neat, new” but “foreign”: it is not the home that he came back to re-member (85). It is pertinent here to refer to Isaac Yuen’s claim that the meanings of “home and place” evolve from the way “we recall a location and how we relate to those flashes of connection [which] profoundly [shape] our relationship with space, things, and people” (“Place and Memory”). Vilner singles out specific places from the urban space. In his memory, each place is individualised, even personified in that it is associated exclusively with the inhabitant(s) of a particular place and their way of life. He finds it incomprehensible why the shutters of windows in the apartment where a member of the Jewish community, Lyuba, used to live are extensively decorated with flowers, whilst Lyuba “used to sneeze from the tiniest amount of pollen!” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 86).37 Even more surprising is the realisation that his “five star hotel”38 is in the house, where in one of the apart35 In the original: “Vietoj buvusios dazˇu˛ parduotuve˙s ant kampo – kavinuke˙s po ske˙cˇiais . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 119). 36 Original Lithuanian: “. . . ˛irodymas, kad dievas yra, nes tik dievas, tik zˇydisˇkas dievas gali ture˙ti toki˛ rafinuota˛ humoro jausma˛” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 118). 37 In the original: “. . . Liubos, kuri cˇiaude˙jo nuo mazˇiausios zˇiedadulke˙s!” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 119). 38 Original Lithuanian: “penkiu˛ zˇvaigzˇducˇiu˛ viesˇbutis” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 117).

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ments, his neighbour, Zelinsky, “had his sewing business and shop, although he did not do any sewing but mostly only patched clothes up” (83–84, 99).39 The implication here is that memory is not only material and selective, but it is also shaped by the intersubjective nature of identity, following Aleida Assmann (211–215). Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs, Assmann explains that “[m]emories . . . are built up, developed, and sustained in interaction, i. e., in social exchange with significant others” (213). Similar to Paul Connerton, Assmann states that “our personal memories are generated in a milieu of social proximity, regular interaction, common forms of life, and shared experiences” (213). She calls such memory forming out of intersubjective links social or collective memory, giving rise to collective identity, arising from self-identification with specific groups and “the respective ‘social frames’ which imply an implicit structure of shared concerns, values, experiences, narratives, and memories.” Each of the formed collective identities “is constructed through specific discourses that mark certain boundary lines and define respective principles of inclusion and exclusion” (223). During the return visit, when looking for traces of Jewish life in Vilnius before the Holocaust, Vilner relies on his own memory trying to remember a collective past. It is the only member of the former Vilnius Jewish community, Mishka Kaplan, a compatriot met in New York, with whom Vilner could discuss “the vanished world of Lithuanian Jews.”40 However, “even he [Mishka Kaplan] was dead” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 82). David, a young Jewish man who accompanies dialysis-dependent, aging Vilner from New York to Vilnius, is not a ‘significant other,’ in Assmann’s sense. As Vilner thinks to himself, he “is not paying his assistant a salary for him to understand the huge irony of fate, there is no need for him [Samuel Vilner] to want [David] to understand…” (86; ellipsis in the original).41 A ‘significant other’ of a different kind is Ernesta whom Vilner meets at an art exhibition in New York. The male protagonist perceives her as a missing link to Esther, a Jewish girl Samuel admired and who was lost in the Holocaust. The depiction of Ernesta as uncultured represents a stereotypical Western view of Eastern European women42 and the internalisation of such a view by Samuel Vilner. As Vilner focalises her, the goal of her coming to the United States is not 39 In the original: “. . . buvo senojo Zelinskio siuvykla ir kromelis, uzˇsiimdave˛s ne siuvimu, bet daugiausia tik lopymu” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 118). 40 The phrase “the vanished world of Lithuanian Jews” is from Alvydas Nikzˇentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, and Darius Staliu¯nas’s book with the same title. 41 In the original: “. . . betgi Samuelis Vilneris moka savo asistentui atlyginima˛ ne uzˇ didzˇiule˙s likimo ironijos supratima˛, ne˙ra ko nore˙t, kad Davidas suprastu˛…” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 119; ellipsis in the original). 42 For the discussion of this stereotype, see, e. g., Vedrana Velicˇkovic´ 128.

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studying art, as she claims it to be, but seeking “a better life” provided by a male suitor (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 76). Ernesta’s cultural identity is not rooted in her national culture. Like Gabija Grusˇaite˙’s female protagonist, the cosmopolitan Rugile˙, who perceives her country of origin as a source of stigmatisation, as discussed in Chapter 8, Ernesta speaks about the capital city of her homeland in a depreciative manner. She expects to impress her Western interlocutors as being more advanced than they would expect her to be, given the stereotypical perception of her homeland as backward. When Vilner asks her why she does not paint Vilnius as the famous painter Mstislav Dobuzhinsky did, she says dismissively: “Vilnius is not a city that inspires me. It’s not even a city. It’s a large village. There is nothing conceptual in it” (78).43 Ernesta’s conceptual art mediates the meanings she attaches to the attribute “conceptual.” In Vilner’s view, her works were “only amateur videos—a badly filmed fly desperately thrashing about endlessly in a closed glass jar” (78).44 Ernesta’s casual statements about Vilnius contrast the ‘social frames’, as per Assmann (223), within which Vilner places his Vilnius, and he thus stops seeing her. Yet, her art has a deconstructive effect on Vilner’s self-perception in relation to Vilnius and his traumatic past. He acknowledges that “the piece was probably in spite of everything oddly good if the impression it had induced had remained with him for so long” (78).45 Walking along German Street in Vilnius, Samuel Vilner sees a poster with “a gigantic enlarged fly in a glass jar” announcing Ernesta’s show, “Migrating Identities. New York–Vilnius,” on “the building, which is, it seems, an art exhibition centre,” erected “on the site of the former Jewish Savings Bank” (93).46 The exhibition centre is on the same street where Vilner, a fifteen-year-old boy then, treated Esther, “her mother and their maid” to water (92).47 Selling water to passers-by was his business which allowed him not only to earn a little income but also to feel the pulse of life in the Jewish Quarter. Given that—following Henri Lefebvre, urban space “is fashioned, shaped and invested by social activities 43 Original Lithuanian: “‘Vilnius man ne˙ra ˛ikvepiantis miestas. Net ne visai miestas. Tik didelis kaimas. Jame ne˙ra nieko konceptualaus’” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 115). 44 Original Lithuanian: “. . . mege˙jisˇki videofilmai – valandu˛ valandas negrabiai filmuota uzˇdarame stiklainyje desperatisˇkai besidauzˇanti muse˙” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 115). 45 Original Lithuanian: “. . . Ernestos mediju˛ videomuse˙ yra meno ku¯rinys, kur kas gilesnis ir reiksˇmingesnis, nei jam pasirode˙ isˇ pirmo zˇvilgsnio” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 115). 46 Original Lithuanian: “milzˇinisˇka isˇdidinta muse˙ stiklainyje”; “‘Migruojancˇios tapatybe˙s. Niujorkas−Vilnius’”; “Zˇydu˛ taupomojo kredito bankas”; “meno parodu˛ centras” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 122). 47 The original language is: “jos motinai ir ju˛ tarnaitei” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 122).

