The Storytelling Human: Lithuanian Folk Tradition Today 9781644694244

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THE STORYTELLING HUMAN LITHUANIAN FOLK T RA D I T I O N TO DAY

Lithuanian Studies without Borders Series Editor Darius Staliūnas (Lithuanian Institute of History) Editorial Board Zenonas Norkus (Vilnius University) Shaul Stampfer (Hebrew University) Giedrius Subačius (University of Illinois at Chicago)

THE STORYTELLING HUMAN LITHUANIAN FOLK T RA D I T I O N TO DAY E d i te d by

LINA BŪGIENĖ

BOSTON 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Būgienė, Lina, 1968- compiler editor. Title: The storytelling human : Lithuanian folk tradition today / compiled and edited by Lina Būgienė. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Series: Lithuanian studies without borders | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026607 (print) | LCCN 2020026608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644694237 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694244 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644694251 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Folklore–Lithuania. | Storytelling–Lithuania. Classification: LCC GR204.8 .S76 2020 (print) | LCC GR204.8 (ebook) | DDC 398.2094793– dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026607 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026608 Copyright©Academic Studies Press, 2020. ISBN 9781644694237 (hardback) ISBN 9781644694244 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644694251 (epub) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover art by Marius Jonutis, reproduced by permission. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon St. Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

The translation of this book was supported by Lithuanian Culture Institute.

Contents

Forewordvii PART ONE. History and Tradition in a Changing World

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1. Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative  Aelita Kensminienė

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2. T  aking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History: Reconstructing Mental Landscapes in Autobiographical Narratives Radvilė Racėnaitė

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3. Th  e Dead Want to Come Home: Stories about the Repatriation of Siberian Deportee Remains to Lithuania Daiva Vaitkevičienė

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4. Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories Lina Būgienė

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PART TWO. Traditional Folklore and Modernity

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5. L  ife in Folktales or Folktales in Life? How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions Jūratė Šlekonytė

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6. Th  e Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs, or Why Do We Need Proverbs Today? Dalia Zaikauskienė

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7. Homo ridens: The Joking Human in Lithuania from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Centuries Salomėja Bandoriūtė

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8. Between Culture and Subculture: The Case of Lithuania’s Basketball Fans Povilas Krikščiūnas

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Bibliography244 Abbreviations261 Index263

Foreword

This collection of articles offers an outline of the ways that folklore exists in Lithuania today—how different facets of tradition have developed, have been transformed, and have adapted in a society increasingly dependent on technologies and media. At the same time, this publication reflects the determination of today’s Lithuanian folklore studies to consider their subject’s and their discipline’s limits and goals within a world that, over several decades, has fundamentally changed. When Lithuania, together with the other Central European countries, emerged from behind the ripped open Iron Curtain three decades ago, the first wave of euphoria at having regained freedom was soon replaced by the realisation that the country now found itself in a completely new environment—one in which it would have to play by different, unfamiliar rules. This was also the case for post-Soviet academic communities, especially those related to the humanities. On the one hand, once they had shaken off the constraints of the Soviet era, researchers saw new horizons open up before them; on the other hand, a good deal of their earlier work began to seem irrelevant, dated, and not useful. But folklore studies in Lithuania, as in most of the European countries whose national ideologies were shaped in the late nineteenth century and under the sway of Romanticism, have deep and significant roots. The creators of the modern Lithuanian state—including the “nation’s patriarch” Jonas Basanavičius—paid great attention to vernacular culture, national traditions, folklore, language, and so on, because they believed these things to be the very basis of the nation’s identity and the key to its survival.1 When history’s spiral made one more turn with the Soviet 1 Regarding Jonas Basanavičius’s folkloric activities, see, for example, Leonardas Sauka, Lietuvių tautosakos mokslas XX amžiuje (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2016), 11–46. For the Jonas Basanavičius Folklore Library, see www. knygadvaris.lt.

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occupation, Lithuanian folklore and folklore studies continued to be important in a similar way: for many, the folkloric movement and attention to national folk traditions became a counterbalance to the ideologised Soviet culture imposed by the occupiers and the ideology of “friendship between nations,” which thinly veiled an aggressive policy of national oppresion. During this period, the folkloric movement both directly and figuratively laid the foundation for the “singing revolutions” in Lithuania and the other Baltic countries and the subsequent restoration of their independence.2 But because newly independent Lithuanian society and state faced different challenges—globalisation, building European identity, developing a free market, and so forth—folklore that had grown out of Lithuanian agrarian culture suddenly lost its former function of promoting national identity. Folklore researchers now felt that they had neither an appropriate, relevant subject nor the methodological tools for studying it.3 There was also (and continues to be!) considerable pressure from society to stop “worshipping clogs and ploughs” and to begin speaking in modern language about relevant, contemporary matters. After 1990, all of this resulted in a deep and fundamental crisis in the discipline, one that lasted more than a decade. It took considerable intellectual effort and a turning toward the experiences of foreign colleagues to begin to dig ourselves out of the ditch, to gradually give up the Romantic view of folklore, to redefine folklore as an aspect of a universal, but continually shifting culture, and to grasp the importance of studying it and its place in the modern world. One of the conceptual, basic steps in this process was a 2010–2012 project conducted by a group of about twenty Lithuanian scholars from different disciplines, “Homo Narrans: Studies of Folk Memory,” the main product of which was a substantial collective monograph containing articles by seventeen authors.4 Through lively discussions and brainstorming, the project’s participants succeeded in establishing several key guidelines to enable the further development of Lithuanian folklore studies. The first step was to rethink the subject of folklore studies—equally from conceptual, methodological, and practical standpoints. If in the past we walked around 2 See, for example, Guntis Šmidchens, The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution (Seattle, WA, and London: University of Washington Press, 2014). 3 For more of this see Lina Būgienė, “Objekto problema šiandienos tautosakos moksle ir naratyvų analizės perspektyvos,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 38–51. 4 Homo narrans: Folklorinė atmintis iš arti, ed. Bronė Stundžienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2012).

Foreword

villages looking for “good” folk singers or storytellers from whom we might record yet one version of a story, song, or riddle that was already in the archives, Lithuanian folklorists now began to focus their research on narrative itself. The narrative could be provided by any kind of person or shaped within a community from different individual narratives, memories, or their fragments. We concentrated on the ways that an individual’s life story reflects their folkloric or cultural identity, and how society’s or an individual’s actions or views are influenced by cultural attitudes or stereotypes that are deeply rooted in the collective consciousness. In addition, folklore’s survival and reach began to be understood as much wider and more varied—consisting not only of traditional things preserved by a community and passed on through direct interaction, but now also including the entire field of continuously reproduced and changing contemporary media, internet, and social media phenomena. Obviously, it could be said that the Lithuanian folklore research, as Western humanities in general, experienced the so-called “narrative turn.” Although narrating and narratives have always been at the heart of the study of folklore, “the folkloristic hierarchies of the past have been turned around, so that ‘I’- and ‘me’-centered narrating has become the norm or orthodoxy at least in the western world, both in everyday practices and in scholarly research.”5 In folklore studies, this development is of course related to performance analysis, the essential notions of which became familiar to the Lithuanian folklorists already some time ago,6 but the shift also embraces increased proximity to the oral history research (sakytinė istorija in Lithuanian), particularly favored in Lithuania as the method for investigating the Soviet period,7 and memory studies, which are especially relevant to folklore researchers. The Lithuanian folklorists participating in the above-mentioned Homo narrans project even made purposeful attempts at defining the concept of folkloric memory (folklorinė atmintis in Lithuanian). In foregrounding the contents of this concept, the notion of 5 Barbro Klein, “Introduction. Telling, Doing, Experiencing. Folkloristic Perspectives on Narrative Analysis,” in Narrating, Doing, Experiencing. Nordic Folkloristic Perspectives, ed. Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj et al. (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2006), 7. 6 See Bronė Stundžienė, “Šiuolaikinė lietuvių folkloristika ir jos metodologiniai horizontai,” in Homo narrans: Folklorinė atmintis iš arti, ed. Bronė Stundžienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2012), 18. 7 See a concise guide for both researchers and practicioners of this method, Sakytinė istorija kaip sovietmečio tyrimo metodas, ed. I. Vinogradnaitė et al. (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2018).

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lieux de mémoire by the French historian Pierre Nora, works by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, particularly his monograph On Collective Memory, and theory of cultural and communicative memory developed by Jan Assmann were employed. Besides, according to the unquestioned knowledge maintained by the former strategies of traditional folklore studies, folklore is born and acts as memory of tradition. Therefore, if we agree that the communicative memory of a certain group of people addressed today still refers to some kind of folkloric manifestations, we have to acknowledge that these often reach to a much deeper kind of cultural memory, including reflections of folk culture, which justify current formation of a much needed tool for researching traditional culture—the concept of folkloric memory.8

This category is proposed not as some denomination of inactive memory bank; to the contrary, it manifests an actively working system and an intensely used arsenal, repeatedly intervening in the contemporary reality.9 Such approach considerably broadens the general understanding of the subject of folklore studies, and allows viewing it as a diverse multilayered narrative encompassing not only the traditional verbal, oral forms, but also various visual, musical, written, and even material expressions of folk creativity. Folklore, therefore, is increasingly perceived and approached as a new cultural text.10 At the same time, folklore researchers stopped preserving their discipline’s “purity”: they found themselves integrated into a wide and diverse field of contemporary anthropological studies and began to actively look toward other branches of scholarship including history, literature, sociology, psychology, even medicine and law, and to draw on their experience while at the same time enriching them with their own new discoveries.11 It should be noted that some of the insights folklorists have achieved approach the level of philosophical reflection and reveal cultural 8 Stundžienė, “Šiuolaikinė lietuvių folkloristika ir jos metodologiniai horizontai,” 36. 9 Ibid. 10 This notion was introduced already in 2008, see Bronė Stundžienė, “Folkloras kaip naujas kultūrinis tekstas,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 25–37. 11 Barbro Klein notes similar developments taking place in Nordic folklore research, and subsequently concludes: “The folkloristic expertise in studying oral narrating and oral narratives is a resource to the other human and social sciences—more than folklorists seem to realize.” See her “Introduction,” 22.

Foreword

depths and influences that could be interesting in terms of efforts to grasp human communication and societal development in general.12 One example of such discoveries is Aelita Kensminienė’s research, which is presented in the opening article of this collection. While the author is a researcher of riddles,13 her attempt to determine the status of this especially archaic genre in our times led her both to disappointment and to much broader conclusions of a scope beyond questions limited to this genre. In 2011, while conducting very typical fieldwork and wandering through the areas surrounding the small Western Lithuanian town of Rietavas, Kensminienė was forced to note that riddles have basically disappeared from contemporary usage—the tradition of riddling has practically died out and it is only rarely that a very elderly person is able to remember one. It was one such individual, an old grey-haired woman who was the only person who could tell several riddles, that most interested the researcher. This inevitably begged the question: why this woman still remembered riddles and other pieces of traditional folklore when other individuals, even of the same generation or analogous experience, did not? What made this informant remarkable—what traits related to her understanding and communication determined such abilities? Comparing this woman with another distinct female informant from the same area, Kensminienė noticed that the two women not only had very different styles of narration, but also ways of understanding the world. The first informant appeared to be more the homo audiens type—she had a primarily auditory understanding of her environment (this was clearly evident from her speech, dominated by words that express sounds, talking, and so forth). She was also better at remembering and conveying texts belonging to oral folklore. On the other hand, in the case of homo videns, that is, someone who has a predominantly visual understanding, traditional oral folkloric genres emerge only as fragments and motifs, even when such an individual has the ability to use and incorporate them into new texts. It should be noted that the informant who could remember traditional texts and had a more auditory understanding of her environment was semi-literate, while the 12 For more on these processes see Lina Būgienė, “Lithuanian Folkloristics during the Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods: Changes and Challenges,” in Mapping the History of Folklore Studies: Centers, Borderlands and Shared Spaces, ed. Dace Bula and Sandis Laime (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 29–42. 13 She recently published an extensive collection of Lithuanian riddles; see Lietuvių mįslės. Rinktinė, ed. Aelita Kensminienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2018).

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woman with a visual understanding of her environment, who had almost completely forgotten traditional texts, was literate. The author draws the conclusion that the proportion of people who have predominantly visual understanding is apparently increasing; perhaps this is why traditional folkloric texts, which are passed on orally, are less and less remembered, while new visual forms of folklore emerge. This situation is likely the result of the democratisation of writing and literacy, as well as emergence of cinema and television, and, more recently, the spread of modern media in which things are increasingly, and more effectively, communicated through images. The influence of deep historical experience and traditional folk culture on the contemporary individual’s understanding, attitudes, values, behaviour, and general stance is analysed in the three other articles that make up this collection’s first chapter, titled “History and Tradition in a Changing World.” These articles reflect upon the consequences of the multifaceted historical traumas that Lithuanian and other Central European societies experienced in the mid-twentieth century and then in the fifty years following the war, when they were forcibly erased from the political map and had to endure Soviet occupation, terror, deportations, national oppression, forced collectivization, industrialization, and land reclamation, and other social experiments that left deep scars as much on their landscapes as on their social organization and spiritual culture. In her article, Radvilė Racėnaitė focuses on one aspect of this painful collective and individual experience—how transformations of the visible landscape fundamentally affected a people who were intimately connected to the land, and how these experiences are revealed in recollections. This author also bases her analysis on a comparison of memoir-like texts produced by two well-known folklore informants and by two highly educated literary figures. Examining these individuals’ reflections upon nature’s beauty, their intimacy with it, and its impact on their physical and spiritual lives, she notices that the transformation of the visible landscape into a mental one in memoir texts is related to the axiology of the environment. On the mental plane, this kind of evaluative attitude emerges from an aesthetic relationship of enjoyment and appreciation of the world one lives in. The axiology can be based on practical factors, as when that which is useful is seen as beautiful. This kind of perception of the visible world is naturally related to pragmatic rural attitudes. In other cases, assessment of the natural environment is related to idealization of the landscape. Such aesthetic perception may

Foreword

simply be a given for a more sensitive, poetic person who already knows how to discern beauty. But for a deeper aesthetic relationship to the visible world to develop, some greater mental distance, in terms of both space and time, is necessary. In memoir texts, such distance is often related to situations of loss, when everyday routine is destroyed by historical breaking points or dramatic changes in an individual’s personal life. Mental distance marked by this kind of existential loss can produce an aestheticization of landscape that is characterized by the highest level of poetry and the idealization of places known in the past. At the same time, it is this distance that has resulted in a shift from folklore as a collective creative practice to more individual egodocumentary forms (autobiographical narrative, life story, memoir) conveying personal experiences. Recollections are also the focus of Daiva Vaitkevičienė’s article— both memories of the violent repressions implemented by the Soviet regime in the mid-twentieth century (the 1941–1953 deportations took approximately 28,000 lives) and accounts of more recent efforts by relatives of deportees, who, from the late 1980s, took advantage of the political thaw to bring back their loved ones’ remains from Siberia and the experiences related to that mass effort. This author offers a thorough presentation of the unique and extensive memoir-like material she has collected, which includes narratives, letters, photographs, newspaper articles, and literary reflections on these events. Demonstrating the mass nature of this dramatic “pilgrimage” process and the great challenges faced by those who travelled to recover and repatriate remains (deportee graves were scattered across a vast territory of the Soviet Union, from Komi to Tajikistan, from Yakutia to Irkutsk; the journey required intense physical and psychological efforts, as expedition members had to locate remains on their own and often dig them up with their own hands), this author tries to understand what motivated these people to travel to Siberia and what their accounts tell us about their relationships to the dead. The main goals of this research were to reveal how a burial site in a person’s native land differs from a grave in Siberia, and to explore what kinds of burial rituals were conducted for the repatriated remains of deportees. The article stresses that although narratives about the repatriation of deportee remains from Siberia and their reburial in Lithuania recount fairly recent historical events, they also bear witness to an ancient tradition of burying the dead on their own land, in their birthplace, or at least somewhere in their homeland. For more than four decades, Soviet occupation and the restriction of deportee rights prevented

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relatives of deportees from fulfilling that duty—a duty to the dead that was fulfilled as soon as political conditions made it possible. The narratives of individuals who performed these duties reveal that their determination and perseverance were inspired by clear and unquestionable motivations: the living must bury the dead in an appropriate place and following the necessary rituals, in this way returning them to the homeland and laying their path to the land of the dead. Thus, narratives about the repatriation and burial of remains also constitute a verbal form of ritual: they allow the narrators to make sense of the duties they have performed, and inform listeners (beginning with relations who participate in the funerals) that the burial ritual has been carried out. At the same time, this bears witness to the particularly deep and innate connection that exists in Lithuanian culture between the living and the dead, manifested as the unquestioned necessity of performing certain actions dictated by tradition, and the attitude that failing to do so is tantamount to disturbing the fundamental order of the world. Dramatic historical experience—as revealed on the individual level, through life stories, recollections, and reflections upon historical events— is also the research subject explored in Lina Būgienė’s article. In this case, the focus is on the situation that developed in a small borderland corner of southeastern Lithuania—the Valkininkai region—in the mid-twentieth century, during and after the Second World War. Tangled ethnic and linguistic relationships, four changes of government over two years (1939– 1941), long-term constraints upon developing national identities, and the complex circumstances of the wartime and postwar years—these are but some of the themes that have painfully affected the lives and fates of this area’s inhabitants. The article reveals how the region’s history dramatically disrupts each individual’s personal history, and how each individual has his or her own way of experiencing, surviving, reflecting upon, and relating that history. An absolute and inevitable component of such historical reflection—and perhaps its most fundamental characteristic—is subjectivity: through their narratives, the narrating individuals sometimes reveal themselves even more distinctly and more impressively than they do the events they are describing. Although employing the methods developed for the oral history research, the author adopts the folkloristic point of view rather than the historical one—she focuses completely on the subjective interpretation and meaning of the collected memoirs, entirely abandoning any attempts at their verification or quest for an “objective truth.” It

Foreword

is precisely those multifarious interpretations of the same conflictual situations—the focus on completely different moments and views, adopted by various narrators—that help the listener (and researcher) clearly grasp that historical experience is never uniform, just as there is not and can never be one truth. Nevertheless, and perhaps paradoxically, these individual subjective narratives to a considerable extent reveal the major issues that are relevant even to national and global discourse, thus allowing for better understanding of large-scale processes at the grassroots level. Moreover, Būgienė’s research makes it clear that bitterness about and residue from past grievances and allegedly experienced injustices tend to shape people’s current attitudes and cultural practices (for example, current attitudes toward the Lithuanian–Polish question), which, in turn, can impact future social and cultural development. This book’s second chapter, titled “Traditional Folklore and Modernity,” comprises articles focusing on the development of traditional folklore, the transformations that its various genres have undergone, and the new folkloric forms or adaptations that are emerging in contemporary, modern society. Folktale researcher Jūratė Šlekonytė’s article considers how and to what degree the long development of the folktale—one of the most “classical” and familiar of the folkloric genres—is determined by the individual storyteller’s personality, temperament, worldview, and creativity, and how all of this is reflected in their story’s text. Offering examples of interesting individual folktale adaptations that have been recorded in the course of recent folkloric fieldwork research, the author strives to elucidate what kinds of meaning the folktale adopts against a modern background, in particular whenever the researcher is able to observe a situation and interpret it from a contemporary folkloristic perspective. Particular scrutiny is applied to cases in which personal and collective aspects of the narrative seem to merge, and the traditional tale incorporates lots of personal details and interpretations that as a rule are quite rare, presenting evidence of individual narrative creativity. The next article is devoted to the archaic and very popular oral genre of the proverb. Paremiologist Dalia Zaikauskienė surveys both the tradition of the proverb and its contemporary usage. She notes that we can be sure that the proverb genre has survived the challenges of modern communication, has spread into new uncharacteristic spheres, is taking on new forms, and is continuously evolving. The goal of her article is to present contemporary

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Lithuanian proverb usage within an international context to highlight both the cosmopolitan aspects and national singularities of that usage. In order to do this, Zaikauskienė reviews how contemporary Lithuanian proverbs are used and how they can be applied in the public sphere; she presents what kinds of proverbial expressions are used by the contemporary Lithuanianspeaking community and how they are modified to achieve linguistic and paralinguistic goals; finally, she attempts to draw conclusions about the intentions behind the use of proverbs in contemporary communication. The article offers extensive examples of modern proverb usage from the news media, the internet, social media, and so forth, as well as proverb translations, adaptations, reworkings, and modifications. According to the author, recent decades have seen a revival in proverb usage, more attention to proverbs, and even a trend in using and manipulating them. On the one hand, the existence, use, and application of proverbs in contemporary communication is clearly a continuation of an ancient oral tradition. It indicates the survival of a habitual model of conversation; the continued use of traditional proverbs; essentially unaltered usage intentions; the contemporary person’s ability to use proverbs; and the deep proverbial principles to which new “non-folkloric” sayings must submit. On the other hand, we can see and recognize changes in terms of the proverb fund, expression, functions, and usage objectives, and how broadly, inventively, and creatively proverbs are applied for concrete pragmatic and artistic purposes in many areas in which they are not traditionally used. In contemporary Lithuanian proverb usage the relationship between tradition and modernity unfurls in complex and varied ways: traditionally used sayings help one to feel like a part of a certain community, while the breaking of tradition allows for the expression of individuality. Indeed, in modern communication contexts the use of something traditional can even be a sign of originality and individuality. The author of the following article, Salomėja Bandoriūtė, concentrates on the traditional folk genre of the joke—its development and the distinct features of its contemporary manifestations. Examining archival examples of traditional jokes and anecdotes that have been recorded since the late nineteenth century, as well as examples of Soviet-era humor (both officially sanctioned by the state and directed against it), and, finally, contemporary jokes (which are published on a mass scale online), the author attempts to draw out the cultural characteristics of the joking Lithuanian across different historical periods. She notes that humor is the best example of the

Foreword

social phenomenon of folklore: it adapts to everyday life, helps identify the stereotypes that dominate in a given society, and expresses opinions about different events and people. Humor is here and now, and it evolves along with its users—from oral transmission to internet joke sites, from radio programs to television, from leaflets handed out on the street to social networks on the Web. On the other hand, analysis of Lithuanian jokes dating from different periods reveals that there are three groups that are most popular as targets: women, foreigners, and people of higher social status. Concrete manifestations of these targets naturally shift across historical periods, depending upon specific political, social, or cultural situations; the persistence of certain themes over more than a century reveals a tendency to laugh at jokes that are based on stereotypical views about certain social groups. Targets of mockery help to generate a feeling of connection: jokes become a connecting thread between people who joke and laugh in the same way. It can also be argued that joking is a certain form of bullying that arises when people see things from the perspective of the we—they opposition. The last article in this collection analyses an instance of folkloric culture that is especially modern, both in terms of its object, expression, and means of dissemination. The article’s author, Povilas Krikščiūnas, draws our attention to the most popular sport in Lithuania, basketball, which is often referred to as “Lithuanians’ second religion” in popular discourse. International and major national basketball events attract large crowds of fans to sports arenas and television sets; they express their passion and emotion not only during the matches, but also before and after them. The internet—where it is possible to combine textual, graphic, and video elements—is perfectly suited to this and has therefore enabled fans to develop new forms of expression and self-expression. The article examines folkloric (or closely associated) elements related to basketball and basketball fans from Lithuanian internet sources. Krikščiūnas seeks to determine what kinds of texts, images, or combinations thereof are most popular, and understand their sources and connections to real events and people. Presenting a large number of examples of fan culture, he demonstrates that they are marked by distinct folkloric traits: the use of certain plots and motifs, their development and variation, and so on. As in the earlier discussion of jokes, here we can clearly see stereotypes, the we—they opposition, as well as a certain sublimation of aggression. It is therefore safe to say that internet sports fan creations constitute a new

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form of folkloric expression that bears witness to the vitality of folkloric traditions and their capacity for adjusting to new times and contexts. Although this publication cannot, naturally, encompass all newly emerging folkloric forms and cultural manifestations in today’s Lithuania, we hope that it will at least allow readers to form an impression about the development of contemporary Lithuanian folklore, as well as certain facets of culture and society in general. Separate articles offer possible answers to certain problematic questions related to today’s world, such as: what are the causes behind the disappearance of traditional oral folkloric genres? Why do Lithuanians stereotypically see themselves as having an especially strong connection to their native land a unique relationship to nature? What innate cultural attitudes inspired the mass repatriation of deportee remains from Siberia, even when the obstacles and difficulties involved were almost insurmountable? What are the roots of some Lithuanians’ prejudices against Poles, attitudes that can still be felt today? Finally, how and in what forms does folklore manifest and transform itself in Lithuania today? This book is also the first collective scholarly publication in English to present the state of academic folklore studies in post-Soviet Lithuania to an international readership. * * * This collection of articles was compiled and edited as part of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore’s research program “Studies of Baltic Mythology and Lithuanian Folk Narrative” (2012–2016). Its editor and authors thank the Lithuanian Culture Institute for supporting translation of the text into English, and Karla Gruodis for her excellent translation.

Chapter 1

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative Aelita Kensminienė

Introduction This article was inspired by fieldwork I conducted with a colleague several years ago—a 2011 expedition to the municipality of Rietavas, in the Žemaitija region of Lithuania. Because I am a researcher of riddles and know that it is quite difficult to document them (they often need to be dragged out of people), I began my research by investigating which riddles from this region had already been recorded. This region’s riddles have been collected for a long time—more than 150 years. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the publisher of the first Lithuanian calendars, Laurynas Ivinskis, lived in Rietavas.1 Ivinskis’s calendars often contained a considerable amount of folklore, so I anticipated that his collections, which contain riddles, would likely include a good number of such texts recorded in Rietavas and the areas surrounding it.2 As I perused the collections it became clear that the majority of the riddles he used came from printed sources, as he used a careful system of abbreviations in rewriting them. For example, in Ivinskis’s largest collection of riddles, out of 340 riddles only 43 are transcribed without abbreviation, indicating that the majority were rewritten from other authors.3 Some of these riddles, or variations on them, were recorded from sources in the Rietavas area in later years, so they were 1 Stasys Stropus, Rietavo kraštas (1253–2003) (Vilnius: Mokslo aidai, 2003), 99–105. 2 LMD I 227, LMD I 671, LMD I 710, LMD I 921. 3 LMD I 710.

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likely collected by Ivinskis himself. In addition to these, another 150 or so riddles were recorded. The material collected during the fieldwork trip led me in a completely different direction. It did not especially surprise me (I did not expect to record a great number of riddles), but it left me somewhat saddened: only one informant was able to remember a total of four riddles, while other interviewees could only say that, while they remembered knowing riddles and enjoying them in childhood, they simply could not remember any. The results of this trip once more confirmed what many folklorists have stated verbally and on paper about the almost complete extinction of old folklore forms and genres, and the need to begin looking at folklore itself in a new way: As we look, out of habit, at its (sometimes remarkably well-preserved) remnants, we repeatedly arrive at the same conclusion: our folklore is irreversibly dwindling and changing. Although the changes and modifications it is undergoing provide new opportunities for research, the new cultural situation we find ourselves in calls for more effective scholarly approaches.4

As the number of classic folkloristic texts written today dwindles, the previously existing context in turn becomes a new “text”: folklore studies are increasingly turning their attention to informants and their narrations about themselves and their lives. Phenomena that we previously so easily ascribed to various narratives we now must try to identify more precisely: life stories,5 personal experience narratives,6 utterances,7 and so on. Of course, this is not a recent phenomenon—according to Finnish folklorist Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, as early as 1932 the Swedish researcher Carl Wilhelm von Sydow argued that it is difficult to grasp the nature of folklore, or its development and spread, without paying attention to the so-called folklore bearers; beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, folklore studies have increasingly turned their attention to the general performance situation, 4 Bronė Stundžienė, “Folkloras kaip naujas kultūrinis tekstas,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 34. 5 Vilma Daugirdaitė, “Folklorinės patirties apraiškos gyvenimo pasakojimuose,” Tautosakos darbai 32 (2006). 6 Lina Būgienė, “Objekto problema šiandienos tautosakos moksle ir naratyvų analizės perspektyvos,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008). 7 Stundžienė, “Folkloras kaip naujas kultūrinis tekstas.”

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

as well as the performers that impact narrative structures.8 At the end of the twentieth century, German scholar Sabine Wienker-Piepho wrote: “If, in the 1960s, the American ballad researcher Wilgus could still follow the motto ‘The text is the thing,’ today we are saying ‘The context is the thing.’”9 Although those several riddles recorded in the Rietavas area offered meager material for studying shifts in riddle repertoires, the very fact that they were recorded as complete texts was significant for attracting my attention to the woman who remembered them. It made her more interesting to me, a researcher of riddles, than other sources and even than the riddles she offered me, and led me to look more closely at her as a person. In the course of this fieldwork, another informant drew my interest; this woman could not remember a single riddle, but in her narration she highlighted (or even generated) certain images. And imagery, of course, is a key feature of riddle poetics. As Donatas Sauka wrote, “Riddles use images and imagery very precisely, consciously anticipating their effect; indeed, generation of an image is at the core of the challenge of solving a riddle.”10 In truth, while imagery is a dominant feature in riddles, it is not a mandatory one but, rather, like paradox, is a central characteristic of the form. Another central leitmotif in riddles is physicality, so the senses and sensations, understanding of them, or unconscious attempts to do so also frequently hover over many riddle texts. It is interesting that there are riddle questions that refer to the theme of this article (and also, naturally, describe and stress the polarity that is characteristic of riddles): “I see—I cannot hear, I hear—I cannot see (Snow and rain).”11 It must also be noted that here our main informants’ articulations are presented in a somewhat exaggerated manner as though the two radically distant poles in this riddle reflect two different and dominant ways of grasping one’s surroundings—the more auditory and the more visual. The current study seeks only to present a phenomenon that drew the researcher’s attention; more objective conclusions would require Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, “Pasakojimas ir pasakojimo pateikimas,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 (2005): 203, 208. [Translated from: Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Kertomus ja kerronta (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1988): 7–24.] 9 Sabine Wienker-Piepho, “Dabartinė liaudies pasakojimų tyrinėjimo padėtis” [Contemporary Research Situation of Folk Narrations], Tautosakos darbai 5/12 (1996): 155. 10 Donatas Sauka, Lietuvių tautosaka (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2007), 278. 11 LTR 69/844. 8

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a more thorough and broad-ranging study. In this case, the focus will be these two women’s narrative styles and self-presentation; in quoting them I will make an effort to allow them to “speak” more themselves, because it is not only the message of the narrative that is important and informative, but also its manner of transmission—that is, not only what is narrated, but how it is narrated, in particular key words, insertions, pauses, and intonation.

Homo audiens: “I had a good tongue” Stressing her jolly nature and singing abilities, more than one person in my first informant’s village referred us to her, and she was the only individual I encountered during this fieldwork who had preserved any riddles. Very tall for her generation, with fairly short grey hair and large, bony hands, she was weeding her garden with a hoe despite the hot June day. When my colleague and I chatted her up she immediately agreed to sing for us, and she proudly invited us into her home (we were “lucky” to visit her on her eighty-fourth birthday). Serving us coffee, she explained that she drinks coffee ten times a day. In preparation for our visit (the local librarian had told her folklorists would be visiting), she had written the songs she knew down in a notebook—she explained that it is not always easy to remember them on the spot, so she had written them down (though she had skipped some letters in doing so). Perhaps as a result of her advanced age, she half sang, half read the songs. At first we recorded thirteen songs, four riddles, and three descriptions about where she heard them, and then our informant began to tell us about her life. It was a typical one for a folklore informant— she was a poor orphan and had seen plenty of hardship.12 She was born and had always lived very close to Rietavas; the farthest she had ever travelled was to the Lithuanian port city of Klaipėda and, once, to the Curonian spit on the Baltic coast. Her mother died when she was four years old, and her father, when she was sixteen. She and her two sisters were raised by their maternal aunt. School did not figure at all in her narrative. She began to work as a maid at the age of fourteen, and, as a young woman, bore a child out of wedlock from her employers’ son. When asked if it was difficult, she mischievously replied, “What do you think—is it that hard to make a baby?” When we clarified our question and asked how people reacted, 12 Compare with Donatas Sauka, Lietuvių tautosaka (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1982), 236–237; and Vilma Daugirdaitė, “Žvilgsnis į liaudies dainininką kaip lietuvių folkloristikos objektą,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 (2005): 48–49.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

she answered that people had been very sympathetic.13 She married much later; her husband was tall, handsome, and very popular with the local girls. His sisters objected to the fact that she had a child, but he did not care. In addition, she was six years older than him, but she “had a good tongue” and knew how to talk to men.14 Describing herself, our informant said that she was very resourceful— she had worked for thirty years as a wedding and funeral caterer. In relating how she danced with partisans in her youth, she said, in an off-hand manner, that she has “fooled around” a lot, and would continue to “fool around” if she were still young.15 When asked is she had been pretty as a young woman, our informant said she did not know whether she had been pretty—she had been tall and blond. In her view it is not beauty that a woman needs; it is most important “to have the gift of the gab—you just need to have a good tongue, to be able to make them laugh, to be fun to talk to, and then everything will go well.”16 When asked if she herself had had a good tongue, she replied that she had had “a pretty good one, that [she] really knew how to talk.” When someone would say to her “Stop gabbing!” she would retort, “But my tongue is not a whip— it won’t hurt anyone’s ass.”17 Interestingly, a similar, but shorter version of this expression is recorded in above-mentioned calendar publisher Ivinskis’s collection: “Liežuvis ne botagas, pasturgalio nepraplaks [A tongue is not a whip, it won’t hurt anyone’s ass].”18 It therefore appears that our informant is a preserver of ancient, traditional forms. One of the riddles that we recorded from her bears further witness to this. The riddle “Daili daili kamarėlė, pilna kultuvėlių, po slenksčiu raudonas šuo guli (Burna, dantys ir liežuvis) [A very pretty closet, full of flails, a red dog lying on 13 We began to notice this relative liberalism with regards to stereotypical views of rural women’s morality in Žemaitija. For example, in describing the circumstances around her marriage, another informant (a respectable married woman) calmly explained that she was already pregnant at her wedding. When we expressed further interest in this, she explained that no one condemned young women for that kind of thing; she said that young men in the region did not usually abandon young women in such situations, and that, if they did, it was the young men who were condemned (LTRF cd 565/25). 14 LTRF cd 570/16. 15 Compare with “More than one elderly singer remembers, as in the song, being quite something as a young woman: ‘When I was a child and a girl I was like quicksilver, very mischievous. I was always the leader.’ And she would have thrown all the energy she had left into singing and games.” Sauka, Lietuvių tautosaka (1982), 238. 16 LTRF cd 571/9. 17 LTRF cd 571/21. 18 LMD I 257/388.

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its threshold (Mouth, teeth, tongue)]”19 is also recorded both by Ivinskis and in later collections. Another one—“Mįslė mįslė, per pilvą gyslė, pilvo gale jomarkas (Mes armonija vadinom, taip kur trauki, armonika) [Riddle, riddle, a vein across the stomach, a market at the end of the stomach (We called it a harmony, how you play it, harmonica)]”20—appears in Norbertas Vėlius’s 1960 collection.21 Our informant confirmed that she learned riddles from others through oral communication: Did you think up these riddles or did you learn them from somewhere else?22 Well, it was the old people who taught them to us. So when would you say the riddles? One of the old folks would say them to us children. They would say the riddle, and if we didn’t know, they would tell us [the answer].23

In addition, in speaking about herself, our informant more than once repeated that she had been a singer and even compared herself to a wellknown folksong performer: “I was a singer when I was young—like that woman who lost her hair.”24 Now she had been a widow for thirty-two years “and nobody had wanted this singer again.” In addition to the abovementioned child out of wedlock, our informant had two more children: a daughter, and a son who had died two months before our visit. Neither at this point nor at any other did this woman express any grief or self-pity; she simply told us about her life as though it were a story. Her narrative contained few visual elements or realistic details. Even her reference to herself as having been fair-haired was merely a confirmation of a suggestion we made; she confirmed this, but continued to stress her “good tongue” and 19 LTRF cd 570/21. 20 LTRF cd 570/17. 21 LTR 3433/226. Two other riddles also show strong similarities: “Guli merga patvory, turi skylę vidury, kas ateina, tas gauna (Šulinys—kai ateini vandens ir semi susirietęs) [A girl lies by a fence, there’s a hole in the middle, whoever comes by can get it (A well—when you come to get water and pull it up, bent over)],” LTRF cd 570/18; and “Daili daili panelė, kas ateina, prieš tą lenkiasi (Senovėje buvo šulinys, ir buvo svirtis, tokia aukšta įdėta—taip panelė lenkiasi, ji pasiduoda ir semia vandenį) [A very pretty girl, whoever comes by bows to her (In older times there was a well and a tall wellsweep—when a young woman pulled it down it gave way and drew the water up)],” LTRF cd 570/19. 22 The interviewer’s questions are given in Italic when quoted. 23 LTRF cd 570/20. 24 She was likely referring to the famous Lithuanian folksong artist Veronika Povilionienė, whose struggle with cancer was written up in the press.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

the importance of being able to “shoot the bull.” Nor did she provide any visual descriptions of other characters in her narratives—she referred only to what they said and did. If she mentioned that her fiancé was tall and handsome, she immediately stressed that other girls hung about him, so even this description served the purpose of proving that she had a good tongue and used it to conquer her opponents. Here is her description of how she was unable to meet with the father of her unborn child because his own parents forbade it: His father was a good man, but his mother really liked to grumble. They wouldn’t let him. And you know, in those days children listened to their parents. If they forbade something, you didn’t disobey them. Yes, yes, he wanted [to marry me] . . . but what can you do.25

Our informant’s disregard for visual detail is even reflected in the notebook in which she recorded her songs, where she had copied two songs, Močiute širdele (My dear mother, my heart) and Vainikėli mano mielas (My dear wreath) onto one page: she ignores line divisions, stanzas, breaks, and capital letters, and even begins a new song on the same line as the previous one without any sign separating the two texts, and also omits the refrains (oi–oi–oi). Why bother writing something that will be sung properly? The notes were only in case she forgot a word. But it is worth paying attention to how our informant narrates, how she quotes spoken language, what emphatic terms she uses (here—klausyk [listen], later—sakau, garbės žodis! [I tell you, on my word of honour!]), and what synonyms she uses. For example, in relating one unfortunate incident—two young men got into a fight at a dance; one stabbed the other and, frightened, left for Germany— she said, “and not even a voice remained.”26 Drawing on von Sydow’s distinction between active and passive bearers of culture, John D. Niles draws attention to “strong tradition-bearer.” He offers an example of one Scottish informant: that man’s life, views about folklore, and repertoire: Williamson’s repertory naturally reflects his worldview. He sings almost no songs of domestic violence, for example. . . . The underlying reason he does not sing them, I suspect, is his bedrock belief in the power of the word. For him as emphatically as for African tribesmen who have been the subject of 25 LTRF cd 570/15. 26 LTRF cd 570/37.