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during a finite historical period” imprinted with values predetermining ways of relating to the city as a constructed social space, influencing relations among the urbanites (73),—the changes in what used to be the Jewish Quarter encourage thoughts in Vilner about the pulse of Jewish life in Vilnius being stopped. Contemporary discourses on Jewish culture in the present-day Vilnius also tend to emphasise its demise in the city which had been “[k]nown as the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’” and, among other features of bustling cultural life, “home to 105 synagogues and six daily Jewish newspapers” (Miller). Throughout most of the story, Vilner sees the urban space in terms of rigid binaries of ‘us’/past and ‘them’/present, positioning ‘them’ as complicit in the events that led to the Jewish absence in the present-day capital and in the country. This thematic span is developed by referring to the culture of the city as a culture of death or as a culture disrespecting the dead. The former is observed in the episode when, looking for Jewish challah in a food store, Vilner grumbles: “What sort of town is this which keeps its bread like corpses in plastic bags? This is not the bread of Vilna, this is dead bread, the bread of the dead; bread has to breathe, to rejoice in the sun and the light, to shine with an egg yolk glaze on its crust!” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 95).48 The treatment of Lithuanian culture as disrespecting the dead is most explicit in the episode describing Mishka Kaplan’s return to the homeland and his impressions of it: He said that trip had been the biggest mistake of his life. He related some terrible stories—about cemeteries that had been levelled to the ground, about the headstones of Jewish graves used as stepping stones up a hill, on which there was a wedding registry office, built on another cemetery that had been destroyed, a Lutheran one. “Imagine a city in which if you want to marry you have to do that on Jewish headstones! Open up the champagne and dance the polka! . . . Could a normal person have thought that up? Only an animal and not a normal person could do that! Could that have happened in our day! What sort of town is that! One that does not respect its dead, Jewish or not!” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 79–80)49

48 In the original: “Kas cˇia per miestas, kuris savo duona˛ laiko kaip lavonus, polietileniniuose ˇ ia ne Vilniaus duona, cˇia – negyva duona, negyveliu˛ duona; duona turi kve˙puoti, maisˇuose? C dzˇiaugtis saule ir sˇviesa, blizge˙ti kiausˇinio tryniu nutepta pluta!” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 123−124). 49 In the original: “Sake˙, jog ta kelione˙ buvo didzˇiausia jo gyvenimo klaida. Jis pasakojo baisias istorijas – apie su zˇeme sulygintas kapines, apie isˇ zˇydu˛ antkapiu˛ pastatytus laiptus ˛i kalna˛, ant kurio – santuoku˛ registravimo biuras, ˛irengtas dar ant kitu˛, taip pat sunaikintu˛, liuteronisˇku˛ kapiniu˛. ‘I˛sivaizduok sau miesta˛, kuriame, jei nori susituokt, pirmiausia turi atsˇve˛st tai ant zˇydu˛ antkapiu˛! Atsikimsˇt sˇampana˛ ir pasˇokt polkute˛! . . . Argi normalus zˇmogus taip gale˙jo sugalvoti? Tik zˇve˙ris, o ne normalus zˇmogus! Argi mu¯su˛ laikais taip bu¯tu˛ gale˙je˛ nutikti? Tfu, kas per miestas! Negerbiantis net savo mirusiu˛, zˇydu˛ ar ne zˇydu˛!’” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 115−116).

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The latter example is based on historical evidence. During the soviet occupation of Lithuania, Jewish headstones were “used as building materials,” including construction of staircases (Miller; see also Parasonis). According to Laimonas Briedis, such destructive acts were an outcome of forgetfulness that pervaded the atmosphere of Vilnius at the time. The soviet history of the city was limited to national, soviet, and international topics, used as soviet propaganda, intended to quench all interest in the pre-soviet past. In essence, many of the relics of the past were either censored or destroyed, so that the new—soviet Vilnians—including those relocated to Lithuania from Russia as part of the russification policy, would remain focused on their everyday life and would not seek to understand their link with the former (dead) citizens of the city (Briedis 268).50 “The Return of Samuel Vilner” takes an unexpected twist towards the end of the narrative. The failure to return to some intact and unaltered urban landscape triggers a turn from confrontational discourse to a dialogic one. In contemporary memory and political studies, such a move is referred to as “the agonistic approach” informed by “agonistic memory.” With reference to Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, Shauna Robertson summarises this approach as “reject[ing] the desirability of developing a single overarching narrative of the past.” Rather, the aim is “to acknowledge, and to work through, a variety of contrasting memories of the past.” A non-antagonistic approach to memory “promotes a radical approach allowing for multiple perspectives and is open to a dialogue with ‘the other,’ a dialogue which it sees in open-ended terms without assuming it can lead to consensus” (Robertson). In “The Return of Samuel Vilner,” an attempt to include the perspective of the ‘other’ can be discerned in the episode, when revisiting his memories of what he had to endure struggling to survive after he had escaped from the ghetto, Vilner acknowledges that he was “fortunate that he managed to get to British Palestine, and from there to New York” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 103). Those who stayed in the soviet-occupied country could have only two destinies: to be a slave or a slave master. Or to be someone who obediently without any questions builds stairs from the grave stones of strangers, and if a person were not to obey, he himself would end up in a grave. One was either a victim or an executioner. Kaplan was right, a system like that could only have been thought up by a wild animal and not a human being. (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 102–103)51

50 Quoted with minor adaptations from the original: Laimonas Briedis, Vilnius: savas ir svetimas (2010). 51 Original Lithuanian: “Juk po karo, prie sovietu˛, zˇmogui buvo tik du likimai: arba bu¯ti vergu, arba vergu˛ prizˇiu¯re˙toju. Arba bu¯ti tuo, kuris neklausdamas klusniai isˇ svetimu˛ antkapiu˛ stato laiptus, o jei nepaklu¯sta, pats atsiduria kape. Arba auka, arba budelis. Kaplanas buvo teisus,