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scholarly research (Peek 1981), words are things and acts. If you speak of evil, . . . you may bring evil about.27

Our informant, too, firmly believes in the power of the word, or more precisely prayer: she repeated as many as four times that if you do not pray for the dead they will visit you in your dreams.28 She admitted that she would very much like to dream about her dead son, but she cannot stop herself from saying her prayers—she cannot “swear on it” (swear that she will not do it), so, when morning comes, she is again saying them; there is nothing to do, so she says her prayers, and she always prays for the dead.29 Perhaps the strongest expression of her faith in the power of the spoken word is revealed in her account of how the woman who abused her was punished: . . . We [with the father of my child born out of wedlock] had decided to get married . . . And his sister, there you go, said that I was poor (I was working for them as a maid): “She’s poor, so what do you need her for?” But then I had an idea. . . . I saw an old woman on her way to church, walking toward the town. I gave her some money and said: “When you get to the church, go see the pastor and tell him the whole truth, tell him who stopped me from marrying my young man, so that God would punish them.” But later I felt badly about it—less than two weeks later the sister went mad, and ended up in the asylum in Švėkšna. Maybe it was a bit too harsh, eh?30

This narrative revealing faith in the power of the word is not an individual phenomenon. Rather, it is indicative of a general belief in the power of curses and spells. According to Jonas Balys, [There] remains evidence of strong belief in the idea that curses can be fulfilled, especially in cases when the person who said the imprecation is dying, when someone has been unjustly condemned to death, when curses involve parents (especially mothers) and old people, deceived girls, pregnant women, or sorcerers. A curse cannot be taken back, so it is important to control one’s feelings and words.31 27 John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 191–192. 28 LTRF cd 571/17–20. 29 LTRF cd 571/18. 30 LTRF cd 570/14. 31 Jonas Balys, Raštai, vol. 2, ed. Rita Repšienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2000), 162.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

In our informant’s narratives, the culminating moment often involved spoken words. In one story, for example, she spoke about the front line during the Second World War: . . . The front line was along the old Žemaičių highway . . . My father was a craftsman, and Christ, Christ, he wanted to do check out what was happening on that highway, because if the Germans were now rounding up the Russians, he wanted to check it out. So he went there, and there you go, the Germans seized him, searched him and emptied his pockets and said, “Do you have anything?” ‘Cause they’d have shot him if they’d found anything. . . . They found a measuring tape and a craftsman’s folding knife; my father really treasured that knife. So then my father came home and said: “Just watch—the Germans won’t invade Russia, because they took my knife!” Christ, did we ever laugh, let me tell you! The Germans stayed near Russia for three years, and then they had to go back, so they never invaded it. But not because of that knife; we were just joking around about that.32

The essential point here is not that our informant stresses that it was not her father’s angry words about his confiscated knife that prevented the Germans from reaching Moscow; what is significant is that she feels the need to make the clarification. The convention is negated, but it has not been forgotten—it is only her faith in it that is unstable. In this way the narrative can be compared to so-called anti-legends, when, following an initial tale-like narration, a rational explanation for the event is offered.33 In another narrative, about how some soldiers shot a little dog, our informant could not remember which kinds of soldiers were involved until she recalled the sound of their spoken words: when she finally remembers, she devotes as much attention to the Russian soldiers’ words as to the upsetting experience of witnessing the senseless shooting of the dog: What they were, Russians or Germans, I don’t know, but I do know that we loved our little dog, and he was walking with the soldiers, and they shot him. I felt so sorry for that dog. And then those soldiers, there were ten of them sleeping [with us]—whether they were Russians or Germans, I don’t know. No, maybe Lithuanians. But no, because they said, in Russian, Pazharit kartoshku! [To fry some potatoes!]. So our auntie brought some in, 32 LTRF cd 571/1. 33 Lina Būgienė, “‘Nuo tada netikiu į baidymus’: pasaulėžiūros lūžių atspindžiai sakmėse,” Tautosakos darbai 18/25 (2003): 113.

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and they peeled potatoes, and she peeled potatoes, and then say, A zhyr!— Give us some fat! So she brings in bucket of fat, and later our auntie, she says, “Bloody hell! They scooped out up half a bucket of fat! Using spoons? They dropped spoonfuls of fat into the frying pans and fried the potatoes. Those potatoes must have been drowning in fat, they were eating so greasily! . . . The Russians ate very fatty food, they used a lot of fat. And Lithuanians didn’t eat like that? We fried things like potatoes, but I think we did it a bit more reasonably. We would say “Let’s fry ourselves some potatoes,” and they said this in Russian. Those Russian words—I was so interested in them, was trying to pick them up. And why did they shoot the dog? They saw him and “Pow”—they just . . . they just shot him. It wasn’t barking or anything? No. He was just a little one, that dog of ours, and then he ran off to the barn, to this small barn we had, and that’s where he died.34

The memory-stimulating mechanism revealed in this narration is something like Marcel Proust’s madeleine effect: a memory of a senseless killing and a feeling of anger about crude greediness is, for all times, associatively linked to a small sensory detail—the sound of a foreign language that becomes like an individual symbol.35 David Crystal cites 34 LTRF cd 571/3. 35 Another woman from the Rietavas area similarly remembers the painful moment when she was apprehended for deportation: “And that .  .  . that procedure when we were taken away for the deportation. Now I had these two girlfriends, both of them Komsomol members, these goody-two-shoes with the last name Savickytė. They were from the countryside but they were afraid to live there, and we lived in the city, so they would come to sleep at my house every night, so the forest brothers wouldn’t attack them. At five in the morning, when it was still a bit dark, this man comes in (the door wasn’t locked, just the outer one with a hook, we were sleeping upstairs—Virginija Savickytė on one side, I was by the wall, and the other sister was in another bed). This armed man (I’ll remember that image until I die) comes in and says to the one sleeping separately: “Familia [Last name]?”—“Savickytė.” And he says nothing. Then he asks Virginija Savickytė, who is on the other end of the bed: “Familia?”—“Savickytė.” And then he says to me, “Grinevičiūtė—padyom [let’s go]!” And then the worst . . . the worst . . . from my whole life, that we had to . . . my mother was already packing, her eyes full of tears, we had been sleeping upstairs, but now I was downstairs. Into bags . . . we could pack what we wanted into our bags, but what could we throw into them in such a short time? Oh, that was a horrifying moment . . . truly horrifying.” LTRF cd 575/10. Although this narrator stresses an unforgettable image (and images are very important

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

a testimonial about a similar connection when describing historical facts about how prohibitions against speaking a certain language were sometimes implemented by washing the disobedient party’s mouth out with soap: “In other places, washing the mouth out with soap was popular: as a Tlingit man from Alaska put it—‘Whenever I speak Tlingit, I can still taste the soap.’”36 Another seemingly indirect reinforcement of these ideas is contained in another narrative. Here our informant remembers doing outdoor work with her employers and how one of their sons, unaware that there were Lithuanian partisans pouring themselves some homemade vodka in the barn, walked by them singing a song in Russian: He sang some sort of song, something about the partisans—we knew songs like that—and with vay matey [distortion of the ending of a Russian expletive tvoiu mat′], but in Russian somehow. Jesus, and those partisans, there they were in the barn, whispering and pouring. And they figured that the soldiers were already there—Jesus, how they beat up that young guy, then we brought him back to bed in very bad shape. They were so furious that they beat him up. Was it because he frightened them? Well, yes, because they figured he was a stribokas.37 Because he spoke in Russian? Yes, because he spoke in Russian.

Kaivola-Bregenhøj speaks about schemas that make it easier to remember and reproduce folklore texts: they are broken down not only in terms of information, but the emotions they evoke. Emotions appear to work as a kind of organizing filter: they select material depending upon a person’s mood and store it in the memory. And there is a reverse effect: a performed song can stimulate personal memories.38 In the above-cited narrative, a Russian song that was sung for a joke acts, for the partisans, in other narratives of hers), she says the Russian phrase with such an intonation, and with a lowered voice, that there is no doubt that the auditory imagery of the scene is deeply embedded in her memory. 36 David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 112. 37 Stribas or stribokas—folk jargon for people who collaborated with repressive Soviet forces; from the Russian word istrebitel′ (“liquidator”). 38 Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, “Pasakojimas ir pasakojimo pateikimas,” Tautosakos darbai 30 (2005): 174–176. [Translated from: Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Kertomus ja kerronta (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1988): 25–38 (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran Toimituksia 480)].

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as a reference to Russian stribai,39 stimulating especially negative emotions that do not pass even after it is revealed who sang the song, and requiring violent physical release upon the hapless singer. Nevertheless, it seems that the horrors of the Second World War and of the postwar period,40 which so many other people have vividly described, did not especially upset our informant. This is possibly because of the difficult personal experiences she had had, but more likely because the horrors in a sense passed by her: the front was a good distance away, there was no fear, there was no need to dig trenches, she and her family only saw airplane lights,41 and few people from that region were deported.42 It was as though she were living in a classical, harmonious world in which “Kaip danguje, taip ir ant žemės [In heaven as it is on earth]”43 and “Kaip kas šaukia, taip ir atsiliepia [As someone calls, so they will be answered]”44: relations between men and women were based on mutual accord,45 and if you were in the habit of saying your prayers but did not dream of the dead, you could ask an intermediary to talk to God and He would punish your abuser. 39 Stribai—plural of stribas, c.f. note 37. 40 According to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania’s program “Deportation and Imprisonment Sites,” over 156,000 Lithuanian inhabitants were imprisoned during the Soviet period. Lithuanians comprised approximately one tenth of all gulag prisoners. According to testimonials, Lithuanian prisoners in Soviet gulags suffered especially from starvation, cold, heavy labor, inappropriate clothing, nighttime searches, overcrowded facilities, lack of air, criminal rampages by other prisoners, cruelty on the part of guards, endless thefts, lack of medical assistance, epidemics, diseases, psychological abuse, and humiliation. Approximately 23,000 Lithuanian prisoners were executed or died in the Soviet gulags. In 1940–1953, 131,600 people were deported from Lithuania. The lists of people for deportation included not only the able-bodied, but the elderly, the sick, the disabled, as well as pregnant women, children, and babies. One out of ten deportees was a child, and approximately 5000 Lithuanian children died during transportation to deportation locations. Virtually all former deportees describe shame and humiliation, slave-like labor, constant hunger and starvation, cold, impossible work quotas, unpaid labor, the cruelty of commandants, the mockery of administrative officials, and the lack of medical help. The early stage of life in the deportation is described by survivors as the most difficult period of their lives. According to available information, approximately 28,000 Lithuanians died while in deportation. See the website of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, http://genocid.lt/centras/lt/1491/a/, accessed November 2, 2018. 41 LTRF cd 571/1. 42 LTRF cd 570/35. 43 LPP I 434. 44 LMD I 671/1248. 45 LTRF cd 571/23.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

Homo videns: “I can see it all before my eyes” Almost everything that was recorded from our second informant fits into the category of life story or confessional narrative, and the informant herself refers to her narratives as her “life history.” She was born in 1933 in a small town in the Žemaitija region in western Lithuania. Her parents were not wealthy, but they were clever and industrious people from the region. They met in the town of Telšiai: her mother (who was from Rietavas) was working for the archbishop at Telšiai and her father was helping to build a church there. After they married, the woman’s parents decided to do some business and opened a teetotallers’ teahouse. They ran this business in several locations and then, in 1939, sold it and moved to Kvėdarna, where they quietly waited out the upheavals of the years immediately before and during the war. Our informant completed the town’s high school as a top student and had dreams of becoming a doctor. Although she did well on the entrance exams for Kaunas Medical Institute, she was not a member of the Komsomol46 and refused to join, so was not accepted to the institute and had to settle for nursing college. She describes this herself: I had hopes of becoming a doctor, but thank God that I never did. Why? What kind of a doctor would I have made? Lady doctors have to be pretty and impressive. Do you really mean that? Oh yes! They just have to be normal women. Little munchkins like me are good for nothing. [. . .] You’re saying that doctors have to be tall? They have to be tall like statues.47

In Rietavas she married a man because he reminded her of her first, unhappy, love: What was most important was that he was tall, had somewhat curly hair, and a slightly hooked nose. So you found him good-looking? I don’t know, but he was tall, and I don’t like short men. I’m short myself, so no.48 46 Komsomol—Communist Youth League. 47 LTRF cd 574/11. 48 LTRF cd 575/1.

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They had three children and raised them successfully, but her husband died quite young. As we can see, this informant, unlike our first interviewee, does not leave out descriptions of appearance, and as her narrative reveals that appearance can even determine such key life events as choice of career and marriage. In her narrative, this woman repeatedly stressed that she was a street child and had grown up on the pavement, though the pavement she referred to was that of a small town in Žemaitija. She describes herself as a wandering bird—she had wandered all around Žemaitija. Wanting to stress that she was not a representative of rural culture, but a city woman, she consistently tried to speak correct Lithuanian, but that caused her to falter, as she often struggled to find the words she needed to express herself. But even when asked to speak the local dialect, she remained firm about speaking regular Lithuanian (though that self-control faltered at several emotional points, when bits of dialect would slip out). Contrary to our first informant, who, even while being a bearer of a dwindling oral tradition, did not think about how she spoke, and simply talked away, our second informant continuously monitored her own speech, thus creating both her narrative and her image. According to philosopher Jurga Jonutytė: [An informant sees a researcher] as a medium through whom a portrait of the informant’s life can be maximally conveyed. In other words, the researcher is presented with a maximally meaningful portrait of that life, even if, for the sake of that unified and desired meaning, certain details are amplified and others are erased. The informant seeks to establish the version of their identity which best corresponds with how their imagined human microcosm should appear—from external description to criteria of behavior, mindset, and action.49

This informant’s memories are “right before [her] eyes” rather than “ringing in [her ears]”: I still have a copy of my first teacher’s words. She was not, by the way, Lithuanian, but probably Polish, and of the nobility. Her entire demeanor was aristocratic. After the war there weren’t any teachers and she was the first one to come along. She gave me a type of little notebook, the kind in which you have to cut the pages yourself, a little narrow one . . . And on the first 49 Jurga Jonutytė, “Tradicinio žinojimo tyrimas: paradigmų kaita,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 19.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

page she wrote “Never say I can’t because these words are humanity’s greatest enemy. Whoever repeats them will never move forward, but will only quietly repeat, over and over, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” And you remembered these words always? Well, I can still see them! I can see them, I can see them. I don’t have the notebook anymore—I left it in Kvėdarna. How was it . . . She was also, it seems, an artist—there was a tree branch, this beautifully drawn tree branch, and then, it seems, this retouched . . . image of a sunrise, or maybe . . . a sunset; no, not a sunset, but a sunrise. So. And this tree, and a leaf; the top of the tree, or maybe not the top, and then a fallen leaf, and on it . . . those words were written. And she .  .  . she gave me that little notebook, and I carried it around with me until I finished high school. But she wrote those words, for me, so beautifully: “Never say I can’t because these words are humanity’s greatest enemy. Whoever repeats them will only wander on the path of darkness, quietly repeating, over and over, I can’t, I can’t . . .” Well, whatever way you look at it, that’s what it . . . that’s what it’s saying, that you should never say I can’t.50

The fact that this informant first says that she still has these words and then that she does not most likely is not a question of confusion: she no longer has the paper notebook, but she has the words—a very graphic image of them—in her memory. The manner in which she recreates this image and the tiniest details of the drawing does not require any commentary. The second (after her first unhappy love) great drama of her life is also connected to the written word. In describing how she was not accepted into Kaunas Medical Institute, our informant provides a backstory about words (that she could not remember at the time of the interview), which she wrote in a schoolmate’s yearbook. This friend’s brother was secretary of the local Komsomol, and he saw the words in his sister’s yearbook. Later our informant doubted this version and suggested that she may have been refused by the institute because, when the boy came by to try to convince her to join the Komsomol, her mother chased him away with a broom.51 In the continuation of this narrative, now set in Kaunas, the motif of making a pact with the devil is distinct:52 our informant described how she went to 50 LTRF cd 574/9. 51 LTRF cd 574/10. 52 In one version of the folktale ATU 811(“A young man promised to the devil becomes a priest”), the priest wants to receive money for his studies, or wants to study successfully, so he promises his soul to the devil (this is quoted in Bronislava Kerbelytė’s catalogue of

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the building where the acceptance committee was meeting, stood in line, entered the meeting room and saw the same Komsomol secretary from Šilalė. The committee members exchanged glances, saw that her grades were good, and gave her a form to sign that would have had her join the Komsomol. But when she had left home, her mother had instructed her not to join the Komsomol. So the girl said nothing to the committee, left the room, went to the dormitory to collect her things, and returned home. And that was the end of her dreams of becoming a doctor.53 The first drama, to do with unhappy love, is also remembered in a similar way. Someone wrote something to her boyfriend, and he sent her an ugly photograph with a cruel message: When he went off to the army I knitted him a pair of mittens. My mother gave me some yarn and I knitted some soldierly mittens, so that he could use his finger to shoot, and a scarf, and we sent him off to the army. I knew his parents. After he left for the army I started receiving letters. Well, those letters . . . those first letters . . . You know, I was just a girl of fourteen or fifteen . . . And then this one letter comes . . . Not a letter, but something or other . . . And I was a high school student, and . . . and I was in a folk dance group, and was involved in all sorts of things, and someone must have written him something, or I must have offended someone. He sent me some photograph of some girl . . . He sent it? M-hm. Of what girl? Some ugly girl, some Russian girl in a fafaika,54 and he wrote, “Keep this photo until I return, because she looks like you . . . Or, actually, you look like her.” And that was the end of it. It was all over. . . .55

Remembering those first letters, our informant briefly held her breath, as she had become moved; this had not happened previously, even though she had described how the boy would go to meet her at school and help her with her chores. She then continued her narrative with difficulty, as folk narrative, www.aruodai.lt.) The motif of making a pact with the devil also appears in tale types ATU 330A, ATU 331, and ATU 812. 53 LTRF cd 574/11. 54 Fafaika, pufaika—slang Lithuanian term for a quilted winter jacket that, in Lithuanian popular culture, is associated with Russians. 55 LTRF cd 575/1.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

though forcing herself to squeeze out the words. It was clear that she deeply valued those first written, romantic testimonials. In an article about the considerable cultural relevance, for folklore studies, of the relatively new theme of letters, Vita Ivanauskaitė cites excerpts from Juozas Paukštelis’s novel Kaimynai (Neighbors), in which the protagonist, Jonas, writes love letters to Saliutė, who decides to respond to him by weaving a folk sash that is usually weared as a necktie.56 The symbolic correspondence of these actions noted by the author can also be found in songs: “. . . letter writing is replaced by actions that are characteristic of ritualistic communication: crochet, sash-weaving, embroidery of shirts, and so on.”57 In this informant’s narratives, traditional folkloric motifs are sometimes only faintly discernable, as though their presence was merely coincidental. But at other points they are clearly evident, as is the case in two stories about how stribokai,58 while driving in a horse-driven carriage past a roadside cross, make a bet about which one will hit the crucifix. On their way back, the one who hits the mark is shot dead in the same part of his body. Another story contains similar elements, except that here the whole company shoots at a chapel for the Virgin Mary, near a stream, and, upon returning, the same company is liquidated.59 In beginning to relate this narrative, our informant’s intonation shifted and she began to speak in an ironically exalted, somewhat mocking voice, as though she were trying to distance herself from the story. “And there can be miracles!” she said. After this she continued speaking in a perfectly serious voice, and, at the end of her narration, jokingly asked whether she would now be put in jail. This informant also remembered two short songs in rhyming couplets and several parodies of prayers and funeral laments. But she remembered just fragments of the latter, while the short songs were only four lines long and framed by narratives about how they were sung by abandoned children.60 One way or another, this informant is not a bearer of oral traditions. The reason for this is likely not her age (she is six years younger than our first informant) but rather the fact that, having receieved both high school and college education, she is fully literate. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in his

56 57 58 59 60

Vita Ivanauskaitė, “Folklorinė laiško paradigma,” Tautosakos darbai 33 (2007): 143–144. Ibid., 145. C.f. note 37. LTRF cd 574/8. LTRF cd 573/16–17.

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1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (which established terms such as “media” and “global village”): The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningful sounds. This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking.  .  . . Only the phonetic alphabet makes such a sharp division in experience, giving to its user an eye for an ear. . . . As an intensification and extension of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch and taste in any literate culture.61

Undoubtedly, shifts of mentality did not occur suddenly, and the second informer’s narrative also contains the odd auditory episode. Although this auditory element is not evident when reading the below narrative as written discourse, it is very obvious when listening to it. The fragment of poetry was presented with a particular intonation: it was said in a much stronger voice than the one the informant used in the previous passage, and in a language close to standard Lithuanian. But in presenting this oral fragment, she still first provided a detailed description of what was happening around her and how she was dressed at the time: I remember very well being a real Lithuanian girl in the summer of 1939. [President] Smetona came to Tverai.62 And I can remember how . . . how those farmer women were preparing a mid-day meal. A soldier . . . young soldiers, I’m not sure from what unit; there were games, horse races, a ceremony. And . . . I was so interested in how the women were making cabbage rolls, and tying them with thread so that they wouldn’t unravel while baking. Those kinds of childish memories. The big event was at the monument to Vytautas (in Tverai it’s in the middle of the town), and Smetona came to meet the people at that monument. And I too was dressed up, in national costume with a big Lithuanian bow or something like that, I don’t know, and I said [a verse], “My mother has often said to me that this is our land, that I am a Lithuanian girl.” . . .63 61 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: MIT Press, 2014), 95–97. 62 Antanas Smetona (1874–1944)—president of Lithuania at that time; Vytautas (c.1350– 1430)—Vytautas the Great, Grand Duke of Lithuania. 63 LTRF cd 573/5.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

When our informant spoke about the Soviet occupation, it was not the Russian language that was lodged in her memory but the appearance of the Russian soldiers: . . . I remember this . . . this one soldier . . . It was 1940, and those Russians were already here, and how . . . how worn out those soldiers looked, how they . . . we had this meadow, and beyond it . . . they, I’m sorry, but those soldiers were freezing their lice and their fleas out there, they, well, that’s how worn out and smelly they were. . . .64

Here is another example of how our second informant drew on images to recall certain episodes in her life: I can see my girlfriend standing before my eyes, we were playing in a yard, playing and sharing our dolls, and so on. And . . . they apprehended her, and shut her up . . . there was a Jewish šiulė there,65 and they shut her up in that Jewish šiulė. I used to go visit her there, those . . . rudaraiščiai [brown-shirts], as they were called. And then, one day, she says, “We’re leaving, we’re going to see our father” (and those fathers, those Jews, had already been killed . . . they had been killed right away). The women sensed it, but they didn’t say anything to the children. We played some more, the two of us. That little Jewish girl had this big doll—such a pretty doll. Then they put her in a truck, and she took that doll with her, even if it was so big, and we said goodbye: “I’m going to see my daddy.” [Pause] An hour later the truck returned, and they threw out that doll, all bloody, well, not bloody, but whatever, I couldn’t tell, but they threw it out of the truck. But I can still see her before my eyes, as she said goodbye: “I’ll be back soon; I’ll see my daddy and I’ll come back.”66

In this narrative we can clearly see that our informant not only emphasizes images, but generates them as well. She creates a distinctly cinematographic scene that could not have taken place in reality—the 64 LTRF cd 573/2. Another informant, who attended and almost graduated from high school, remembers the Germans as follows: “But the Germans—how they were dressed! Their boots . . . those tall boots, their whole uniform, and such helmets! (And the Russians—their feet wrapped in rags . . .) Right away in our yard, right there in the town, they [the Germans] hung mirrors on the fences and right there pulled out their razors and shaved, they . . . well, in a word . . . now that was a well-dressed army! But then, at Stalingrad, they froze and died for who knows what cause.” LTRF cd 575/12. 65 Šiulė—Lithuanian term for Jewish term shul, or “temple” (late nineteenth-century Yiddish, from German Schule “school”). [Trans.] 66 LTRF cd 573/3.

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executioners would not, having shot all the women and children, come back with a bloody doll (presumably pulled from the pile of dead bodies) and thrown it out in the very spot where a seven- or eleven-year-old girl had been waiting for an entire hour. As she tells her story, our informant herself realizes that she has embellished the scene and, for the sake of truth, clarifies that it is her departing friend’s image that she sees before her eyes. This is now, we can see, a worldview shaped not by writing, but also by cinema and television—a filmmaker seeking to use more extreme imagery might have used this kind of detail to indicate the girl’s murder. Indeed, as contemporary sociologist and political scientist Giovanni Sartori has written in describing the people with a predominantly visual understanding of the world, the increasing numbers of such people is undoubtedly connected with the influence of television.67 The most characteristic, indeed representative, of this informant’s narratives, which encapsulates her specific narrative style, is the following one: And then the property . . . while the Jews were still locked up there, in the Jewish šiulė, right away, right away .  .  . And not only with the Jews; the same thing happened in Klaipėda after the war, and here in Šilutė, after the Germans retreated. People went . . . everyone went, and it didn’t matter if the person was a pauper or a farmer—they hitched a young mare and went to Šilutė or to the Jewish homes. If there were some better dishes, or bedding, or anything .  .  . Those Jews were still locked up in the Jewish šiulė (there was this boarded-up Jewish šiulė), and already people were splitting up their property. I can remember it so well, I can see it all before my eyes, how they were dividing it up, then what was left was quickly, šutki mutki, taken to that Jewish šiulė and then, after the Jews had all been shot, or maybe a month later, those baltaraiščiai 68 would hold something up, they would hold up some piece of clothing or bedding, and then, if there was a better item, everyone was shouting, “For me, for me, for me!”—a crowd of hands are reaching up “For me!” And I can remember that there was a down duvet . . . and, like a beggar-child, I stood there watching as the crowd of people began to look as though snow had fallen on them. Everyone grabbed at that duvet, and it started to tear, and they were all covered in feathers, and then it fell . . . 67 Giovanni Sartori, Homo videns: televisione e post pensiere (Roma and Bari: Gius, Laterza and Figli Spa, 1997). 68 Baltaraiščiai (pl.), baltaraištis (“white-armband”)—local people who participated in Nazi-led actions and wore white armbands on their sleeves for identification.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

And when people used to go to Germany,69 they’d come back saying “How many cherries there are there! But you can’t reach them, the trees are so tall, so you cut them down, and they fall, and then you can pick the fruit.”70

Perhaps this is an extreme and too bold an interpretation, but the first time that I heard this narration the image of a riddle (recorded not far away—in the Varniai area, as well as in Kelmė and Viekšniai) came to mind: “Balti pūkeliai po orą laksto (Sniegas) [White fluff floating in the air (Snow)].”71 White fluff in the air and snowdrifts on the ground call forth other associations, related to cherry trees, while the colour of their fruit connects to another riddle that is an echo of an earlier narrative: “Baltas kaip sniegas, žalias kaip dobilas, raudonas kaip kraujas (Vyšnia) [White as snow, green as clover, red as blood (Cherry tree)].”72 The image of a tree cut down with its fruit also recalls a riddle rewritten by Ivinskis from Jokūbas Brodovskis: “Pirma buvau jaunas žalias, paskui patapau kankaluotas, pakirto kumpis koją, kėlė į pilį (Žirniai, dalgis) [First I was young and green, then I became gnarly, the bowed one cut me down at the leg, lifted me up into the castle (Peas, scythe)].”73 In riddle texts referring to horses, even more popular than the word kumelė (“mare”) is the word kumelaitė (“young mare,” diminutive of kumelė);74 the phrase “they hitched a young mare” is used by this informant in several narratives.75 But what is important in the latter narrative is not these motifs echoing from traditional folklore, but the words that seem to have been casually slipped in to suggest that the informant is viewing everything with some distance. These words make it possible to think that the informant sees herself as an observer or a witness—like a camera recording action from which she is somehow detached. It is as though she participates in history, but in a non-central role—that she is a minor character or one who remains off-screen. This is also how the informant sees herself, as when she says that, throughout her life, she never tried to be in first place, but rather quietly floated along.76 In 69 The Klaipėda region historically belonged to Lithuania Minor, or Prussia, which, having long been controlled by Germany, was heavily affected by German culture. 70 LTRF cd 574/1. 71 LTR 6101/347. 72 LTR 37/341. 73 LMD I 710/284. 74 In the riddle database, the word kumelaitė (“young mare,” diminutive of kumelė) appears 497 times, while kumelė (“mare”) appears 204 times. 75 For example, LTRF cd 573/18. 76 LTRF cd 575/3.

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summarizing the story of her life, she said that she was from the lower class, never completed higher studies or saw the great expanses of Russia, and that she “swam along a ripple.”77 Our first informant, on the other hand, did not even think about such things and did not compare herself to anyone. Our second informant believes that in the postwar years the world became “one big mess” that mixed up people’s heads, and that we are still in that state now;78 at the same time she, like our first informant, understands the world as a place marked by some kind of balance. Although her memories are full of the horrors that people of her generation experienced in childhood and youth, retribution exists: the stribai who shot at holy statues are themselves shot;79 the sister of an NKVD agent who tortured an innocent high school student later tries to get rid of her child and is punished;80 a baltaraištis who returns from the scene of the crime and begins to live well off Jewish gold, but is belittled by all because both Jew-killers and stribai were seen as second-class humans;81 because of the moral choices she made in her youth, our informant received the respect of those around her82 and was blessed by good children.83 It seems that as children all people—regardless of their level of education, life experience, and understanding of the world around them—enjoy stories with happy endings, and want to believe that the world is ruled by principles of balance. * * * In her comparison of the autobiographical narratives of two famous informants from the southern Lithuanian region of Dzūkija— Anelė Čepukienė and Rožė Sabaliauskienė—Vilma Daugirdaitė concludes that “the manner of narration itself indicates whether the informant belongs to the singing or narrating tradition.”84 Kaivola-Bregenhøj makes a similar point: “Narrative research shows that aspects of an informant’s life history and personality are reflected in their narrative style and repertoire. On the 77 78 79 80

LTRF cd 575/2. LTRF cd 573/19. LTRF cd 574/8. LTRF cd 573/21. NKVD agent—officer of the Soviet security forces, called by their acronym “NKVD” (later “KGB”). 81 LTRF cd 574/5. 82 LTRF cd 575/3. 83 LTRF cd 575/1. 84 Vilma Daugirdaitė, “Folklorinės patirties apraiškos gyvenimo pasakojimuose,” Tautosakos darbai 32 (2006): 223.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

other hand, a narrator is not only an individual, but a product of the culture in which they lived.”85 Having presented a comparison of my two informants, I would further argue that an individual’s narrative style reflects whether their worldview is connected more to hearing or sight. This research indicates that a person who has a more auditory understanding of their surroundings—homo audiens—is more likely to remember and pass on traditional folklore texts. A person who has a predominantly sight-oriented understanding—homo videns—remembers only fragments and motifs of traditional oral folklore, but has a tendency to creatively play with them and incorporate them into new texts. While the informant who remembers traditional texts better and has a more aural grasp of her environment is semi-literate, the informant who has a visually oriented understanding and has almost completely forgotten traditional texts is literate. As KaivolaBregenhøj writes, “[In] general, the memories of illiterates, and others who primarily use oral or other forms of communication, are remarkably precise memories.”86 It is worth noting that most of the individuals who provided riddles in the Rietavas area were born at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, and some of them around 1930 (as were the two women discussed here). This period between two centuries is generally seen as a major turning point in terms of technology, culture, and human thinking. One of the changes driving these shifts was the spread of literacy from elite levels of society to the wider population: we could say that in Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century the information revolution occurred in the lives of most oral folk artists who were more or less literate. It is difficult to imagine the degree of cultural, psychological, ethical, and aesthetic change that resulted from this rise in literacy.87

It seems that, with some extremes, these changes were also reflected in poetic folk culture: on the one hand, military-historical songs began to include more realistic and naturalistic representation;88 on the other 85 Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, “Pasakojimas ir pasakojimo pateikimas,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 (2005): 210. 86 Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, “Pasakojimas ir pasakojimo pateikimas,” Tautosakos darbai 30 (2005): 180. 87 Vita Ivanauskaitė, “Folklorinės tradicijos kaitos ypatumai,” Tautosakos darbai 18/25 (2003): 17. 88 Vita Ivanauskaitė, “Naujos folkloro kūrybos tendencijos karinėse-istorinėse dainose (XIX a. pabaiga–XX a. pradžia),” in Lietuvių liaudies dainynas, vol. 17: Karinės-istorinės

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hand, romantic, highly sentimental, popular songs [romansai], also quickly became extremely popular (and later almost completely pushed archaic songs out of use). In a review of the ninth volume of the Lithuanian folksong collection (comprising military-historical songs), Daiva Vaitkevičienė offers a brief summary of editor Pranė Jokimaitienė’s insight about how, contrary to older military songs, more recent ones are marked by naturalistic representations of battle fields and death, and concludes: “Such transformations indicate not only a change in manner of expression, but much deeper shifts in Lithuanian culture.”89 It appears that increasingly large numbers of people have a predominantly visual grasp of the world. The democratization of print and literacy is likely one of the causes of this. Others could be the disturbing horrors of the two World Wars and the postwar years, and the influence of film and television, in which images can communicate more, or at least with more impact. The Italian writer Umberto Eco was born in 1932 and therefore belongs to the same generation; his 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana describes a contemporary character affected by amnesia who, while sifting through old comic books, newspapers, and books in the attic of his youth, gradually reconstructs memories from the same period as the one discussed by the informants interviewed for this study. In the introduction to his 1959 book Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm), Czeslaw Milosz, who was born in 1911 in what is now Lithuanian territory, writes: Today, I would define my goal differently. There is a new organ, which we may call the telescopic eye, that perceives simultaneously not only different points of the globe but also different moments in time; the motion picture created it in all my contemporaries. And I, more often than my contemporaries, had to make use of it, tossed as I was from one civilization into another, from high-pressure areas into low, and vice versa. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 seen through the eyes of a child and a foreigner, to New Mexico and the coast of California, I have wandered through zones of storm and calm, heat and cold. New images canceled out none of the old and, strictly speaking, I

dainos, book 3, ed. Vita Ivanauskaitė and Aušra Žičkienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2003), 13. 89 Daiva Vaitkevičienė, “Mirties perspektyva karinėse-istorinėse dainose: apžvelgiant ‘Lietuvių liaudies dainyno’ IX tomą,” Tautosakos darbai 5/12 (1996): 264.

Predominant Modes of Perception and Folk Narrative

do not see them in chronological order as if on a strip of film, but in parallel, colliding with one another, overlapping.90

Perhaps because images are beginning to dominate both as external irritants as well as internal means of preserving and recreating memories, we are less and less able to remember orally transmitted traditional folklore pieces. But folklore is always adapting to contexts, evolving, and looking for new spaces: today it is taking the shape of the little pictures and maxims that thrive on the internet, or the graffiti drawings and texts that, despite prohibitions and fines, appear during the night on city walls.

90 Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 3.

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Chapter 2

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History: Reconstructing Mental Landscapes in Autobiographical Narratives Radvilė Racėnaitė

Introduction With the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, the natural development of this Baltic state was interrupted. This resulted in a profound shift in the country’s political, social, and cultural life, and countless individual losses and traumas throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In order to eliminate resistance to both the totalitarian regime itself and to the communist regime’s large-scale program of urbanization, industrialization, forced collectivization, and intensive farming of confiscated private land, the Soviet authorities carried out waves of mass deportations of Lithuanian citizens. Such policies also had a dramatic impact on the rural landscape and traditional way of life: tens of thousands people were forced to abandon their homes in villages and relocate to towns and cities. Until then, as Lithuanian literary scholar Vigmantas Butkus writes:

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

There had never been a time in Lithuanian history when the country’s topographical makeup—its urban and architectural landscapes, its rural panoramas, its countryside, and, in short, all of its spaces—had been so rapidly changed and altered; as a result of a radical shift of values, topographical spaces lost their substantive, essential dimensions and gradually acquired functional ones deliberately tailored to specific uses.1

Like an open wound, these dramatic political, social, and cultural changes pulsate in Lithuanians’ experiential memory to this day. The traumatic experiences they caused still play an active role in shaping a painful relationship to the past—a relationship that is explored in literary works and academic research. The Lithuanian relationship with the landscape is therefore not only related to events directly experienced within it; it must also be considered in relation to existential experiences generated by historical cataclysms. Only then can the perceived environment be assessed—not only in relation to its direct adaptation to common farming activities, but as a component of mentality, worldview, and beliefs, and as a point of reference for ethical and moral values; this makes it possible to compare and contrast what life was like in earlier times and how it is now— to understand what remains important and what has irretrievably changed. Subjective, experiential relationships with the world and its visible forms are especially well revealed in works of memoir and autobiographical narratives, in which the visible landscape is not only a static background for recalled events, but also becomes a dynamically reflected existential being that bears witness to lived and experienced incidents. The material we are examining here is multifaceted. First of all, we draw on the autobiographic narratives of two of the best-known Lithuanian folklore informants, both of whom were from the southeastern ethnographic region of Dzūkija: Anelė Čepukienė (1904–1980) and Petras Zalanskas (1900–1980). Their texts about personal experiences of the landscape were first self-recorded, and then later, with the efforts of folklorists, published. While these texts to some degree approach artistic creation, they are also distinct reflections of the Lithuanian folk worldview; they contain elements of folkloric style and passages of traditional folkloric works.

1 Vigmantas Butkus, “Literatūros topografija: (poli)metodologinės trajektorijos (Teoriniai apmatai topografinės tapatybės ir topografinės vaizduotės studijoms lietuvių literatūroje),” Colloquia 21 (2008): 11–12.

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Secondly, we examine the autobiographical narratives of two Lithuanian literary writers with roots in the western ethnographic region of Žemaitija. Marcelijus Martinaitis (1936–2013) was one of Lithuania’s most important twentieth-century poets and essayists. A longtime lecturer in literature and folklore studies at Vilnius University and a recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts (1998), Martinaitis published stories from his own life, works of memoir, and letters, in particular a deliberate, extended correspondence with Viktorija Daujotytė (b. 1945), a literary scholar and fellow National Prize for Culture and Arts recipient. Although Martinaitis is well known as a poet, following the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, a shift occurred in his writing—he produced less poetry and published a series of books of autobiographical essays in which he could unburden himself in a manner that was more acceptable in the “interpretive community that existed at the turn of the century,” and which allowed him to develop an “ethnographic identity narrative.”2 Both Daujotytė and Martinaitis stress their traditional rural origins and their connections to native culture, which each considers an essential component of their sense of self; they consciously explore related experiences and personal memories, and analyze shifts in the Lithuanian nation’s collective memories of the land. Almost every astute scholar who has studied Martinaitis’s oeuvre has noted his general “connection to folk culture” and identified “codes and layers of native culture” in his writing that can help people understand “the characteristic notions of the Lithuanian and Žemaitija regions’ people’s native culture.”3 Researchers have also argued that Martinaitis’s autobiographical works are foundational twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that helped to shape and explore Lithuanian identity and understanding of self; his works “highlight the universal nature of native culture, attempt to dig down to its roots, describe its meanings and its lows and highs, and reconstruct certain states of consciousness and self-awareness.”4 2

Akvilė Rėklaitytė-Kraniauskienė, “Marcelijaus Martinaičio poetinė antropologija” (PhD diss., Vilniaus universitetas and Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2017), 220–221. 3 Viktorija Daujotytė, Boružė, ropojanti plentu. Prigimtinės kultūros kasinėjimai Marcelijaus Martinaičio kūryboje (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2013), 43. 4 Jūratė Sprindytė, “Marcelijaus Martinaičio esė: lietuvių mentaliteto rekonstrukcijos bandymas,” in Archaika ir modernybė: Marcelijus Martinaitis laikų sąvartose (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2008), 68 and 70.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

This contrast in our chosen research objects—two rural people from the Dzūkija region and two intellectual literary figures from Žemaitija— necessarily raises certain methodological questions. All of these authors— both the two prominent Dzūkija region folklore informants Čepukienė and Zalanskas (who were still directly connected to the old agrarian worldview of village people) and the two intellectual Žemaitija-born writers Martinaitis and Daujotytė (who apply a researcher’s focus to explorations of the nature of folkloric selfhood) are connected by the fact that they represent not only the classical rural community as a space for traditional, anonymous oral literature. Perhaps even more importantly, they are also representatives of the culture of the written and printed word, and of forms of expression that are to a lesser or greater degree individual. All four are therefore creative people in a way that distinguishes them from the usual folklore informant. Although the research material we collected reveals certain differences of mentality, literary knowledge, and writing skill, the texts we examined are connected by the fact that, through one aspect or another, they all reveal the rural person’s particular attitude toward the visible, natural, and traditional rural environment; they examine changes in worldview related to the decline of the old agrarian landscape and the emergence of a new attitude toward the surrounding world. Our analysis of autobiographical narratives will also seek to reveal how and which components of the visible environment are transformed, through experiential self-reflection, into constituent parts of a mental landscape, and which features of the visible world are highlighted as important within the mental plane. We will also ask what is the memoirist’s axiological relationship to the landscape and how mental-values mechanisms function (in terms of practical relationship to landscape, aestheticization of landscape, and nostalgic idealization of landscape). We will explore how and to what degree the evolution of attitudes to the changing landscape are reflected in narratives of an autobiographical nature, and the general degree to which the development of those attitudes has been affected by the historical and sociocultural processes of the modern era.