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This marks a turning point in the story in that its meanings become to be invested in the perceptions of those who experienced life under occupations. Vilner remembers what it was like when Vilnius was restored to Lithuania in 1939 after twenty years of Polish occupation. He recalls that this led to bankruptcy of his “water business,” that the change of government affected the economic life of Vilnians—“[o]ver night the inhabitants of Vilna—it did not matter if they were Poles, Jews or Old Believers—became three times poorer” (105)52—and that when Lithuanians “came into Vilnius they could not converse with anyone in Lithuanian… They all imagined that the people speaking behind their backs in a language they did not understand were being disparaging and trying to swindle them, and they behaved with anyone as if they were their enemies, even if they wished the Lithuanians no harm” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 105–106; ellipsis in the original).53 Absence of conversation/intercultural dialogue, as the quotation above shows, generates hostility. Identifying with his own experience of return to independent Lithuania after the fifty-year long soviet occupation, Vilner understandands that, when Lithuanians regained Vilnius from Poland, “[t]hey had hoped to return to their legendary capital of Lithuania, to return home, but they saw there was almost nothing Lithuanian there” (106).54 Vilner considers that, then in 1939, “the city was foreign to them [Lithuanians]”; “it did not speak their language and when addressed it did not reply”; “it lived engrossed in its own affairs, and was not welcoming” (106).55 When Vilner starts looking at Vilnius taking into consideration the country’s history of occupations, he starts to see the changes in the city as an outcome of historical contingencies and enactments of power rather than an unspecified ill-will. If viewed from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre’s treatment of place as social space, Samuel’s response to the city seems to foreground conceived space, which is the order that is ascribed to places by city planners and institutions of power (38–39). He tries to understand the role of history in the changing the city. What causes Samuel’s frustration is the inability

52 53

54 55

sˇitokia˛ sistema˛ gale˙jo sugalvoti tik zˇve˙ris, ne zˇmogus” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 127). Original Lithuanian: “Pernakt vilnietis – nesvarbu, lenkas, zˇydas ar sentikis – triskart nuskurdo . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “ Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 128). Original Lithuanian: “. . . atgave˛ savo legendine˛ sostine˛, atvazˇiave˛ joje negale˙jo susisˇneke˙ti lietuvisˇkai… Vis jiems atrode˙, kad uzˇ nugaru˛ ˇsnekantys jiems nesuprantama kalba juos apkalba ir bando apgauti, su visais elge˙si kaip su priesˇais, net jei tie nieko bloga ir nelinke˙jo” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 128; ellipsis in the original). Original Lithuanian: Jie tike˙josi sugri˛zˇti ˛i legendine˛ savo Lietuvos sostine˛, sugri˛zˇti namo, o pamate˙, kad ten nieko lietuvisˇka beveik ne˙ra . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 128). Original Lithuanian: “[Jie jaute˙] kad miestas jiems svetimas, ne˙ nekalba ju˛ kalba ir sˇaukiamas neatsako, gyvena sau uzˇsie˙me˛s savais reikalais, ju˛ ne˙ nelaukdamas” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 128).

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to re-experience what Lefebvre calls the lived space, which is the individual/actual use of spaces and the personal and collective/cultural meanings associated with them (37–39). Therefore, he cannot have the same mental and sensory experiences, persisting in his memory of the “old Vilna” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 97). Neither ca he re-connect to the recognisable social spaces created by the users of the city at the time (cf. Lefebvre 233, 39). Reverting to Paul Connerton’s emphasis on materiality of memory which can be sustained by participating in “recollection” activities, “treated as cultural rather than individual” embodied practices involving people sharing similar mental and sensory experiences (4–5),56 one can read the ending of the story as Vilner’s succumbing to the realisation that, for him, none of such preconditions exist. Nevertheless, “dream without any logic to it is what keeps a person grasping on to life” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 107).57 This reflection and soul searching that the reader is privy to highlight the irony of Samuel’s life: his belief in the dream and his conviction that dreams best remain as dreams. The irony of this is not lost on Samuel as he begins to see at the end of the narrative that “the dream has gone” (107).58 The ultimate sentence in the story tells us that he clings to the most personal of his memories—“the memory of how he had once satisfied [Esther’s] thirst”: “Now there is only the memory of water and its sweet, sweet taste in the mouth, and the feeling of how the cold water travels down the throat into the stomach and spreads along the arteries throughout the whole body, and the sound of the fountain fading into the distance…” (107; ellipsis in the original).59 By investing the memory with the aquatic symbolism and situating it within the context of basic human physiology, Samuel divests his memory of any social meanings thus breaking a connection between the remembered and the social world. This connection loses its importance, as the final reverie not only connotes the demise of Samuel’s dream but also of Samuel himself, perhaps even to death. By recounting the story of his past and his return visit to the homeland, Samuel also narrates identities of those who are part of the narrative. According to Kai Erikson, trauma survivors “are drawn to others similarly marked” (187). 56 Like Paul Connerton, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson hold that memory is embodied; it is founded on sensory perceptions whose meanings derive from their specific social and ideological contexts across diverse categories, such as social, economic, corporeal, and political (Smith and Watson 11). 57 Original Lithuanian: “. . . svajone˙ be jokios logikos laike˙ ji˛ pririsˇusi prie gyvenimo” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 129). 58 Original Lithuanian: “nebeliko svajone˙s” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 129). 59 Original Lithuanian: “Liko tik prisiminimas apie tai, kaip jis karta˛ numalsˇino jos trosˇkuli˛. Dabar yra tik prisiminimas apie vandeni˛ ir jo saldu˛ skoni˛ burnoje, vis saldesni˛ ir saldesni˛, ir jausma˛, kaip sˇaltas vanduo gerkle teka ˛i skrandi˛ ir plinta gyslele˙mis po visa˛ku¯na˛, fontanas vis tyla ir tolsta” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 129).

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By sharing perspectives on the causes of trauma and its effects on personal and collective planes, they reveal the specificity of their experience resulting in not only “a changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to others” but also in “a changed worldview” (Erikson 186–194). In addition to this heuristic nature of sharing, there is an affective one: people who have endured similar traumatic events “can supply a human context and a kind of emotional solvent in which the work of recovery can begin” (187). In this regard, situating “The Return of Samuel Vilner” within the framework of the return narrative—of which sharing of memories/individual perspectives is a part—aligns it with what has been described above as agonistic approach to memory and to dealing with contested truths. Within this approach, perspectives of those who had different roles in particular historical events are included “in order to understand the historical and sociopolitical contexts and passions” behind their actions (Robertson). Such a stance, then, makes it possible to (re)assess “the contexts and passions that foster democratic institutions and processes, considering how these are culturally constructed and how they can be transformed” (Robertson).60 Accordingly, situating Vilner’s account of his reactions to the city within the discourse of an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ oppositional duality may be seen as a way of exposing a collective identity formed by discourses accentuating divisions rather than seeking solutions. The words of a historian and a Holocaust scholar, Saulius Suzˇiede˙lis, on the tragic fate of the Lithuanian Jews and the question of Lithuania’s involvement in the Holocaust deserve special mention here. He states that “What matters is not spotless but truthful history” (qtd. in Vitkus). Suzˇiede˙lis’s statement denounces the denial of Lithuania’s involvement in the Holocaust. He also explains the historical circumstances which had complicated the recognition (Vitkus; also Suzˇiede˙lis, Historical Dictionary of Lithuania 126–128; Suzˇiede˙lis, “The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” 103–116; Karn 127–153). The reasons complicating dealing with Holocaust-related issues in Lithuania are listed by Emanuelis Zingeris, “a scholar specialising in Lithuania’s Jewish history,” a member of the Lithuanian Parliament, and a member of “The International Comission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (Karn 130) —not to mention his other important contribution to the field. Zingeris provides insight into this complex issue. As reported by Alexander Karn, Zingeris asks “whether ‘five decades of Hitlerine indoctrination, suffocating Soviet silence, fact

60 In her review of Gintare˙ Malinauskaite˙’s book Mediated Memories: Narratives and Iconographies of the Holocaust in Lithuania, Violeta Davoliu¯te˙ states that “strategies for the interrogation of contested pasts shift from an outdated model of consensus and reconciliation to more realistic models of agonistic memory” (264).

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manipulation, [and] absence of open discussions’ can be overcome in just one generation” (Zingeris qtd. in Karn 140). Kristina Sabaliauskaite˙’s multi-voiced narrative may be seen as a form of emplotment into the ongoing effort to contribute to the probing into ‘truth’ in uncovering the history of the Holocaust. Her literary endeavour entwines with the search for new forms of representing trauma, memory, postmemory and fact in fiction and nonfiction about the Holocaust (Hirsch [2012]; King [2000]; Wilhelm [2017]; Munté [2011]). Christine Berberich states that “Holocaust Fiction is . . . moving away from the sanctioned narrative” which has been called “‘Holocaust piety.’” Recently, literary works in different genres have been published: Holocaust comedies; Holocaust perpetrator fiction; Holocaust fiction that openly questions the relationship between history and memory, and history and narrative. It is important to highlight that these are not acts of commemorative sabotage. These works do not question the Holocaust, nor do they doubt the importance of remembering. What they do challenge is an over-simplified, ritualised, unreflective act of remembering merely for the sake of remembering. What these works of literature seek to do is to find new and meaningful ways of engagement with the past that make their readers think and reflect. (Berberich; emphasis in the original)

Using the focalising character, Samuel Vilner, Sabaliauskaite˙’s story narrativises the experience of different ethnic groups under specific sociohistorical circumstances. Essentially, the story exposes prevailing views existing in real life among those ethnic groups on reasons of ethnic frictions. The reasons can be explained with reference to “a general definition of ethnicity” as “the subjective affiliation to an ethnic group having cultural commons, for instance language and tradition” as well as “shar[ing] historical and actual experiences and ideas of common descent which create the basis of a particular awareness of identity and solidarity” (Klinke et al., ch. 1). However, it is not these categories that create “the actual differences . . . but rather the insistence of group members, or outsiders, on stressing such differences and making them relevant in interaction” (Eriksen qtd. in Klinke et al., ch. 1). In “Return of Samuel Vilner” just as in the other two stories of Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna, there is hardly any communication among members of the represented ethnic groups or even within the ethnic groups. When Samuel Vilner cannot connect with anyone, he remembers his conversation with his fellow Litvak, Mishka Kaplan, whose return journey gave him a negative impression of the shift in the values and culture of Vilnius. He said that even the Jews who “‘are left and even if you meet one—it’s not one of our Jews’” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 79).61 The perception of members of the same ethnic group as

61 Original Lithuanian: “‘Kartais viskas atrodo lyg ir taip pat, bet isˇ tikru˛ju˛, ten visai kitas

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different recalls Kai Erikson’s statement that “when the community is profoundly affected, one can speak of a damaged social organism in almost the same way that one would speak of a damaged body” (188). In “The Return of Samuel Vilner,” foregrounding the idea of Vilnius as “a damaged social organism” draws attention to the social and political contingencies behind the damage. Vilner only partly spells them out. The causalities emerge out of reading the three stories as a cycle. Differently from Vilner’s rigid understanding of belonging to the ethnic group in terms of shared language, religion, cultural traditions and history, Samuel’s assistant David, a young Jewish man, looks at the foreign culture beyond ethnic distinctions. When Samuel becomes very upset with the way bread is kept in a food store, David thinks that this does not have much to do with cultural differences, but with the fact that “Vilner had not set foot in any food store now for twenty years, or perhaps even longer” because his food is “prepared at home by a chef” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 94).62 David just listens but does respond to Vilner’s comments on the foreignness of the city, suggesting his openness for change and fluidity about understanding difference. The idea that contemporary life in Vilnius contains both figures from the past, Samuel Vilner, and the bedridden former soviet fonctionnaire, and characters such as the cashier who angers Vilner by referring to the Jewish word challah as slang (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” 96–97), the artist, Ernesta, who does not tie her identity to any culture, and the revenge seeking nurse aligns the second two texts, “The Return of Samuel Vilner” and “The Weathervanes of Vilnius,” in their emphasis on immovable and differing perspectives. The first text, “Franco’s Black Pearls,” just as the other two texts, shows the same mode of engagement with history—reflection in retrospect on the history of an ethnic group as experienced by individual characters. “Franco’s Black Pearls” depicts the secret lives and passions of the young innocent Polish-speaking students in Poland-occupied Vilnius and shows how their life changes when Vilnius is restored to Lithuania, and how their hopes and dreams are then broken as the German occupation takes over. The story ends with the narrator’s contemplation of the fates of these young Polish women. The inexplicit ending suggests that some of them may have escaped the tyranny of the invasion. In calling to mind the desecration and appropriation of the churches of Vilnius, the story plays with the notion that the frescos in these churches, like the innocence of the girls at Queen Jadwiga’s School have been made ambiguous in their representation of virtue. The story opens by re-presenting Vilnius as a contested space: miestas. Isˇ ano nieko nebelike˛. Net ir zˇydu˛ beveik nebelike˛, jeigu koks dar ir pasitaiko – tai visai ne mu¯sisˇkis zˇydas” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas’” 115). 62 Original Lithuanian: “. . . Vilneris jau dvidesˇimt metu˛, o gal net ir daugiau, ne˙ra kojos ˛ike˙le˛s ˛i jokia˛maisto prekiu˛ parduotuve˛, tad ko nore˙ti isˇ zˇmogaus, kuriam namuose vire˙jo pagamintas valgis atnesˇamas ant sidabrinio pade˙klo?” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilnerio sugri˛zˇimas” 124).