The relevance of the question and methodological assumptions behind a study of mental landscapes In the second half of the twentieth century, as academic research horizons broadened and interdisciplinary methodological approaches multiplied,

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the so-called spatial turn occurred: closer attention began to be paid to questions around interactions between geographical environment and images related to worldview. The resulting studies brought together numerous disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, including the geography of religion, environmental psychology, literary topography, and humanistic geography. A good number of these methodologies were influenced by phenomenology, which argues that objects and phenomena in the world can be known only to the degree that they reveal themselves and allow themselves to be known by a subjective observing consciousness. According to the American philosopher Edward C. Casey, who studies the phenomenology of space and place, landscape is important to phenomenology because we first of all experience our world as a spatial volume, so any objects within it can only be grasped as existing when they occupy a specific place.5 Everything that we do is in some way framed in space within the concrete places that we live in, interact with others, and die: “[To] be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place.”6 For that reason, place is as vitally important to us as the air that we breathe, the land that we stand on, and the bodies that we live in.7 However, as Estonian philosopher Tõnu Viik points out, “the physical objects on a terrain are just there” and they “can be meaningful as belonging to something . . . only if somebody views and understands them in such a way.”8 This occurs when a “spatial formation (a region of space, or a territory) . . . obtains specific meaning that defines them as landscape, home, or country.”9 Our understanding of landscape is shaped by a certain existential experience of a place, by our earliest sensations, by the first ways in which we experience ourselves in a place and in the world.10 Thus, in Viik’s words, “landscape is a way of seeing, rather than an object that is seen.”11

5 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), 4. 6 Ibid., IX. 7 Ibid. 8 Tõnu Viik, “Human Spatiality: A Cultural Phenomenology of Landscapes and Places,” Problemos 79 (2011): 103. 9 Ibid. 10 Viktorija Daujotytė, “Kraštovaizdis ir ‘vietos dvasia’ literatūros klasikoje,” Colloquia 21 (2008): 35. 11 Viik, “Human Spatiality,” 105.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

It is noteworthy that the mental understanding of landscape is related to the cultural memory of place and what Pierre Nora has termed lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory.12 One must concur that the capacity to remember is, first of all, a given of human consciousness. Understanding of the past is possible only because people are able to systematically notice and retain what they experience, and then, as needed, to return this information from the depths of memory to the level of conscious thought. Thus the phenomenon of memory lies in the “constructive, social and argumentative nature” of the process of remembering.13 Such memories do not reproduce the past, but rather interpret it in the present, because “we do not remember the things themselves but our experiences of them, which we must actualize and understand in the content of our present reality.”14 And when memories survive in people’s thoughts in a latent form, and when they are deliberately remembered, memory acquires a certain narrative structure. In other words, memory is a narration about the past. As a kind of displacement within the flow of time, memory is always related to the dimensions of both space and place. It is not only the localization of an entirety of memories within the symbolic space of a person’s consciousness, but also the association of separate memories with concrete places in which memorable events have occurred. When we explore, in depth, the mental dispersal of landscape within autobiographical narratives, we always come face to face with an object-like and physically real image of the residential area, river, hill, or plain mentioned in the narrative.15 These kinds of landscape objects therefore retain their geocultural duality: they are at once related to both visible physical reality and culture. In addition to an objectively visible form of expression, environments that appear in memories also contain rich meanings that are related to the landscape’s cultural dimension, and are full of symbolic content, meanings, and values

12 Cf.: Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in Representations 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (1989), 7–24. 13 Ulla-Maija Peltonen and Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, “Memory and Narration: Interdisciplinary Discussions of Oral History Methodology,” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 32/4 (2007): 5. 14 Dalius Jonkus, “Kūrybiškumo psichologija ir fenomenologija Vosyliaus Sezemano estetikoje,” Filosofija. Sociologija 26, no. 14 (2015): 59–60. 15 Olga Lavrenova, Semantika kul′turnogo landshafta: Avtoreferat disertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni doktora filosofskikh nauk (Moscow: Rosiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2010), 26.

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that the local community has attributed to it.16 It is therefore possible to say that visible landscape in a sense provides a spatial framework for cultural memory. Because memory is selective, certain spaces in memories are singled out from others, and, as a result, acquire particular significance and importance in relation to the remaining space, with objects within landscapes becoming vessels for people’s significant memories. This kind of spatial structuring of the world in a sense “preserves” and guarantees the survival of traditional memory mechanisms. In short, land, its surface, and remarkable natural or cultural landscape places not only become conditions for the emergence of narratives about them, but provide an impetus for repeatedly remembering and retelling them. We can therefore say that it is not only human beings that create narratives about the landscape around them; the objects within it also generate certain meanings, which are then included in the narrations.

Landscape axiology: between pragmatic attitude and aesthetic insight Contemporary research has shown that attitudes that were still shaped in the traditional countryside indicate a rather reserved relationship between the individual and the nature surrounding them, more impressive landscape formations, and cultural landscape monuments.17 Lithuanian researchers have described how strange it is when, during fieldwork, “a local person does not seem to be affected by the aesthetic landscape features of their native area, that it does not seem to matter to them,” and, “even when asked how they feel about the nature that surrounds them, do not express any fascination with it or any emotions about what makes their living environment unique.”18 It is certainly worth asking what determines this kind of reserved relationship to landscape—whether it is a new, “modern,” attitude or, indeed, an expression of traditional views that seems remarkable under new historical conditions in which the goal of and need for aestheticizing 16 Anna Górka, “Krajobraz kulturowy wsi jako nośnik mitu,” Prace Komisji Krajobrazu Kulturowego 15 (2011): 248. 17 Bronė Stundžienė, “Žemaičių folklorinė atmintis,” Tautosakos darbai 34 (2007): 35–37. 18 Eadem, “Empatiškoji kultūrinio kraštovaizdžio versija: folklorinis aspektas,” Tautosakos darbai 42 (2011): 20.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

life, the ability to give in to aesthetic perception, and to find these things not only in the cultural sphere but in the landscape, is a matter of course. Some of our concerns have been examined in considerable depth by Lithuanian folklorist Bronė Stundžienė. In our view, she has grasped the nature of the barely suggested and unarticulated reserved attitude that some informants revealed with regards to their surroundings: [The] local person who has spent their life in what were still truly agrarian cultural conditions . . . is connected to their native land in some other way— certainly not through a relationship of aesthetic satisfaction, but rather a more meaningful one of having coalesced with it. The peasant mentality neither has a concept for expressing any internal connection with it (and often over more than one generation), nor, as we would say today, was any effort needed to verbalize this feeling. It was some kind of deeper connection, one related to worldview, and, rather, expressed through a person’s attitude, behavior, and work. It was a relationship that was not spoken about but simply lived; for this reason, to someone observing from the side, it could seem more practical, materialized, and almost workaday, though for that same person it was all the more real and more deeply grasped.19

In their literary letters, the scholar Viktorija Daujotytė and the poet Marcelijus Martinaitis more than once discussed this question of the rural person’s different relationship to landscape aesthetics. Writing to the poet, Daujotytė says: “You have probably experienced it—when that feeling for nature, that attachment to a certain tree or corner of a meadow is laughable to a rural person”; she goes on to elaborate on how, “after all, in the country you can’t simply walk around for no reason,” and how, in general, it is not common to talk “about what is beautiful—only a specific flower or fabric can be beautiful. A day is considered beautiful when the hay is drying; the rain falls nicely when it waters a freshly planted garden,” and homesteads are beautiful “when they are precisely arranged”20 or for the “convenient” arrangement between their buildings, with ideal distances “from the cottage to the well, the orchard, and the garden.”21 But nor should we over-emphasize this, shall we say, practical and efficient relationship to the natural environment and its forms as an essential 19 Ibid., 20–21. 20 Marcelijus Martinaitis, Prilenktas prie savo gyvenimo: kalbino ir kalbėjosi Viktorija Daujotytė (Vilnius: Vyturys, 1998), 43. 21 Daujotytė, “Kraštovaizdis,” 38.

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aspect of the traditional worldview. There is no question that the individual with traditional consciousness saw and felt the beauty of the world and was capable of expressing it. This is thoroughly illustrated by the wealth of poetic means of expression that folklore presents as an artistic system: the decorative color and detailed ornament of folk craft tools and household objects, buildings, furniture, hand-woven textiles, folk religious art, as well as the above-mentioned architectural aesthetics of the harmonious homestead plan and so on. This kind of aesthetic sensibility is especially evident when examining the autobiographical works of two of the most talented twentieth-century folklore informants, Anelė Čepukienė and Petras Zalanskas, who are remarkable for their imagination and aesthetic sense of their surroundings, and worldview. Čepukienė’s vignette “Ežeras” (The Lake), about the beloved lake at her native village of Puodžiai, is recognized by both folklorists and literary scholars alike as a sensitive and poetic hymn to the beauty of the world.22 While Čepukienė emotionally extols the lake, its waters, and the landscape around it during the different seasons, she focuses the greater part of her efforts to describing it during the summer months. This, too, is natural, because that is when people spend much more time outside and feel a closer connection to the natural world. Moreover, when observing a place “during different times of the year—different months and days, in daylight and nighttime—it becomes possible to grasp the time of a place, not so much with regards to increasing age, but in terms of the periods and moments when that place most distinguishes itself from its surroundings, when it is replete with life and content.”23 So, too, the landscape that Čepukienė observes most lends itself to experiences during the summer; that it when it is most impressive, when it sees lush vegetation and the most active life forms. At the same time, this objective apprehension of the visible world, 22 Norbertas Vėlius, “Dainininkė Anelė Čepukienė,” in Oi tu kregždele: Anelės Čepukienės tautosakos ir kūrybos rinktinė, ed. Norbertas Vėlius (Vilnius: Vaga, 1973), 273; Viktorija Daujotytė, Prigimtinės kultūros ratilai, ed. Daiva Vaitkevičienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2017), 99. It is worth noting that Lithuania is blessed with a remarkable number of bodies of water. The country’s territory contains around 3,000 lakes, 30,000 rivers and streams, and, before the Soviet government’s mid-twentieth-century land reclamation program, it contained vast areas of wetlands and marshes. Traditional rural habitations were, therefore, both naturally and for practical reasons, situated near bodies of water—a proximity that inevitably shaped local inhabitants’ worldviews and understanding of their environment. 23 Vykintas Vaitkevičius, “Kraštovaizdžio skaitymas su patirties žodynu,” Liaudies kultūra 4 (2012): 57.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

this close observation of a specific landscape element and the seasonal shifts within nature create the conditions for metaphysical experiences, and narratives describing them, to occur. In Čepukienė’s text the summer landscape is framed within the description of a single day, with the calm experienced by the lake in the early morning and late evening providing moments of apotheosis. She goes to the lake in the morning, when other people are still asleep: I run down to the lake early in the morning, and stand on the dock looking around. What a lovely scene—it is like the earth’s eye! The lake sleeps so peacefully, without a ripple, as though it were dreaming sweet, ancient dreams. I bend down to wash, and am about to wet my hands, when I stop, because I see myself, the trees, and the sky—all of it so clearly. I become frightened, because it looks so deep, like that other world that the old folks told stories about. And the clouds float by, one after another, bigger and smaller, grey and white, like little groups of sheep without a shepherd. I can see the dawn reddening, the sun poking out like the most beautiful golden ball.24

No less impressive and painterly is Čepukienė’s description of the lake on a calm summer evening as night approaches: It is beautiful in the daytime, but no less so in the evening. The water is once again preparing to sleep. All creatures become quiet, there is no movement on the water, no one is rowing. Only some laughter or the occasional song can be heard. The water lays calm and quiet, with only some ducks shouting and swimming in long cords, like a beaded necklace stretched out in the middle of the lake. The moon is going for a swim, and the twinkling stars look like they too want to take a dip in the warm evening water. This is also when the women go for a swim, after they have put their children to sleep. In the dark they too, like the ducks, let out subdued shouts.25

Čepukienė’s vignette clearly indicates that the cyclical experience of nature is important to Lithuanian country folk, while, just as in Lithuanian mythology, the sky’s lanterns—the sun and the moon—fulfill the functions

24 Oi tu kregždele: Anelės Čepukienės tautosakos ir kūrybos rinktinė, ed. Norbertas Vėlius (Vilnius: Vaga, 1973), 194. 25 Ibid., 197–198.

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of regulating the times of the day and the year.26 This small work presents images of the lake and its shores not only in the different seasons, but at different times of the day, reinforcing how the lake offers ever different experiences depending upon the season. But while the text illustrates the importance of the cyclically changing lake to this village community, here it is also viewed from Čepukienė’s own, very personal and intimate, point of view. By revealing how dear the empathic moments she experiences by the lake are to her, the author in a sense takes ownership of it, transforming it from an objective landscape element that exists in her everyday life into a participant in her subjective, internal life. This is because, as Lithuanian philosopher Arūnas Sverdiolas puts it, visible space that has been filled with personal existential content is “fundamentally connected with the self, with the I—it is oriented, centered, or egocentric: it is based on a certain point of view, that of the I”; for this reason spatial objects are seen from the point of view where I is, from a position determined by the I’s body and consciousness.27 How the lake, as a concrete place, is seen is to some degree based on the mythological worldview’s dualistic universalities: the warm time of the year (spring and summer)–the cold time of the year (fall and winter); day– night; sun–moon; high (sky)–low (lake). With the exception of the seasons, these pairs are not set up as strict oppositions, but in a sense make up two parts of a whole that are related to one another through the principles of complementation and echoing, rather than polarity. In this sense, the last pair—high (sky)–low (lake)—is especially interesting. In each of the above cited passages, about the lake in early morning and late evening, Čepukienė writes that the dome of the sky surrounds the lake and is reflected in its waters: in the morning she “can see the dawn reddening, the sun poking out like the most beautiful golden ball” and observes “the sky reflected in the lake—everything so clear”; in the evening “[the moon goes] for a swim, and the twinkling stars look like they too want to take a dip in the warm evening water.” It is as though the lake were drawing the sky down to itself, pulling its heavenly lights into itself. Of course, this implied juxtaposition of the surface of the water with a mirror is natural and founded on the fact that each possesses a reflective surface. On the other hand, in this way the lake 26 Lina Būgienė, “Mitinis vandens įprasminimas lietuvių sakmėse, padavimuose ir tikėjimuose,” Tautosakos darbai 11/18 (1999): 65, 72. 27 Arūnas Sverdiolas, Steigtis ir sauga: kultūros filosofijos etiudai (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996), 291.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

also becomes identified with the sky and acquires some of the sky’s symbolic qualities of heavenly purity, which, in turn, reinforces our understanding of it as a place that is good for people to be in. This kind of understanding of the lake—what could be considered a topophilic28 definition—is expressed in the phrase “people feel good when they are by the lake.”29 Nor can we dismiss the point that this poetic comparison of the lake and the sky is also connected to literary clichés, which are common in texts by Čepukienė and most other self-taught writers.30 Nevertheless, one is still inclined to also see a certain mythological commitment on Čepukienė’s part—that she is offering her own interpretation of Lithuanian place legends about lakes having descended from the sky and therefore having retained an implicit, close connection to the heavens. It is also clear that the lake is not only admired for its beauty, but is appreciated for the benefits it offers people throughout the year.31 The writer stresses that the lake is crucial to human life—that they are all dependent on it, because “no one can live without water.”32 The lake water is used every day for watering animals, washing laundry, swimming, and fishing. And the lake is just as important on holidays, “when you won’t find a single person in their cottage—they are all at the lake, so strong is its attraction.”33 Some row their boats, others gather by the water’s edge to chat, play, or listen to others playing music, to sing or to dance. And in winter they travel across its frozen ice. In other words, “the village is completely attached to the lake, which surrounds us like some kind of treasure.”34 There are many places in Čepukienė’s text where we can sense that a kind of symbiotic connection has formed between the lake and the villagers, one that provides both spiritual and practical benefits. It appears that this type of relationship with the lake reflects certain principles of worldview. As Lina Leparskienė, who has studied the experiences of people living in 28 Topophilia—a concept coined by a prominent Chinese-US human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, is a strong sense of place, which often becomes mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place. See: Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs and London: Prentice-Hall, 1974). 29 Oi tu kregždele, 196. 30 Vėlius, “Dainininkė Anelė Čepukienė,” 274. 31 Ibid. 32 Oi tu kregždele, 194. 33 Ibid., 197. 34 Ibid., 194.