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If you were to ask someone in Vilnius today where Queen Jadwiga’s School is—no one would even know what you were talking about. The only royal things left in today’s Vilnius are King Mindaugas Bridge and the monument next to it, commemorating Lithuania’s only crowned king. . . . But nobody would have heard of Queen Jadwiga’s School. . . . Queen Jadwiga’s girls’ high school before World War II was in a building marked with the number 19 on St Anne’s Street. By the way, no one today will be able to show you St Anne’s Street either. Nor will you find it on a map of the city. Not unless you had a special map—of a completely different Vilnius that has disappeared and is no longer visible. A ghostly map of Wilno in which only dead souls reside. A city with the Bristol and George hotels, with all three Sztrall cafés—the White, the Green and the Red, the Pohulanka and the White Pillars, formerly marking an entry into Wilno, the Jewish Credit Bank, located with the real Wilno irony in German Street, Stefan Batory University and its students wearing their velvet caps. (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Franco’s Black Pearls” 17–18)63

The conspiratorial second person voice alerts the reader to the existence of “a completely different Vilnius that has disappeared and is no longer visible” beneath the cityscape of the present-day Vilnius. Yet, evidence of this earlier version of the city does exist, and can be found, but only on condition the reader “had a special map,” referred to as “[a] ghostly map of Wilno in which only dead souls reside” (18). The issues in focus illustrate a situation when cultural identity is stronly linked to territoriality. Specifically, the story illustrates a situation when, as argued by Berberich, Campbell, and Hudson, “an understanding of territoriality . . . underpinned national identity and the nation state. And this emphasis on territorial nationalism has often resulted in armed conflict” (29). Sabaliauskaite˙ exposes the dispute over Vilnius, which in popular discourse is frequently imbued with ironic overtones reiterated in the story. The reader is provoked, as it were, to take sides in response to the narrator’s comment that “[i]f you were to ask someone in Vilnius today where Queen Jadwiga’s School is—no one would even know what you were talking about” (17).

63 In the original: “Jeigu sˇiandien Vilniuje ko nors paklausite, kur yra Karaliene˙s Jadvygos mokykla – niekas ne˙ nezˇinos apie ka˛ kalbate. Vieninte˙liai karalisˇki dalykai sˇiandienos Vilniuje yra Karaliaus Mindaugo tiltas ir sˇalia jo esantis paminklas. . . . Bet Karaliene˙s Jadvygos mokyklos niekas nebus girde˙je˛s. . . . Vilnietisˇkoji Karaliene˙s Jadvygos mergaicˇiu˛ gimnazija iki Antrojo pasaulinio karo buvo devynioliktu numeriu pazˇyme˙tame name, Sˇventosios Onos gatve˙je. Beje, Sˇventosios Onos gatve˙s jums sˇiandien irgi niekas neparodys. Ir ju¯s jos nerasite miesto plane. Nebent ture˙tume˙te ypatinga˛ miesto plana˛ – visisˇkai kito Vilniaus, dingusio ir nematomo. Vaiduoklisˇko Vilniaus plana˛, kuriame gyvena tik mirusios sielos. Miesto su “Bristolio” ir “Zˇorzˇo” viesˇbucˇiais, visais trimis – Baltuoju, Zˇaliuoju ir Raudonuoju – “Sˇtraliais,” Pohulianka ir Baltaisiais Stulpais, Zˇydu˛ kredito banku, su tikra vilnietisˇka ironija ˛isitaisiusiu Vokiecˇiu˛ galtve˙je, su Stepono Batoro universitetu ir jo studentais aksomine˙m kepure˙le˙m” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Juodieji Franko perlai” 7−8).

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The story seems to aim to recuperate what has been erased in the mapping of the present-day Vilnius. As Henri Lefebvre tells us, maps not only inform their users about the visibility of physical places. Given that “spaces are produced” in places by institutions/agents with a different degree of power and by individual users, maps “embod[y] and impl[y] particular social relations” (83–84; emphasis in the original). In Sabaliauskaite˙’s story the references to the geography of the Polish Vilnius signal that the story considers the social relations/culture and identities “before times have changed” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Franco’s Black Pearls” 18). The story is very explicit that the change of times is univocally related to change of culture. Vilnius becomes inhabited by people “for whom priests have become more important than saints and for that reason St Anne’s Street is now called Maironis Street after the priest Maironis; the name of the Holy Queen Jadwiga has disappeared from the map and from the memory together with the high school . . .” (18).64 Since the marriage of Queen Jadwiga of Poland to Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1386 “embodies the union of Lithuania and Poland” (Rowell 137), the disappearance of the girls’ school, named after the Polish queen in the reclaimed Vilnius, is regarded as one more sign of dissociation from common LithuanianPolish history and Polish culture. Queen Jadwiga’s public school existed in Vilnius between 1926 and 1939 within the premises of the Congregation of Daughters of Our Lady of Mercy, committed to providing service in education, including education in Christianity, and providing social help (Jarocka). As depicted in “Franco’s Black Pearls,” school discipline is strict, the “ten-year-olds” are “wound as tight as piano strings” (19).65 The story foregrounds the girls’ innocence as foreshadowing of its loss and the inevitable demise of all things in the end. As the narrator ironically puts it, “[a]s with many things in Vilnius,”66 innocence is just an impeccable façade represented by the schoolgirls, “still in truth real angels—singing in their heavenly voices under the direction of the school chaplain to Marshal Piłsudski” (23, 19).67 When, as a sign of appreciation, Marshal Piłsudski “smiles and even strokes [the] cheek” of the shy solo singer in the girls’ choir, Jadwiga, a thought crosses her mind that she “in general does not

64 In the original: “. . . ate˙jo laikai ir zˇmone˙s, kuriems kunigai tapo svarbesni uzˇ sˇventuosius, tad Sˇventosios Onos gatve˙ pervadinta ˛i kunigo Maironio, sˇventoji karaliene˙ Jadvyga isˇnyko isˇ zˇeme˙lapio ir atminties kartu su gimnazija . . . ” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Juodieji Franko perlai” 8). 65 In the original: “desˇimtmete˙s, ˛isitempusios kaip stygos” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Juodieji Franko perlai” 8). 66 Original Lithuanian: “Kaip ir daugelis dalyku˛ Vilniuje . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Juodieji Franko perlai” 10). 67 In the original: “. . . dar isˇ tiesu˛ tikri angele˙liai – mokyklos kapeliono diriguojamos gieda angelisˇkais balsais pacˇiam marsˇalui Pilsudskiui . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Juodieji Franko perlai” 8).

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like being touched by strangers, marshals or not” (23, 20; emphasis added).68 The story develops as growing out of innocence with the reader being included in the secrecy of the girls’ sexual awakening and privy to the fine-drawn and complex dynamics within their families and community. A secondary theme is women’s position in society, if also explored by way of the anecdotal commentary, using the girls’ teacher, a nun, who instructs them in the correct social behaviours expected of young women and, simultaneously, providing them hints on how to bypass social standards. Although religion is shown to have a moral authority, the reader can discern this coming from distinct sources. For the nun, the rules of virtue are driven from a place of fear for one’s safety. The archbishop’s edict to Jadwiga’s father, “the curia’s barber,” that his wages will be reduced because his daughter dropped out of school to get married exude the degree of authority of religion at that time (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Franco’s Black Pearls” 31, 29–30). However, the war conditions the demise of the archbishop’s power, and the evidence of his suffering is such that even Jadwiga, whose family suffered at his hands, found it “no longer possible to be angry with him” (53).69 Just as Sabaliauskaite˙’s story uncovers the hidden Polish culture allegedly overlaid by Lithuanian culture, it also attempts to reclaim important facts about Lithuania that remain unmentioned in Polish sources. The story includes the character Faustyna, “a poor nun cook of the Merciful Mother of God sisterhood” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Franco’s Black Pearls” 32).70 Faustyna is the character based on the historical figure of “St Faustina Kowalska . . . beatified on April 18, 1993, and canonised on April 30, 2000” (“St Faustina Kowalska”). However, what St Faustina’s biographies “fail to mention (perhaps intentionally) is that she spent her most interesting, creative, and productive spiritual years in Vilnius” (Gintautas). Continuing with the idea that in Vilnius “first impressions are often deceptive” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Franco’s Black Pearls” 19),71 Faustyna is treated as litmus test to gauge the truthfulness of mercy advocated by the nuns in Queen Jadwiga’s School. As the narrator puts it, “[t]hey, the nuns from good families, are really not at all merciful” (32).72 The nuns make jokes of Faustyna’s prophesies 68 In the original: “. . . Pilsudskis nusisˇypso ir net paglosto skruosteli˛. [Jadvyga] apskritai neme˙gsta, kai ja˛ liecˇia nepazˇ˛istami, marsˇalai ar ne marsˇalai . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Juodieji Franko perlai” 8). 69 In the original: “. . . ant jo tiesiog nebegalima buvo jau pykti . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 22). 70 In the original: “. . . vargsˇ[e˙] Gailestingosios Dievo Motinos seserijos vienuol[e˙] vire˙j[a] . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 14). 71 In the original: “. . . cˇia Vilnius, pirmas ˛ispu¯dis cˇia dazˇnai apgaulingas” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 8). 72 In the original: “Jos, panele˙s vienuole˙s isˇ geru˛ ˇseimu˛, tikrai negailestingos” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 14).

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and apparitions of “our Lord,” whereas “the Vatican . . . recommends that she undergo psychiatric examination” which reveals that she is “of completely sound mind” (32–33).73 Still, it is not clear whether any of the characters takes seriously Faustyna’s prophesy about the soon approaching World War II. That the spirituality of Faustina was tested for sanity is based on biographical facts (“St Faustina”). The story ends on a revelation that the atrocious historical events the Vilnians had to deal with make one realise that “nationality becomes meaningless and only human beings are left, only good and evil remain, memory and pain, but at the end that fades away, even the memories fade away” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Franco’s Black Pearls” 51).74 What is brought to the fore is that belonging, and bonding is based on values, not on national or ethnic characteristics. The ending details that Jadwiga will hate until her dying day the zealous doctor not because he is a Lithuanian but because he validated her being sent to a forced labour camp in Germany (49). Saving lives of Vilnians by an Austrian man, an officer of the German army, will remain as manifestations of goodness even if personal details about him fade away. And the story of Zorika-Zos´ka, who falls in love with a man introducing himself as General Franco’s nephew and gives her what he calls heirloom black pearls, will congeal into a cautionary tale of romantic illusions (51). In considering the connection between these stories, it is of comparable interest to consider the order of these narratives. In “Franco’s Black Pearls” the reader is invited into a Wilno on the cusp of change. Even with the threat of war and invasion, the tenacity and zest for life of the young students cannot be denied. Indeed, the shadow of war is used as an inspiration and an opening for exploration and self-discovery. Through recounting these insights, the reader gets to share in a Wilno that has for all intent and purpose disappeared and turned to dust, as described in the final sentence of the story. In doing so Sabaliauskaite˙ creates a bond, and relationship with the reader as reflected in her choice of second-person voice to give a conspiratorial overtone. It is this overtone that helps to reflect the mood of the Wilno of this story, for it is a time of liaisons, a time of secrecy and confidentiality. The two nuns, one acting as the authority of moral behaviour and sexual relations, and the other prophesising the coming of war, give the reader a deeper understanding of the context in which the story takes place. As characters related to themes of morality, spirituality, and survival they also share a synergy in their foreshadowing of the imminent threat to the safety and wellbeing—both moral and physical—that the changing times will bring. In equal 73 Continuous text in the original: “. . . Vatikanas neme˙gsta, ir tode˙l paskiria tai Faustinai medicinine˛ psichiatrine˛ ekspertize˛” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 14). ˇ ia isˇnyksta tautybe˙s ir lieka tik zˇmone˙s, lieka tik ge˙ris ir blogis, atmintis ir 74 In the original: “C nuoskaudos, bet galu˛ gale isˇnyksta ir jos, isˇnyksta net patys atsiminimai” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 22).