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the small town of Trakai (a region known for its numerous lakes) has noted, on the one hand, the lake becomes the focal point of the landscape, around which both everyday and spiritual activities circle. The lake determines “the development, economic activities, lifestyle, and leisure activities” of the habitation that has formed around it.35 On the other hand, Leparskienė stresses that her informants, like Čepukienė, express the importance of “attachment to places, time, and experiences that belong to the early periods of their lives and are connected to their place of birth,” when the lake is enjoyed as though it were still being seen through the eyes of a marveling child,36 when life by the water shapes a way of thinking, habits, humor, and sense of place.37 She notes that paralinguistic elements such as onomatopoeic interjections, sighs, speaking slowly to emphasize the meaning of a sentence, and the pondering of what is being said indicate that “the size of the lake is not so much a concrete but an emotional parameter”38 and that “the large expanse of the waters is almost reduced to our shore, thus adapting it to the smaller space of everyday life.”39 Čepukienė describes Puodžiai Lake as though it were almost a sentient being that responds to people’s worries and expectations—the lake tries to make the lives of people living by it more comfortable, while the people who appreciate the lake’s beauty and bounty closely associate their lives with it. It could be said that the lake centers the villagers’ everyday life, simultaneously becoming a kind of ontological center near which they have aesthetic experiences that are crucial to their spiritual lives. It is important to note that the passage discussed, about the lake during the summer, illustrates that this kind of experience of the beauty of the world is only possible when one can at least briefly retreat from everyday concerns—by going to the lake either early in the morning, before preparations for the day begin, or else in the late evening (when all the chores have been completed and it is possible to find a moment for oneself), or during a holiday, when one is not supposed to work and therefore has time for rest. This kind of brief moment of respite makes it

35 Lina Leparskienė, “Trakų lokalinio pasaulio refleksijos žmonių pasakojimuose” (PhD diss., Vilniaus universitetas, 2016), 182. 36 Ibid., 152. 37 Ibid., 182. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 156.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

possible to reflect upon one’s surroundings—to see not only the usefulness of the surrounding nature, but also its beauty. The original writing and worldview of another well-known folklore informant, Petras Zalanskas, offers an even more striking example of someone expressing appreciation of their surroundings. Scholars who have examined Zalanskas’s oeuvre have noted that his especially deep spiritual connection to nature—to plants, birds, and animals—was indeed physically felt. Zalanskas loved the “flourishing, prospering earth,” which “sends all the life forms out to live, then grows and feeds them, and later welcomes them back to rest,” and, equally, “the sun, and the sky up high, which is connected with the endless greatness and eternity of the universe.” Overall, Zalanskas can, “without exaggeration, be called a man of the sky, sun, light, and day,” because, “of all the bright things in the sky he best liked the sun, of the seasons—summer, of the hours—daytime, and of the day—midday.”40 Like Čepukienė, Zalanskas was especially fond of sunny spring and summer days, when nature is all abuzz and plant life is revived. There is therefore nothing strange that Zalanskas experienced the world as being so full of life force and activity, as both alive and enlivened. It is worth noting that, in his small works, this impression of the life surrounding him is first of all created by according material elements and living creatures with bright human emotions and exalted feelings: Oh, how the dear black earth waits for that bright, dear sun, for it to first warm up the loose dirt so that the black, loose earth could grow all sorts of flowers, all sorts of grasses, so that the black earth could adorn itself with all the beauty of spring, and all the people’s hearts should flower with that beauty that comes from the bright sun. Not only will the dear folk revel in nature’s beauty, but so will all the little creatures of the forest who, while the earth was cold, had no shelter, and all those little bugs that were frozen into balls all winter. And when the warm spring comes and the bright sun gives heat, then beautiful nature awakens all the little creatures from their sleep. . . . And what joy there is when they all start to live life again!41

40 Norbertas Vėlius, “Petras Zalanskas—pasakotojas,” in Čiulba ulba sakalas: Petro Zalansko tautosakos ir atsiminimų rinktinė, ed. Norbertas Vėlius and Danutė Krištopaitė, (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008), 68. 41 Čiulba ulba sakalas: Petro Zalansko tautosakos ir atsiminimų rinktinė, ed. Norbertas Vėlius and Danutė Krištopaitė (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008), 347.

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During exceptional moments in his life, Zalanskas’s love for specific objects and creatures in nature would “flow into one boundless sense of the beauty of the world, and then he would say, with great emotion: ‘Oh world, my world, how beautiful you are!’”42 We could say, therefore, that Petras Zalanskas’s sense of the world around him thoroughly surpasses average aesthetic perceptions of landscape and acquires descriptive power. His capacity to see his environment encompasses the universality of the world lived in by humans—from the earth, with all of its life forms, to the brightly shining dome of the sky. This is especially evident in Zalanskas’s “Psalmė apie Gudo šalies grožybes” (Psalm about the Beauty of the Gudas Land),43 which extols virtually all of the area’s most distinctive landscape features. The “Psalm”44 enumerates all of the topoi that were important to country folk: from objects that were part of the general, larger landscape macrostructure to the tiniest detail of the micro-world.45 The traditional spatial worldview, organically combining the spheres of nature and culture— islands, forests, trees, berries, roads, open roads, hills, “babbling pools,” lagoons, rivers, streams, orchards, rye fields, green fields, cemeteries (where parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents rest), “our holy church,” roadside crosses, the sky high above, the sun, the moon, and the stars are thus revealed to us. And we can see that elements of nature that have been cultured by people—roads, orchards, worked fields, hayed meadows— belong to the cultural sphere in the direct sense of the word. Another set of objects that have an important place in Zalanskas’s writing consists of landscape elements related to spiritual life: church, cross, cemeteries. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the old Dzūkija region and the Lithuanian countryside in general were consistently made up of communities of believers whose members prayed as they had been taught to from childhood, and devotedly accepted the religious authority of priests 42 Modesta Liugaitė-Černiauskienė, “Petro Zalansko pasaulėjauta ir aplinka,” in Čiulba ulba sakalas: Petro Zalansko tautosakos ir atsiminimų rinktinė, ed. Norbertas Vėlius and Danutė Krištopaitė (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008), 25. 43 Gudo šalis [Gudas land]—a portion of the Čepkeliai marshland in southern Lithuania, where the men of neighboring villages would go to hay. A wet zone of old stumps, it differed considerably from the surrounding landscape’s fields and forests. 44 Čiulba ulba sakalas, 336–345. 45 According to Viktorija Daujotytė, “the landscape has its macrostructure, which is defined by hills, open roads, large forests and bodies of water, the sky.” The micro-world or “landscape micro-structures” are made up of homesteads, single trees, wells, paths, and small bodies of water (Daujotytė, “Kraštovaizdis,” 45).

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

and village sages; for country folk, the Catholic church served as “the vertical axis of [their] lives and a sacral sphere, so that they were enveloped by a feeling of holiness.”46 People living in the recent past were also surrounded by small works of sacral architecture; these were among the most distinct visual elements within the traditional agrarian spatial structure, and they organically blended into the traditional Lithuanian rural landscape. As Skaidrė Urbonienė points out: Whether the rural person was working, traveling, or resting, they always saw a cross or a wayside shrine or roofed pillar shrine, from any of which it seemed that Jesus, Mary, and the saints were observing human life. Sacral structures containing images of the saints were located on homestead properties or near them, as well as in fields, rises, crossroads, and dangerous, frightening places. People therefore encountered images of the saints not only in church on holy days, but also in their everyday lives.47

The abundance of these manifestations of rural folk religiosity is especially revealed in Zalanskas’s “Psalm about the Beauty of the Gudas Land,” in which “the worship of God is born from a boundless—verging on ecstatic—sense of the beauty, complexity, abundance, and fertility of nature.48 In this work, which is made up of twenty-eight parts, Zalanskas explains how to “worship God anywhere and how to thank God for His holy gifts,” and for nature’s beauty.49 The “Psalm” thanks God, who created the world’s diversity, for various objects in the natural and cultural landscape: the lights in the sky, the plants, the animals, the birds, and the fish, all the while listing each one’s most detailed characteristics and singular traits. This kind of attitude reinforces the idea of the holiness of all of nature and points out its origins in “the very structure of the world’s phenomena.”50 We can see that, “[for] religious man, nature is never only ‘natural’; it is always fraught with a religious value” and for that reason, the natural environment always means something beyond itself; the opposite is also true, that “supernatural things” are inseparably connected to “that which 46 Liugaitė-Černiauskienė, “Petro Zalansko pasaulėjauta ir aplinka,” 26. 47 Skaidrė Urbonienė, “Šventųjų atvaizdai kasdienybėje: vieta, prasmė ir funkcijų transformacijos,” Lietuvos etnologija: socialinės antropologijos ir etnologijos studijos 5/14 (2005): 155. 48 Liugaitė-Černiauskienė, “Petro Zalansko pasaulėjauta ir aplinka,” 29. 49 Čiulba ulba sakalas, 336–345. 50 Gintaras Beresnevičius, introduction to Šventybė ir pasaulietiškumas by Mircea Eliade, (Vilnius: Mintis, 1997), XI.

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is natural.”51 It is only in this way—through the visible world—that we can experience the invisible mystery of the sacred. In addition to this sacral dimension, Zalanskas’s texts are marked by the aforementioned traditional view of the landscape offering concrete uses. For example, while describing the beauty of nature, Zalanskas does not forget to mention the practical medicinal uses of plants; he indicates what they can heal and lists their medicinal properties: And now I will write about another type of red berry—cranberries. They grow in wet spots, groves of sparse birches, where there is white moss. Those red cranberries lay themselves out on the white mosses, their droopy leaves looking like those of the green rue. But how many berries those thin stems can grow, how many red berries can ripen on them. All the cottages, villages, towns and cities gather these red berries. And how many vitamins they contain—A, B, C, and D. How many diseases they can heal.52

It is noteworthy that this kind of transition from emotionally charged exaltation in nature to a practical attitude and listing of concrete, useful properties is natural and automatic in autobiographical narratives by folklore informants. This kind of practical and instrumental relationship with the landscape belongs to the sphere of traditional culture and is characteristic of a person who lives in, or at least grew up in, that kind of environment. The practical attitude to reality and aesthetic feeling for that reality blend into a single unity of feelings, with one or the other aspect becoming more pronounced depending upon the circumstances.

Historical turning points of worldview or nostalgic idealization of the landscape Researchers of Lithuanian culture frequently speak of a fateful shift in traditional folk culture, the unavoidable collapse of traditional lifestyle, and the waning of classical folk creation. Articles by folklorists written in the twenty-first century especially stress the virtual extinction of traditional oral folk genres as a result of the decline of the contexts in which they once flourished. One view is that this is because classical folklore no longer plays a role in the lives of rural communities: “the live folklore form no longer 51 Mircea Eliade, Šventybė ir pasaulietiškumas (Vilnius: Mintis, 1997), 81. 52 Čiulba ulba sakalas, 338.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

has an entertainment function—because there is no one left to sing for or tell stories to and no reason to do so, it is neither valued nor necessary.”53 This emerging reality is thoroughly discussed in the literary correspondence between Viktorija Daujotytė and Marcelijus Martinaitis. In the latter’s view, “it feels as though our only original culture—the folklore that shaped my rural experience—is shattering and splintering before our eyes, and that we have no idea how everything will fall with the turn of the millennium . . . and for that reason we treasure the last crumbs of our living folklore and ethnography.”54 According to Daujotytė, the study of those crumbs is becoming “a kind of archeography,” because we have to try to “cobble something together from fragments, try to reconstruct something based on signs or codes.”55 Together with changes within traditional culture and lifestyle came shifts in the understanding of space. These are related to dramatic processes of urbanization and industrialization that started in Lithuania in the midtwentieth century following the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union in 1944. Martinaitis has written about this extensively, drawing on painful personal experience to make generalizations about great shifts in the fate of the nation as a whole. In the poet’s view, both the loss of personal property and changes to the landscape and attitudes to the land determined the hitherto sedentary rural community’s movement from the country to the city: The journey from a world so familiar was seen as violence, misfortune, loss, and interference by a foreign force into these rural folk’s lives. Those who returned were now different and strange. . . . The pull of this small country’s land was so strong—it nurtured, punished, forgave, and sheltered, until it was cut up by roads, highways, asphalt through which all of Lithuania then travelled over the pastures, meadows, school paths of my youth, until the land no longer welcomed back those who had left their homes, their birthplaces, their loved ones.56

53 Stundžienė, “Aukštaitės folkloristės akistata su žemaičiais,” Tautosakos darbai 34 (2007): 230. 54 Martinaitis, Prilenktas prie savo gyvenimo, 70. 55 Ibid., 58. 56 Marcelijus Martinaitis, Mes gyvenome: biografiniai užrašai (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009), 114.

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The Soviet collectivization and industrial agriculture that were imposed throughout the country also opened the door to a completely new approach toward the landscape in general and to workable land in particular: there are horrible, polluting machines digging, excavating, and plowing throughout. . . . Now, everywhere, the land is losing its name: homesteads and cemeteries are being trampled, rocks that had their own names are being split in half . . . so that the land can barely remember anything anymore.57 . . . They have finally succeeded in fencing man in, in separating him, with ditches and canals, from his past, his home, nature. That nature has now been spooked, constricted, and cut into pieces.58

As a result, the poet believes, the very foundation stones of human existence had been destroyed: “man’s individual space—family, land, homestead, kin—had been dismantled.”59 “That centuries-old, almost mythical concept of time, of human and time, of the harmony of nature was being threatened, and this went against those almost innate experiences.”60 The poet associates the contemporary individual’s problems with a disorientation that is at once spatial and existential: If there is one bad thing that has happened to contemporary people, it is their loss of their own place, their inability to know its limits. It is a new attitude—now we are afraid of space, of spaces. We squeeze ourselves into closed quarters, into automobiles, isolating ourselves from spaces and from nature with loud music and noise. A consumer attitude to nature, and being in it, has emerged. . . . The commercialization of space, of spaces has resulted in an almost universal turning of humans into marketable commodities.61

But nor does Martinaitis view the movement from countryside to city as solely negative. In the context of the frequent poeticization and romanticization of folk culture by classical folklore historiography, the poet’s words about the traditional lifestyle’s limitations sound quite unexpected: “[This] way of life was well ordered, but it was closed. Although it encouraged the formation of a unique ethnic culture, it did not create 57 Martinaitis, Prilenktas prie savo gyvenimo, 63. 58 Ibid., 38. 59 Martinaitis, Mes gyvenome, 100. 60 Viktorija Daujotytė and Marcelijus Martinaitis, Sugrįžęs iš gyvenimo: pokalbiai, literatūriniai laiškai (Vilnius: Alma Littera, 2013), 124. 61 Ibid., 106.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

the conditions for professional art to emerge, for great discoveries to be made, or for a broader understanding of the world to be possible.”62 And Viktorija Daujotytė seconds him: “Rural culture is universal in terms of meeting human needs, but is merciless to the distinct individual, so that many aspects of it can be related to limitations upon the individual, the dismissal of freedoms, even violence.”63 That is why, in Martinaitis’s view, “[Our] nation’s prominent people only ever achieved anything by leaving their villages and homesteads, while maintaining psychological and cultural ties with villages as places of ethnic origin.”64 That is how most members of the so-called “last generation of the plough”65 must have felt— individuals who were still “directly connected to rural customs and culture,” who, in an existential sense, left the countryside permanently for city life, to become public cultural workers.66 For these émigrés, escape to the city resulted in a conflicting fate: “having tasted another [urban] culture, they could no longer stay ‘at home,’ but home long remained a source of nostalgia and resignation.”67 This latter idea is important for our current study because it points to the origins of the aesthetic perception of landscape. We can therefore argue that aestheticization of the visible landscape—its purified and exalted conceptualization—emerges from a distance traced in time and space, between one’s birthplace and nostalgic or idealizing reflection upon it. Perhaps that is why traditional rural folk did not excessively idealize the landscape. They were sedentary and lived in a well-established, limited, and familiar space, so they did not have opportunities to observe it from any temporal or topological distance—to long for, ennoble, or aestheticize its parts. But even the smallest distance—spatial or temporal—opened up possibilities for reflecting upon those cozy, familiar places, and remembered images of birthplaces could now acquire aesthetic depth.

62 Martinaitis, Prilenktas prie savo gyvenimo, 114. 63 Daujotytė, Boružė, ropojanti plentu, 120. 64 Martinaitis, Prilenktas prie savo gyvenimo, 114. 65 This is how the generation born and raised in the countryside of the independent Lithuania in the first half of the twentieth century is often called. The natural rural life style of this generation was disrupted and changed by the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania that forced large numbers of people to move to the cities and start living under the new conditions of intense urban and industrial growth. 66 Ibid., 54–55. 67 Ibid., 56.

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Such thoughts contemplations:

inform

many

of

Martinaitis’s

philosophical

I too, after all, ran away from my village. Had I stayed there, I would not speak or write about it so positively, or with such nostalgia. The most beautiful things are those that we lose. That which is now far away is more easily loved and remembered fondly. Perhaps the more life recedes into memories, the more one loves it.68

Such thoughts were not only stimulated by Martinaitis’s departure from his parents’ home to study in the city, but by the painful experience of seeing his parents’ homestead destroyed during the years of Soviet land reclamation. According to Daujotytė, “[In] the whole of Marcelijus Martinaitis’s personal experience, the theme of destroyed birthplace, of a dismantled original order, is the most painful one, and it has most reordered things in his consciousness, thinking, and writing.”69 Later, the wound “became a part of his memory, a stimulus for rethinking, and a source of motivation” which drew on “both ethnic and ethical, and sometimes also aesthetic arguments.”70 An autobiographical text by Čepukienė is also interesting in this regard.71 Here the author explores the experiences of a traditional rural person who has moved far from and lost their connection to their birthplace. Her description of landscape places that are personally important to her unfurls a map of the most important life experiences. Čepukienė’s intimate narrative and its exaltation of her birthplace flows from a great longing and deeply nostalgic memories: Then I led my sons-in-law through the hills where I had once shepherded. . . . I showed them a ditch where I used to hide from the wind, when I was shepherding and it was cold. Now it is grown over with huge pines, but back then they were scrawny little saplings. I showed them the marshes I ran through hundreds of times, and the streams that were once too deep for me to cross. Now the lake is lower, so they’re shallower. I showed them the big rocks that we used to call rabbit chapels. . . . I showed them where I climbed

68 Daujotytė, Martinaitis, Sugrįžęs iš gyvenimo, 46. 69 Daujotytė, Boružė, ropojanti plentu, 112. 70 Ibid. 71 Vilma Daugirdaitė, ed., “Anelę Čepukienę prisimenant,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 (2005): 323–326.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

the pine forest: when a wolf was carrying off sheep, and I was terrified of the wolf, . . . so I scampered into the pines and screamed as loud as I could.72

In this passage from the text, Čepukienė’s descriptions of the places that were most important to her in childhood reveal a dual understanding of landscape. First of all, we see here the whole of an individual traditional mindset, that is, landscape objects that are only important to a specific person because of the experiences they have had in them. On the other hand, through several compact sentences we bear witness to the forever lost panorama of the rural landscape, which can now only be remembered, because land reclamation has left the streams and lakes shallower. Even though she had neither lived there nor even visited for many years, Čepukienė’s steady longing for the land of her birth is so great that it stylistically and poetically resembles a traditional Lithuanian funeral lamentation: I told them about how I miss my native region, though none of it misses me. Except, perhaps, some green trees or those paths that I once walked on with healthy legs. Or maybe, too, that lake, that clear water where I swam in the summers when I was little. Oh, how my heart ached, as though pierced by a sword—it has been so long, fifteen years, since I saw them, perhaps even more years will go by, or I may never see them again at all. . . . My path will grow over with green grass, then with green trees. Pied cuckoos will sing in them, but I, though a poor soul, will not cry over them. Let those green trees become full with fluttering peacock feathers, and I can even watch them from a different land, and see how they grow green there too. If only I could I would talk to them morning and night, and tell them everything about my troubles, my hard daily life.73

The text highlights the quintessence of this woman’s birthplace, which is contained in the places most important to her: the paths she walked in her youth, the lake and the trees surrounding it. The image of the birthplace that no longer waits, because there is no one left there who can wait, is similarly vivid in Marcelijus Martinaitis’s autobiographical writing:

72 Ibid., 324–325. 73 Ibid., 326.

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The villages that were once huddled close together have completely disappeared, the home of my birth is gone, my family scattered. I felt, for the first time, that I had nowhere left to return to, that there is no longer a place where I will be expected. All of my ties with the places where I was born and grew up have been sundered—my connection to them has been destroyed.74

It is as though such places lose the emotional weight they once had, and are no longer dear. For the poet, such change does not signify only the physical loss of the homestead where he was born and the extinction of the entire agrarian landscape, but first of all, the existential crisis that this geocultural erosion produces: I am not sad about the woven willow fences, the linen cloths, the songs or stories, or even my parents’ cottage, which has been replaced by a grim, empty space. I am thinking about the cultural disaster. Each nation creates is own Universe and its own Sun, its Moon, its stars, land, air, fire, and water, and through them expresses the uniqueness of human existence.75

Thus, the conditions for this kind of aesthetic awareness of surroundings fell into place following certain changes in terms of historical and personal time; these created a certain distance that made it possible to observe the world from the side and reflect upon its beauty. This kind of landscape offers many things directly related to human emotional experience. We can conclude that the agrarian landscape is generally seen through an emotionally idealizing lens. At the same time, the landscape itself, which has experienced the effects of modern technology and is to some degree unrecognizable, is now seen in a negative light. * * * The transformation of visible landscape into mental landscape in memoir texts is related to the axiology of environment. On the mental plane, this kind of evaluative attitude emerges from an aesthetic relationship of enjoyment and appreciation of the world one lives in. The axiology can be based on practical factors, as when that which is useful is seen as beautiful. This kind of perception of the visible world is naturally related to pragmatic rural attitudes. When one wishes to emphasize the usefulness of certain 74 Martinaitis, Prilenktas prie savo gyvenimo, 5. 75 Ibid., 91.