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measure in “The Return of Samuel Vilner,” this truth of the shift in the values and culture of Vilnius is made clear by way the urban reality reveals to Samuel Vilner how far he is removed from his contemporary Vilnius—one that he cannot connect with on his return. In the third story of the short story cycle, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius,” the juxtaposition of its tightly set scene against the wide expanses of the previous somewhat expository text adds tension and urgency. The reader is faced with another vulnerable older man who, in a bedridden state, is more indisposed than Samuel Vilner. The former soviet fonctionnaire is possibly even dying; one who also looks back on his life in Vilnius. This time, however, rather than a deliberate choice to revisit the past, the former inquisitor is forced to reflect on his actions and the impact he himself had on former Vilnius, and Vilnians. Sabaliauskaite˙’s rendering of atrocities during the communist occupation in Vilnius through the voice of the old man as justifiable means to the end is made starker by the assertion that the former soviet supporter desires for “The Truth”75 and for the success of the “Soviet Man”76 (Sabaliauskaite˙, “The Weathervanes of Vilnius” 138). From the fonctionnaire’s perspective his actions were defendable and rational. The question as to how or why such acts of violence and human rights violations were sustained during this period are addressed through this use of the old man’s point of view to present an acceptable Devil’s advocate. With only thirty years having passed since the end of this troubled time it is hardly surprising that Sabaliauskaite˙ chooses to handle current sensitivities and ongoing anguish about the occupation and crimes against humanity in this carefully constructed distant manner. Propounding the communist party lines through this use of the old man’s point of view allows the reader access to ways of thinking that are plausible for an executive of the soviet regime. Furthermore, the stories invite a comparison of the same events to juxtapose one and the others, and to consider the diverse historical facts alluded to in the texts. For example, the history of Vilnius Jews filtered through the perspective of the returnee Samuel Vilner is supplemented by the description of the former soviet KGB agent living in a flat which implicitly belonged to a Jewish family. The impossibility of a dialogue in “The Return of Samuel” is juxtaposed to positive relations with Jews in pre-war Vilnius, as suggested in the episode when a Jewish woman donates a school uniform to Jadwiga, the central character in “Franco’s Black Pearls.” Samuel Vilner’s irritation of seeing the church being overshadowed by “some kind of curved concrete bunker” erected in place of “former palaces

75 Original Lithuanian: “Tiesa” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 136). 76 Original Lithuanian: “Tarybinis zˇmogus” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 146).

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and townhouses of the magnates” (90) 77 links to former soviet agent’s plans to uproot the culture of the ‘old’ Vilnius so that the soviet indoctrination could put down roots. The destructive effects of the soviet regime become most pronounced at the end of “Franco’s Black Pearls” when the narrator says that “with the passage of years the reproach” to the extinguishing of tradition became “less and less sharp” (54).78 Each twist, turn and revelation in the three stories draws the reader further into internal wranglings of how one might qualify Vilnius and the identity positions encoded in its social spaces. Sabaliauskaite˙’s creation of multiple characters helps to show that the answer is that there is no one way to understand Vilnius, that its complexity over time and the influence from so many external forces brings new meanings and unique perspectives, and that these different voices cannot come easily to an agreement in their understanding of each other. With such a disjointed view of what Vilnius is and how its landscape is seen throughout time, Sabaliauskaite˙’s short story cycle guides readers to read the multiple sites of identification revealed in the stories as underscoring the idea that matters of identity are necessarily multiple—whether looked at from outside or from within the nation. As Paul Connerton states, “[t]he narrative of one’s life is part of interconnecting sets of narratives; it is embedded in the story of those groups from which individuals derive their identity” (21). Sabaliauskaite˙’s texts highlight the interconnectedness of these groups, hence their narratives, feeding into the narrative of Vilnius as a physical place and a social space. Exposing different perspectives on and in this locality, Sabaliauskaite˙’s texts invite a reading that takes into consideration issues raised by Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson in their discussion of the relationship between place and identity: “[h]ow we feel about place”; “how we define ourselves in relation to landscape”; and “how we respond to others’ sense of these complex attachments” (18). It is this relationship between self and other that is central in the understanding of the dialogic in the preceding chapters of this volume intended to open a window to culture79 as represented in selected literary texts. The texts are envisioned not only as mediating culture but also as being embedded in multiple dialoguing discourses.80 The identities evolving in these texts underscore the 77 Continuous text in the original: “. . . vietoj grazˇiu˛ju˛ buvusiu˛ magnatu˛ namu˛ – kazˇoks lenktas betoninis bunkeris” (Sabaliauskaite˙, “Vilniaus ve˙trunge˙s” 121). 78 In the original: “. . . metams be˙gant vis blysˇkesni priekaisˇtai ir vis blysˇkesne˙s freskos . . .” (Sabaliauskaite˙ “Juodieji Franko perlai” 22). 79 The reference here is to “Literature as Windows to World Cultures Series,” e. g., Doughlas Killam, Literature of Africa (2004). 80 The idea draws on Stuart Hall’s concept of representation as construction of meaning by signifying relations among objects in the real world, concepts, and signs through repre-

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multiple facets of Lithuanian identity not just as a general characteristic of (national cultural) identity but also pinpoint differences from within. These identities have been discussed as discursive constructs diversified by historical contingencies and cultural categories, such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, and social position, among others (cf., Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 53). The argument along such lines acquires an added significance in light of Sara Upstone’s statement that, because of the discursive nature of identity and “the imagined status of the nation . . . as a form of social and textual affiliation,” literature “as a fundamental part of a cultural imaginary . . . has a potential to contribute to political outcomes” (45). This transforming potential of literature is most appealing at the present time regarding the instabilities and threats unseen by the world since World War Two (e. g., Wike et al.). Literature, then, as a form of cultural imaginary opens a space for the analysis of culture within which the intersubjective formation of identity and search for truth(s) take place. As textual space where historical contingencies and identities are re-imagined, literature can become an important repository feeding into “a political memory.” Aleida Assman defines it as “a mediated memory [residing] in material media, symbols and practices which have to be engrafted into the hearts and minds of individuals” to shape their identities in terms of inclusion and exclusion, in many cases with respect to history of specific groups. Otherwise stated, “[h]istory turns into memory when it is transformed into forms of shared knowledge and collective identification and participation” (Assman 216). Belonging in terms of discursively constructed categories is not without its perils. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism, Sara Upstone holds that this “ground breaking” work “asks us to consider how entire identities might be constructed through cultural imaginaries.” Such identities exist “not in reality but rather in a complex matrix of cultural representations that over time cement them into what appears a tangible presence” (45). To avoid entanglement in such fixed categories, stimulating oppositional thinking, the chapters in the present volume invite the reader to consider that, to quote Jonathan Culler, “the value of literature has long been linked to the vicarious experiences it gives readers, enabling them to know how it feels to be in particular situations and thus to acquire dispositions to act and feel in certain ways” (111). Literature, thus, can help to develop a fresh look on how discourses and historical contexts sentational systems. Representation, according to Hall, “functions less like a model of a oneway transmitter and more like the model of a dialogue—it is, as they say, dialogic” (10; emphasis in the original). The dialogue unfolds as interplay of competing discourses as sources of knowledge and definitions of social practices. Simultaneously, discourses as “language for talking about . . . a particular topic at a particular historical moment” reflect on cultural codes and discursively regulated practices in the sociocultural context, which are reconstructed in the systems of representation (44).