Taking Shelter in Memoir amid the Turmoil of History

objects being discussed, rational passages can find their way into a poetic memoir text. In other cases, assessment of the natural environment is related to idealization of the landscape. Such aesthetic perception may simply be a given for a more sensitive, poetic person who already knows how to discern beauty. But for a deeper aesthetic relationship to the visible world to form, some greater mental distance, in terms of both space and time, is necessary. In autobiographical narratives, such distance is often related to situations of loss—when everyday routine is destroyed by historical breaking points or dramatic changes in an individual’s personal life. Mental distance marked by this kind of existential loss can produce an aestheticization of landscape that is characterized by the highest level of poetry and the idealization of places from the past. At the same time, it is this distance that has resulted in a shift from folklore as a collective creative practice to more individual egodocumentary forms (autobiographical narrative, life story, memoir) conveying personal experiences. In memoir texts, the individualist stance is often permeated by a desire to analytically dissect images from the past, to grasp what they once meant when they were still part of everyday life, and what they mean now, when they have settled in the depths of memory. We can say, therefore, that aestheticization of the visible landscape, its transformation into a purified and exalted concept in the mental place, results from the mapping of temporal and spatial distance in relation to one’s birthplace, and nostalgic and idealizing reflection of that environment.

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Chapter 3

The Dead Want to Come Home: Stories about the Repatriation of Siberian Deportee Remains to Lithuania Daiva Vaitkevičienė

Introduction: The repatriation of deportee remains on the eve of the restoration of Lithuania’s independence In Lithuania, the years 1988–1990 saw the emergence of a political process that involved both recognition of Soviet occupation of the country and the determination to restore Lithuania’s independence. Amid many important political and legal steps was the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of deportees and political prisoners who had been victims of Soviet violent policies and acts of terror. It was finally possible to speak openly about those who had died in the gulags and in deportation in Siberia, and also to travel to former deportation locations and visit loved ones’ graves. Relatives of people who died and were buried while in deportation began travelling to Siberia to exhume and repatriate the remains of the dead. In November 1989 the writer Petras Dirgėla wrote: From Siberia, from the bare islands of the Laptev Sea, from all the former gulags Lithuanians are bringing home their dead—the remains of their

The Dead Want to Come Home

deported fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. This is the most important thing that is happening in Lithuania today. It is the nation’s first political act.1

At the time, the reburial of deportees seemed so important that various social and political organizations began to organize expeditions for repatriating remains. The first such expedition, to Igarka, repatriated the remains of 128 deportees on July 27, 1989. When the airplane containing them landed at the Kėdainiai air base, it was met by a group of 15,000 mourners from across Lithuania.2 The remains were then transported to different locations in the country, where they were each time met by solemn gatherings. In October of the same year, the remains of twenty deportees travelled by train from the permafrost territory around the estuary of the Lena River, where Lithuanians deported in 1941 lived under extremely harsh conditions. This was one of the most complicated repatriation journeys, as this deportation site was beyond the 78th parallel (for comparison, the state of Alaska begins at the 60th parallel). Preparations had begun well in advance—an initial exploratory trip to the region took place in 1988, and in the summer of 1989 four Lithuanian expeditions worked there, each with separate tasks such as the erection of monuments, the maintenance of grave sites, and the transfer of remains.3 The largest number of repatriation expeditions took place in 1990, when the organization Deportee Club (later renamed the Union of Lithuanian Political Prisoners and Deportees) organized twelve expeditions to Siberia—to the Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Tomsk regions. As a result, the remains of 1,500 deportees were brought back to Lithuania. But the remains of those who died behind the walls of the gulags were beyond the abilities of the expeditions—most prisoners were buried in unmarked mass graves, making it impossible to identify their remains. In addition to such organized expeditions, separate families and individuals also travelled to Siberia to bring back their loved ones’ remains, generally when organized trips did not go to certain burial sites. Although most of these voyages took place in 1989–1990, some also occurred in 1991–1992. Some people hurried to make these journeys because they were worried that the political thaw would not last and that the political 1 Petras Dirgėla, Tranų pasaulis: esė apie vaikišką meilę namams ir kapams (Vilnius: Lithuanus, 1990), 75. 2 http://www.draugas.org/archive/1989_reg/1989-08-04-DRAUGAS-i7-8.pdf, accessed December 1, 2018. 3 LTRF cd 1136.

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situation could change. Others traveled on their own for personal reasons.4 In some isolated cases, deportee remains were brought back to Lithuania (or attempts were made to do so) during the Soviet period, prior to the establishment of the Lithuanian independence movement Sąjūdis in 1988. To this date most private journeys are unknown to scholars. Nor were records kept of the instances in which deportees’ families took the initiative to exhume their relatives’ remains and re-bury them in their homeland— these were private family matters. Only in rare instances were documents or lists of names left with regional offices or local museums.5 The task of locating, exhuming, and repatriating remains was not an easy task for either organized expeditions or groups of relatives. Most of the people who travelled to Siberia for these purposes had never dug a grave or seen exhumed human remains; although they were determined to do so, it was psychologically challenging. Witnesses report that the image of unearthed graves was upsetting to men and women alike.6 It was especially emotionally difficult to remove bones from the graves and collect them in pieces of fabric or small boxes.7 Although the task was disturbing, most people gradually became accustomed to it, working away at it like archaeologists.8 These psychological challenges are recalled by Rimantas Plėštys, who led a 1989 expedition to the Lena River area: People travelling to erect monuments had to be psychologically prepared— at any time they might have to open caskets, gather and rebury remains, and work in the sludge of the thawed tundra, and then a few minutes later stop to eat. The food often stuck in our throats.9

There were also instances in which the graves had been destroyed. For example, the Bolshaya Rechka graveyard in Irkutsk region was razed during the construction of the Angarsk hydroelectric plant; in Trofimovsk and at Bykov promontory (Yakutia [Sakha] republic, Russian Federation), 4 For example, a former deportee named Vladas Plikūnas, who traveled to Khabaydak (Krasnoyarsk Region) in 1989, wrote: “I did not want to travel with other people. It was too sensitive a matter for me” (LGGRTC). 5 Irina Flige, “Lietuvių tremtinių atminimas šiuolaikinėje Rusijoje,” Genocidas ir rezistencija 2/24 (2008), http://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/730/a/008, accessed January 2, 2014. 6 LTRF cd 1139. 7 LTRF cd 1133. 8 LTRF cd 1133, LTRF cd 1139. 9 http://www.diena.lt/naujienos/lietuva/salies-pulsas/ekspedicijos-lena-89-istorija-tautosatminties-zenklai-palikti-atsiauriame-sibire-868643, accessed December 15, 2018.

The Dead Want to Come Home

most of the graves had slipped into the Laptev Sea; in Ungursky village (Irkutsk region), local Komsomol youths had burned the crosses and fences that would have made it possible to identify the graves, and so on.10 In cases where crosses and fences had decayed or collapsed, or if trees had been felled or additional bodies buried on top of existing graves, it became very difficult and sometimes impossible to locate a loved one’s final resting place. Many of these graveyards are in remote locations, in the depths of the taiga—places where deportees were forced to live as lumber workers. In some cases these locations could only be reached by special transportation (four-wheel drive jeeps or amphibian vehicles). Sometimes people had to travel dozens of kilometres by foot. In deportation locations beyond the Arctic Circle, such as Igarka or the Lena River delta by the Laptev Sea, the dead had to be chopped out of the frozen earth.11

Boxes containing exhumed remains, ready for travel. Expedition members are praying, some hold candles. On the left stands Father Stasys Kazėnas. The shorter box contains the remains of two children from Bykov promontory. Tit-Ary (Yakutia [Sakha] republic, Russian Federation). 1989 LTRFt 18059. 10 Antanas Simėnas, “Sunkus sugrįžimas,” Tremtinys 10/25 (1990): 1; Eugenijus Ignatavičius, “Stovi Šiaurėje vienišas kryžius. Iš rašytojo bloknoto,” Pergalė 2 (1990): 107; LTRF cd 1139. 11 LTRF cd 1136.

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Those who joined trips organized by the Deportee Club received a great deal of assistance from their expedition leaders, who organised tickets, accommodations, and transportation to gravesites. Naturally, unexpected circumstances arose—impassable roads, broken down vehicles, over-burial issues (in some cases people discovered that other bodies had been buried on top of their relatives). Expedition members would be dispersed among graveyards separated by considerable distances; they would have to locate their loved ones’ remains on their own, dig them up, and return with them to prearranged locations. Sometimes people had to walk a few or even a dozen or so kilometres carrying remains on their shoulders. Those who travelled on their own met with even greater difficulties. They did not always obtain permits allowing them to remove remains, or, fearing political or bureaucratic prohibitions, did not ask for them. Even when exhumation permits were obtained, it was not easy to travel back to Lithuania with the exhumed remains—additional permits and tin-plated coffins were required. For these reasons, in numerous cases relatives of deportees travelled with remains in their suitcases or trunks identified as containing personal effects.12 Even the 1989 expedition to the Lena River delta, by the Laptev Sea, did not have permits to transport remains—twenty boxes were loaded onto containers as “wood articles.”13 Given the obstacles and challenges, why was it that so many former deportees and their families travelled to repatriate their loved ones’ remains? Why was this such an important issue as Lithuania was liberating itself from the Soviet Union? First of all, the intensity of these efforts to repatriate remains reflects the enormous scale of the Soviet deportation and the high numbers of 12 There is no shortage of stories to this effect. For example, Julius Činčikas travelled back from Buryatia with his mother’s and another relative’s remains, but “at the train station no one wanted to look at that kind of cargo. What was I to do? Some good people advised me to wrap the boxes in fabric and write ‘Household Items’ on top. That’s what we did. We came back home by plane, while our cargo returned to Lithuania by train twelve days later.” See Violeta Klimaitė, “Apie laisvę sužinojo per savo jubiliejų,” Druskonis: Druskininkų krašto savaitraštis, March 12, 2010, http://www.druskonis. lt/beta/2010-03-12/index.php?id=laisve, accessed February 19, 2019. Some people travelled with remains in suitcases they kept in their train compartments, placing them under the mattresses while they slept (LTRF cd 1135; LTRF cd 1132). Nor was it safe to inform others that you had returned with remains; in such cases people had to be clever; for example, a brother and sister who had returned with their parents’ remains might tell relatives that “four of us have returned” (LTRF cd 1132). 13 LTRF cd 1136.

The Dead Want to Come Home

Lithuanian residents who died or were killed through these policies. Between 1940 and 1958 the Soviet Union implemented a murderous program against the people of Lithuania that consisted of mass killings, imprisonments, and deportations. At least 456,000 people became the victims of this Soviet program of murder and terror. As many as 332,000 were imprisoned, deported, or sent to gulag labour camps, and another 26,500 were killed in Lithuania.14 Deportees were scattered across an enormous territory—from Komi to Tadzikistan, from Yakutia to Irkutsk. Of the 132,000 deportees (excluding men separated from their families and sent to gulags), approximately 28,000 died from disease, starvation, and crippling labour.15 It was only from the late 1950s that Soviet authorities permitted most Lithuanian deportees to return home. But their deceased relations remained in cemeteries scattered across Siberia, most of them in the Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk regions. Following the departure of surviving deportees, these graves were left to neglect.

Irkutsk region (Russian Federation) 52 Quarter forest cemetery, from which the remains of Lithuanian deportees were exhumed for repatriation. 1990 LGGRTC, MTF 7183, KA-4107.

14 Arvydas Anušauskas, Teroras 1940−1958 m. (Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2013), 280; Lithuania in 1940−1991: The History of Occupied Lithuania, ed. Arvydas Anušauskas (Vilnius: The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2015), 269. 15 Anušauskas, Teroras 1940−1958 m., 276.

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Although the fact of the Soviet political terror and the massive scale of the repressions can partially explain why, with the political thaw under Gorbachev, so many Lithuanians travelled to Siberia to bring back their relatives’ remains, but it does not reveal the deeper, internal motivations behind these sad journeys. What occurred in Lithuania during that period— expeditions to repatriate remains, chartered flights—was an exceptional and unprecedented cultural phenomenon that moved and surprised Lithuanians themselves: people understood that this relentless longing to return their dead, who had died decades earlier, revealed something specific about Lithuanian culture. This is described by eyewitnesses: There is something irrepressible about Lithuanians’ desire to return to their homeland even after death. One can somehow live elsewhere, but one must die in the Homeland.  .  . . We can still remember July 28, 1989, when the Kėdaniai airport runway was covered with coffins containing the remains of returned deportees. Returning loved ones and burying them in Lithuanian cemeteries was also important for the living. But how many graves were never found, how many of the dead had no one left to bring them home?16 It is quite unprecedented in world history that the representatives of one tribe should travel to the other end of the earth to look for their loved ones’ graves, exhume the remains, and fly them back to the Homeland. As though the same Lord God does not look over those lands. We ourselves knew perfectly well that we would never find them, anywhere .  .  . that they are dispersed in the heavens and forever gone. But that is not true. We did find them, and they are resurrected in us.17

On the other hand, the Lithuanians’ desire to bring home the remains of deportees was met with surprise and sometimes mockery by local officials at the deportation locations. Antanas Simėnas, one of the leaders of the 1990 expeditions to repatriate remains from the Irkutsk region, wrote: “It was not easy. Most of the people at the local republican civil aviation authorities are of Russian descent; they mock our goals and say that there is no point to our efforts, as Soviet land is the same everywhere, that we are wasting our money.”18 Julius Činčikas, who in 1974 sought a permit to 16 Petras Bielskis, “Gyvenimai, tapę relikvija,” XXI amžius, September 14, 2012, http:// www.xxiamzius.lt/numeriai/2012/09/14/fondasa_07.html, accessed January 12, 2014. 17 Ignatavičius, “Stovi Šiaurėje vienišas kryžius,” 114. 18 Simėnas, “Sunkus sugrįžimas,” 1.

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exhume his mother in Buratia, was considered mad by local officials: “What do you want to do that for? What difference does it make were a person is buried?”19 Relatives of deportees considered it their duty to repatriate their loved ones’ remains to Lithuania. As Vanda Poderytė, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Tremtinys (Deportee), put it: “Each deported person longed to at least be buried somewhere near their traditional family cemetery. For that reason the repatriation of remains is the Deportee Club’s most important responsibility.”20 The duty of the living to bring their dead back home was clearly grasped even before surviving deportees returned to Lithuania. As they prepared to leave remote locations, deportees sketched plans and took photographs of cemeteries; these were used several decades later by relatives searching for their loved ones’ graves. There were even efforts to leave some signs for the future. Petras Dirgėla wrote: In the deportation my grandfather worked as a sap collector—he gathered pine sap. Before returning to his homeland, to Lithuania, he stood in his own plot under a seed-pine—his friend Petrikaitis, another sap collector, was buried near the pine. . . . My grandfather later said to me: “We buried Petrikaitis under a seed-pine. They don’t cut down seedpines, so his relatives should be able to find him.” “Even then, when you buried him, you hoped that a time would come when someone would be looking for the grave, that they would try to bring his remains home?” . . . “Lithuanians don’t leave their dead in foreign lands. They’ll look for the seed-pine. They’ll find it. They’ll bring back Petrikaitis’s remains.”21

This strong connection with the dead persists in Lithuania, where All Souls’ Day is one of the most important annual holidays—every year on November 1–2 most people visit their relatives’ graves, roads and motorways are congested, and the cemeteries are bright with candlelight. Lithuanian traditions around burying and remembering the dead have been thoroughly studied.22 However, the phenomenon of the repatriation 19 Klimaitė, “Apie laisvę sužinojo per savo jubiliejų.” 20 Vanda Poderytė, “Tautos laisvę ir garbę ginant,” Tremtinys 11 (1989): 1. 21 Dirgėla, Tranų pasaulis, 70. 22 Cf.: Angelė Vyšniauskaitė, Petras Kalnius, and Rasa Paukštytė, Lietuvių šeima ir papročiai (Vilnius: Mintis, 1995); Daiva Vaitkevičienė and Vykintas Vaitkevičius,

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of remains from Siberia has been neglected and has not been examined by historians, sociologists, or cultural anthropologists. There is not a single historical study that contains facts about the repatriation expeditions, and the documentation related to these journeys still lies in the organizations’ archives. The purpose of this study is not to fill in gaps in historical research. The goal of this article is to delve into personal histories in order to understand what traditional beliefs led to the fact that, in 1989–1991, thousands of people ignored hardships and travelled to Siberia to do what they could never imagine themselves capable of doing—dig up their relatives’ bones with their own hands, and bring them home. This study draws on narratives and recollections of individuals who travelled to Siberia, as well as documentary material such as photographs, video recordings, print media articles, and expedition reports. Material used in this research study includes witness testimonials about repatriation of deportee remains, documents, and deportee memoirs preserved in the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. These sources are supplemented by photographs that visually illustrate narratives of the journeys to Siberia. Further material about the events and experiences of the deportations can also be found in documentary films and works of literature and art. The filmmaker Algimantas Maceina, who, with his father, traveled to Siberia to bring back his grandfather’s remains, created the intensely moving film Juoda dežė (Black Box). Literary works that explore the repatriation and reburial theme include Eglė Gudonytė’s novel Karta nuo Sibiro (Siberian Generation), Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s memoir Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea), and Eugenijus Ignatavičius’s essay “Stovi Šiaurėje vienišas kryžius” (A Lonely Cross Stands in the North). In 1990, the graphic artist Gražina Didelytė created the series Sibiro suvenyras (Siberian Souvenir), in which the work “Vienintelis noras” (A Single Desire) illustrated the deportees’ greatest longing—to return home, even if only after death.23 Nor does this study limit itself to written or documentary sources. In seeking to grasp the deeper motivations behind the reburial phenomenon “Mirtis, laidotuvės ir atminai,” Tautosakos darbai 9/16 (1998): 204−264; Janina Samulionytė, “Mirusiųjų paminėjimas—Dziedai,” Liaudies kultūra 5 (1998): 32−41, and others. 23 Gražina Didelytė, Gražinos Didelytės Lietuva, ed. Vygandas Čaplikas (Vilnius: Petro ofsetas, 2011).

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and to hear narratives directly, I met with actual participants in these events—individuals who traveled to bring back remains, as well as their deportee relations. In this article I refer to original conversations with eleven individuals, which are referenced at the end of the article. Many of the personal stories blend into a single, general narrative which speaks to us about burial rituals that were only temporarily postponed, and then conducted four or five decades later. Burial is seen as the duty of a deceased person’s relations— most people did not see the internments that took place in Siberia as proper burials or funerals. For a funeral to be considered complete, traditional ritual customs had to be followed and the body covered with native soil. Narratives about reburials of Siberian deportees are stories about correctly conducted burial rituals and the duty of the living toward the dead. These narratives reveal how traditional rituals were applied to reburials; how the reburials were structured; why Lithuanians consider a deceased person’s connection with their native soil to be essential; and how all of this impacts the deceased person’s and their relatives’ lives.

Locations of Siberian deportee reburials The main motif in narratives about the repatriation of remains is the site of the reburial. Narratives about the trip to Siberia and back speak about a change in burial location and the related circumstances and motivations that led people to undertake such a journey. It is therefore important, first of all, to examine where repatriated remains were reburied and why, and what burial locations seemed appropriate to Lithuanians in 1989–1991. In this chapter I will explore the three main criteria in choosing burial sites: a) burial in a person’s own land (in a broader sense, the homeland as a whole; in a narrower sense, a person’s birthplace, their family’s home town, or at least near their last home); b) their family’s or extended family’s burial plot; and c) a cemetery that is near their descendants’ or other relatives’ current homes. These criteria are often combined, but sometimes only one of them is applied.