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shape modes of dialogue and identity, and, by implication, the understanding of belonging. Given that the word ‘dialogue’ originates from the Greek “verb dialegomai, which means to become involved in a conversation with another” (Peters and Besley 670), the present analysis has considered selected Lithuanian literary texts in dialogue on contested truths to emphasise their multidimensionality. This latter aspect has been behind the idea of dialogue underlined in the chapters of the volume (Inter)cultural Dialogue and Identity in Lithuanian Literature.

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List of Contributors

Adelheid Rundholz is a native of Cologne, Germany. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and in Romance Languages and Literatures (French). Her research interests are literature of migration, novel, literary theory, world literature, aesthetics and language, comparative literature, and translation. She has numerous publications and participates in many conferences both in the United States and in Europe. Vijole˙ Visˇomirskyte˙ is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of Lithuanian Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Her research interests include (post)modern narrative poetics, literary strategies of contemporary Lithuanian literature, literary representations of the city (Kaunas). She is the author of Antano Sˇke˙mos teksto strategija ([Antanas Sˇke˙ma’s Textual Strategy] Kaunas: Vytauto Didzˇiojo universiteto leidykla, 2004). Her recent publications are on transgressive strategies in the contemporary Lithuanian novel, and on allegory, temporality and narrative in Kristijonas Donelaitis’s long poem Metai (The Seasons). Kristina Aurylaite˙ teaches at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literature and Translation Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, teaching courses on media and literature, literary translation, British and Canadian literature. Her research interests include contemporary Canadian and Indigenous literature, artistic decolonial practices, and digital and conceptual writing. Ru¯ta Eidukevicˇiene˙ is Associate Professor in German Literature and Culture at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. After completion of her PhD studies at the University of Saarland, Germany, she has worked as a visiting professor at the universities of Saarland and Heidelberg. Her research interests include contemporary German literature, comparative literature and cultural studies. Major publications include Von Kaunas bis Klaipe˙da: deutsch-jüdischlitauisches Leben entlang der Memel (Fernwald: Litblockin, 2007, coedited with

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List of Contributors

Monika Bukantaite˙-Klees), Interkulturelle Aspekte der deutsch-litauischen Wirtschaftskommunikation (München: Iudicium, 2014, coedited with Antje Johanning-Radzˇiene˙), Baltische Bildungsgeschichte(n) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022, coedited with Silke Pasewalck, Antje Johanning-Radzˇiene˙, and Martin Klöker). Ingrida Egle˙ Zˇindzˇiuviene˙ is Professor of English at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She has published extensively on contemporary American literature, comparative literary studies, American studies, and teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). She has participated in conferences and lectures worldwide. Her main research interests include comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural studies. Professor Milda Danyte˙ is a Canadian of Lithuanian origin who wrote her first articles and a book on Lithuanian migrants in Canada. Since 1990 she has lived and taught at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, publishing mostly on contemporary literature and ethnic minority history, especially concerning the Lithuanian diaspora. Dalia Kuiziniene˙ is Professor in the Lithuanian Studies Department of Vytautas Magnus University and a historian of literature doing research on the literature, media, and cultural history of the Lithuanian diaspora. She has published two monographs and edited twelve books (collections of essays, archival documents, and memoirs) and published over fifty articles in the academic Lithuanian and foreign press. At present she is concentrating her research on the most recent literary texts produced by Lithuanian (e)migrants. Irena Ragaisˇiene˙ is Associate Professor of English at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. Her research interests include gender studies, cultural studies, and literary translation. Her recent research and publications are on identity and displacement in literature of migration. Aurelija Leonavicˇiene˙ is Professor of French at the Department of Foreign Language, Literary and Translation Studies, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Her research specialism is Translation Studies. She has published widely on changes in the current paradigm of translation theory and on translation of cultural content in fictional and non-fictional texts, including the textbook Vertimo atodangos: teorija ir praktika, prancu¯zu˛ – lietuviu˛ kalba ([Translation Outcrops: Theory and Practice, French and Lithuanian Languages] Kaunas: Technologija, 2010) and the monograph Kultu¯riniu˛ teksto reiksˇmiu˛ interpretacija ir vertimas ([Interpretation and Translation of Cultural Meanings] Kaunas: Technologija, 2014). She also participates in international research projects.

List of Contributors

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Jurgita Macijauskaite˙-Bonda has a Ph.D. in Ethnology. Her academic interests include children’s folklore, the image of the child in folklore and folkloric intertexts in translation. She has published a monograph Vaikas lietuviu˛ pasakose ir sakme˙se ([The Child in Lithuanian Folk Tales and Legends] Vilnius: Gimtasis zˇodis, 2015), and is a co-author of the book Sˇiuolaikinis moksleiviu˛ folkloras ([Contemporary Schoolchildren’s Folklore] Vilnius: Gimtasis zˇodis, 2013). She has also participated in different folklore, translation research and digitalisation projects. Currently Macijauskaite˙-Bonda works as a lecturer at the Department of Foreign Language, Literary, and Translation Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Carmen Caro Dugo is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the Department of Romance Languages, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, Lithuania. She has published translation into Spanish of some classical works of Lithuanian literature. Sigita Barnisˇkiene˙ is Emeritus Professor of German at the Department of Foreign Language, Literary and Translation Studies, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. Her research interest are comparative literature and text linguistics. Her publications include “Auch ich muss wandern zur Heimat zurueck”: Litauen und ostpreussische Literatur, Berlin: Saxa Verlag, 2009; Textlinguistische Untersuchungen: Textsemantik, Textfunktionen, Referenz und Deixis im Text, Berlin: Saxa Verlag, 2013; “Korrelation Von Anfang und Ende in den Gedichten Johannes Bobrovskis,” Anfang. Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Implikationen de˙s Anfangs, edited by Alina Kuzborska and Aneta Jachimowicz, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. Sydney based, Elizabeth Mary Cummings works in both educational and mental health settings. A writer, teacher, counsellor and psychotherapist, Elizabeth was born in Manchester, England. She moved to Scotland as a child and completed her schooling there. Elizabeth studied Psychology and Business Studies at Edinburgh University and as a graduate went on to study primary education. Elizabeth enjoyed a primary teaching career for many years, teaching diverse groups in UK and New Zealand. Elizabeth interest in children’s personal growth lead her to a writing career. Passionate about social justice and mental health, Elizabeth has published several children’s books on community and mental health. Her narratives have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, as well as scripted into a Lithuanian language puppet play by the Kaunas State Puppet theatre.