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One’s own land The tradition of burying the dead in the homeland, in their own land, is not something new to the late twentieth century, bur rather an extension of ancient traditions. In his 1850 work Pasakojimas apie veikalus lietuvių tautos senovėje (About Ancient Lithuanian Deeds), the Lithuanian historian Simonas Daukantas wrote: To be buried not in one’s land or reburied in a foreign land was seen as the greatest misfortune of all, and so family or friends would have to travel there and strip the body from the bones, and then bring the bones back home and bury them, like the mother today who, when she hears that her son has died in a foreign land, says: “My dear child, that foreign land will cover your bones.”24

Daukantas also offers a further explanation for why being buried in their own land is so important to Lithuanians: “[they] believed that only those who are buried in their own land will enter Heaven, otherwise the soul will wander the forests, houses, and wilds, generally suffering and causing much harm to their clan and their people for not burying them properly.”25 The phenomenon of deportee reburials allows us to more closely examine the question of burial location and to attempt to understand what “their own land” means to Lithuanians. In general the repatriation of a deportee’s remains was understood as their return to Lithuania or the homeland. On July 1, 1990 the Committee for the Repatriation of Deported Individuals’ Remains and Social Assistance announced: “We invite you to participate in an expedition for a noble and humanitarian goal—to bring home your loved ones’ remains and to fulfill their last dying wish that they may rest in peace in Lithuanian soil.”26 Indeed, that was most deportees’ wish—to see Lithuania before they died, and, if that was not possible, to at least be buried in their homeland. The longing to return to the homeland was so strong that it inspired some very risky undertakings. Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, who was deported to an area by the Laptev Sea, risked a sentence of twenty years’ hard labour when, in 1949, she secretly travelled from Yakutia to Lithuania with her ill mother, who “longed to see Lithuania 24 Simonas Daukantas, Raštai, vol. 2, ed. Vytautas Merkys (Vilnius: Vaga, 1976), 36. 25 Daukantas, Raštai, vol. 1, 607. 26 A. Petrokas’s letter to G. Banys, chair of the Committee for the Repatriation of Lithuanian Deportee Remains and Social Assistance, June 21, 1990.

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and wanted to be buried in her native land.”27 Thanks to her daughter’s efforts, Pranė Grinkevičienė’s wish was fulfilled. When her mother died in 1950, Grinkevičiūtė wrote: “Your final wish was fulfilled. You died in Lithuania. Your native land took you in. You reached it with your final effort. You were weak, dying, persecuted, but you prevailed.” Unfortunately, her mother’s burial was a very complicated matter: unable to bury her mother in a cemetery, Grinkevičiūtė interred her in the basement of her house, under a concrete floor. “Even as she travelled to the next world, she understood that even dead she would not find a place to rest in her native land,” wrote Grinkevičiūtė. Lithuania, homeland, native land—this was a very broadly defined place. For some people the precise location was not so important, as in the case of R. K., who, having brought his father’s remains back from Irtkutsk region, did not consider the precise burial location to be important; it could be anywhere, even in a forest, as long as it was in Lithuania and not distant Siberia. However, most people had very clear ideas about in which cemetery they planned to rebury their relatives. First of all, a gravesite is connected to the deceased person’s birthplace, or the place where they lived before they were deported. When Kazimiera Rakštienė brought back her brother Vytautas Ožeraitis’s bones from Tal′yany (Irkutsk region) in 1989, she buried them in his birthplace, in Margininkai cemetery (Kaunas region), even though her brother’s wife and daughters were living in the city of Panevėžys. Her sister Monika Bašinskienė wrote her dead brother a poem in which she speaks about their birthplace: Brother, do you not remember That your birthplace long awaits you? . . . Your younger sister is on her way And will soon be there with you. It’s time, it’s time To return back home. As you lay in a foreign land for so long, Did you see your dear birthplace in your dreams?28 27 Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, “Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros,” in Amžino įšalo žemėje, ed. Aldona Žemaitytė (Vilnius: Vyturys, 1989), 38. 28 Daiva Vaitkevičienė, “‘Man ta žemė viską duoda . . .’: žemdirbio pasaulėjauta Rakščių patirties pasakojime,”Liaudies kultūra 5 (2013): 68.

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Matas Akamauskas’s remains were brought back to his “native village” in 1990 and buried in the cemetery of the small town of Udrija (Alytus region).29 Many interwar farmers lived in the places where they were born; homesteads and small farms were passed on from one generation to the next, and people’s lives were quite stable. A. J. buried his parents in Geidžiūnai cemetery (Biržai region): “That was my father’s birthplace, that’s where our home was. As they were taken away in a wagon, my mother made the sign of the cross over the house.”30 For the burial, A. J. and her brother brought boxes containing their father and mother’s remains to their former homestead, by an apple tree that had survived from the orchard her father had planted. “It was important that they end up on their own land, that they feel that they have returned,” the woman explained. According to this informant, her parents had wanted to be buried in their home village. Even today there are people in Lithuania who believe that it is best to bury a person in their birthplace. In 2003 the folklore informant and recorder Emilija Brajinskienė, from the town of Šeduva (Radviliškis region) told the author of this article that it is bad to bury the dead anywhere other than their birthplace. If they are not, one should at least throw a handful of earth from the place where the person “ran around as a child”—then they will be able to rest peacefully.

The family plot Another popular choice was to bury the repatriated remains in a family plot. During the interwar period, families were not very widely dispersed, so that younger generations were usually buried in the same cemeteries as their parents. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the situation changed dramatically. This was not only the result of urbanisation and the demographic shift to the cities, but was also a consequence of political prohibitions—many deportees returning from Siberia did not have the right to return to their previous homes or birthplaces; some were even banned from living in the territory of Lithuania (in those cases they usually settled in Latvia or Kaliningrad, in order to be as close to home as possible). But regardless of where deportees’ descendants themselves lived, 29 From Šakiai resident Leonas Juozas Miliušis’s letter to the Vytautas Magnus War Museum, February 25, 1991. 30 LTRF cd 1132.

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the main tendency was to bury repatriated remains in old family plots and cemeteries, next to parents or grandparents who already lay there. Burial in a family plot is a common burial practice that connects the dead to their families through both horizontal and vertical kinship connections (a husband is buried next to his wife; children are buried by their parents, and so on). For example, when Romas Kaunietis brought back his father’s remains from Tungut (Irkutsk region), he buried them in the cemetery in the town of Pandėlys, next to his mother Kazimiera Kaunietienė; his grandparents, Povilas and Uršulė Dūda, are also buried there.31 Aleksandras Gabrys, a Vilnius resident, brought back his brother Klemensas’s remains from the Yun-Yuga gulag cemetery in Komi republic and laid him to rest in the family plot in Gasčiūnai (Joniškis region). Regina Plančiūnienė repatriated the bones of her father Stasys Dirsė, mother Antanina Dirsienė, and grandfather Jonas Dirsė from Shushenskaya district (Krasnoyarsk region) and buried them “in their birthplace of Šėta, because that was where my grandmother was buried.”32 Leonas Miliušis, a resident of the town of Šakiai, reburied his father-in-law in the man’s birthplace, where his wife already lay.33 A. L. buried her brother’s remains near their parents’ grave, because “they are his closest relations. If our parents had been buried somewhere else I would have taken him there.”34 A. J. also wanted to be buried in the same plot after her own death, so as to be closer to her parents, and also so that her parents’ graves would not be neglected after she died. This connected several generations—grandchildren would remember their grandparents, who had been brought back from Siberia, and would take care of the graves. With reburials, efforts were made to preserve previous connections between the dead. For example, A. J.’s mother died in 1951 and was buried in the cemetery in Cheremkhovo (Irkutsk region). Her father also died in the deportation, in 1957. In 1951, as punishment for anti-Soviet activities, he was sent from Cheremkhovo to a prison camp; he was released in 1955 and allowed to return to Cheremkhovo, where his wife was buried and his two children still lived. In her memoir his daughter A. J. writes:

31 Romas Kaunietis, Jei laisve nebūčiau tikėjęs (Buivydžiai and Panevėžys: R. Kaunietis, 2013), 469. 32 LGGRTC KĖ-653, photo 6362. 33 From a letter by Leonas Juozas Miliušis (LGGRTC). 34 LTRF cd 1133.

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After being released from the prison camp, my father could have returned to Lithuania, and we urged him to do so, but he refused—he did not want to leave the place where my mother was buried. When we had buried her he promised that if he returned to Lithuania he would not leave her behind, that he would wrap up her bones and bring them back to Lithuania with him. At that time he was unable to do so, and nor did he want to leave us.35

When A. J.’s father died in 1957, his children buried him next to their mother. When they travelled to Cheremkhovo in 1989, they had decided that they would either bring back both parents or neither one: “If we should find my father and are able to retrieve his bones, then we would take my mother’s as well. But if we should not find him we would leave our mother be, we would leave her here.” The process of repatriating remains from Siberia and burying them alongside relatives can be said to have restored the deportees’ family and kinship ties and returned them to their true network of relations. The same factor was behind the motivation to rebury émigré remains. For example, in describing the transportation of the urns of Alfonsas Jurskis (1894– 1966) and Ona Tallat-Kelpšaitė-Jurskienė (1895–1993) from Philadelphia to Lithuania, Petras Bielskis stresses that their sons fulfilled their parents’ wishes by burying their remains in the cemetery at the foot of Medvėgalis Hill.36 There are also instances of symbolic graves and monuments having been established during the Soviet period for relatives who died far away from Lithuania. Regina Plančiūnienė writes: Our parents’ remains are buried in the cemetery in Šėta, because that is where our grandmother, the wife of Jonas Dirsė, was buried. Thinking that we would never be able to bring their remains back, we had already erected a monument for them well in advance.37

There are other examples of such symbolic graves or monuments. As early as the 1960s P. Motiekienė had established a burial site for her mother in Šeduva cemetery: “From 1969 there was a burial mound marking her spot, even though it was still not possible to bring back her remains. When they [the Soviets] came to take her away, they did it so quickly and without 35 LGGRTC KA-5689, 10. 36 Bielskis, “Gyvenimai, tapę relikvija.” 37 LGGRTC, 6362.

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justification, but I had had to travel [to Siberia] even twice to bring back her bones.”38 Reburial of the dead to a family gravesite is not exclusive to instances of deportation or emigration. For example, Aniceta Videikienė from Plungė moved her father Stanislovas Grigalauskas’s remains from the inoperative cemetery in Pakutuvėnai to the one in the village of Kuliai. “That is where her mother Stanislava Grigalauskienė and all their relatives are buried. But she still visits and tends her father’s former grave site in Pakutuvėnai, because his body was so heavily decayed that part of him stayed there.”39 Although, in this case, it was not necessary to move the gravesite (the Pakutuvėnai cemetery has not been destroyed; it is simply full and therefore no longer active), in reburying her father this woman included him in the extended family’s plot. Separate family gravesites are an old tradition in Lithuania. In the fifteenth century the Polish historian Jan Długosz wrote that, prior to the adoption of Christianity by Lithuania, every family and home maintained a bonfire spot in a sacred forest where they would burn their loved ones’ bodies; they would offer the dead food and drink to quench the souls’ hunger and thirst.40 To this day, burial of the dead and the visiting and care of gravesites are considered family duties.

Cemeteries near home The third important criterion for choosing a burial place is the deceased person’s surviving family members’ place of residence. Up to the midtwentieth century this usually corresponded with the deceased person’s last domicile, because the surviving family members who took responsibility for burial and gravesite maintenance usually inherited the parents’ home. Other children or relatives also often lived nearby and could easily visit the village or parish cemetery where their parents or grandparents were buried. If buried in the parish cemetery, the dead were visited every Sunday when their relatives went to church; this regular visiting of gravesites helped 38 From P. Motiekienė’s letter to V. Morkūnas, Vytautas Magnus War Museum, August 27, 1990 (LGGRTC). 39 Jolanta Klietkutė, “Kaimo gyventojai,” http://www.polia.info/Pakuta/Gyventojai.htm, accessed March 8, 2014. 40 Baltų religijos ir mitologijos šaltiniai, vol. 1: Nuo seniausių laikų iki XV amžiaus pabaigos, ed. Norbertas Vėlius (Vilnius: Vaga, 1996), 580.

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people to maintain their relationship with the dead. After the Second World War, when most people moved away from their birthplaces, the distance between the living and the dead grew. Although it is still common for children to bury their parents in their former parish cemeteries in small towns or villages, people who repatriated remains from Siberia sometimes chose a different solution: they would bury their loved ones near their own places of residence so that they could more frequently visit and care for the gravesites (plant flowers, weed and water the plots, clear dead leaves, light candles). The duty of the living to visit the dead and maintain a steady contact with them is yet another important reason for repatriating remains to Lithuania. Petras Dirgėla wrote about Lithuanians’ desire to bury their parents close to home: Some children still frequently visit their father or mother’s grave; they interact with them as though they were seeking advice and solace. Lithuanian cemeteries are always close to residential home and churches. A Lithuanian feels more peaceful, stronger, and safer if their mother and father’s graves are close by. Lithuanians never left their dead in foreign graves, in unfamiliar lands, and they don’t do so today. This is part of their sense of order in the world—it is part of the unique culture they have inherited from their forebears. When someone says, “I am bringing back my parents’ remains from Siberia” it is not a whim, or some kind of challenge, or a political act. Parental remains must rest in a grave somewhere close to home—this is the secret to that Lithuanian “childish love of gravesites.” People behave this way because they simply have to.41

R. K., who brought his father remains back from Tangut, explains that it is very important “to be able to go to the gravesite and speak to your father, your mother.” I. Š., a deportee living in Kaunas, brought her mother back from Tit-Ary and buried her in the Kaunas cemetery. When her family experiences troubles, difficulties, or a serious illness, she goes to the cemetery to talk to her mother. I. Š. says that she senses that her mother helps her in whatever way she can. The woman remembers how, when her mother died, leaving her to care for her teenaged brother in Siberia, her mother once helped her. Christmas Eve and her brother’s birthday were coming up. I. Š. wanted to do something to cheer her brother up, to lighten 41 Dirgėla, Tranų pasaulis, 76.

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the burden of the endless cold days, hunger, and prison-like labour. One polar night she went out in a snowstorm to visit her mother’s grave and ask for advice. That night her mother appeared in her dream, and gave her precise instructions: she must obtain a handful of flour, mix it with some water, shape it into a wafer and bake it on their makeshift stove—that way they would have some communion bread to share on Christmas Eve.42 I. Š. remembers that if it had not been for her mother’s help in finding the road, she would have gotten lost and frozen to death that night.

Remains of deportees from the Laptev Sea area, Tit-Ary, and Bykov promontory being transported by tractor to a boat. 1989 LTRFt 18066.

The desire to have loved ones’ graves close to home sometimes manifested itself in unexpected ways. The deportee B. P.’s husband died in Siberia in 1957. She brought his remains back to Lithuania and buried him in town of Skuodas, but two decades later transferred his remains to the town of Kretinga, about sixty kilometers away; she lived in Kretinga and wanted to be able to visit her husband’s grave more easily.43 This unusual example further illustrates that Lithuanians’ longing to connect the living 42 LTRF cd 1136. 43 LTRF cd 1138.

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and the dead by bringing them physically closer is so strong that they are willing to travel thousands of kilometers to do so.

Symbolic burial—a handful of earth Not all those who travelled to Siberia were able to find the graves of loved ones who had died decades earlier. Furthermore, deportees and political prisoners who died in the gulags were usually buried in communal, unmarked graves. In some of these cases their relatives would establish a symbolic gravesite and conduct a symbolic burial ritual, returning to Lithuania with a handful of earth from the location where the person was imprisoned or deported. If the deceased individual had not had a separate grave, this earth would be dug into or poured onto the graves of their closest relations. This was a very common practice, and a good example is Aliona Beinoravičienė’s story. Together with other participants in a 1990 repatriation expedition, she travelled to Irkutsk, but was unable to find her father’s grave at the razed cemetery at Bolshaya Rechka. She therefore brought back only a handful of earth, which she placed in a small urn. She had the urn blessed at Vytautas Church in Kaunas and then buried it in her mother’s gravesite.44 Before carrying the urn to the church, she wrapped it in a traditional sash (the kind of woven Lithuanian sashes that was wrapped around coffins brought back from Siberia) and decorated it with a wreath of rue. In the location where they suspected their father was buried, from which the handful of earth was taken, Aliona and her brothers had erected a small wooden cross and planted a rue plant.45 Other members of the same expedition, if unable to locate their relatives’ graves, acted similarly and brought some earth back to Lithuania. From narrative reports we know that similar symbolic burial rituals were conducted during the Soviet period. P. Motiekienė, who, while unsuccessful in her efforts to repatriate her deported mother’s remains, also brought back a handful of earth from her mother’s gravesite, writes: “All I was able to bring back from her grave was a little sand.”46 A similar practice was frequently used in another type of painful case—when 44 Aušra Šuopytė, “Sibiro speigų nugairinta,” Tremtinys 2 (2014): 10. 45 LTRF cd 1139. 46 From P. Motiekienė’s letter to V. Morkūnas, Vytautas Magnus War Museum, October 20, 1990. (LGGRTC).

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wanting to symbolically bury partisans who had been killed in the battle against Soviet occupying forces. Soviet authorities were in the practice of desecrating executed partisans’ bodies, which they then laid down in town squares and later buried in secret locations. Unable to bury their partisan relations, people would gather some earth (sometimes soaked in blood) from the place of execution or desecration, and then conduct a symbolic burial. One partisan’s sister describes this: “I dug up some earth from about eight places where the pro-Soviet collaborators had thrown the bodies, and buried it all in Prienai cemetery, near my mother’s grave. That was my way of remembering him.”47 Sometimes earth was (and still is) transported in the opposite direction—from Lithuania to places of deportation, death, or burial in Siberia. In 2015 members of an annual “Mission Siberia” expedition to restore deportee gravesites in Siberia erected a commemorative cross in a cemetery in Kuzurov; under the cross they “sprinkled a little Lithuanian earth that had been given to [them] by returned deportees now living in the town of Naujoji Akmenė.”48 Lithuanian earth is also sprinkled on the graves of soldiers who died outside the country. For example, in 2013 a Lithuanian delegation conducting a funeral ceremony for Lithuanian soldiers who had died in north-western Russian town of Pskov in 1941, scattered some earth they had brought from Lithuania into their grave.49 In exceptional cases, earth has been transported in two directions: from Lithuania to Siberia and from Siberia to Lithuania. In her documentary novel Siberian Generation, Eglė Gudonytė describes her journey with her mother, a former deportee, to the Altai region in Siberia, where her mother’s two sisters were buried, and how one such exchange of earth was conducted. Traveling to Siberia they took a suitcase containing “a few blessed crosses, some candles, and a handful of Lithuanian earth that had been blessed,” and they returned from Siberia with some earth “to put on my grandparents’ grave.”50 Because the sisters’ gravesite, located high in the 47 Vyšniauskaitė, Kalnius, and Paukštytė, Lietuvių šeima ir papročiai, 466. 48 Virginija Spurytė, “Ekstremali kelionė po Sibirą: kai sustoti neleidžia baimės jausmas po naktinės vagystės,” delfi.lt, https://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/ekstremalikelione-po-sibira-kai-sustoti-neleidzia-baimes-jausmas.d?id=68599092, accessed December 16, 2018. 49 Rytas Narvydas, “Lietuvių karių palaikų palaidojimas Pskovo srityje,” Genocidas ir rezistencija, 2/34 (2013), http://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/1935/a/, accessed January 15, 2014. 50 Eglė Gudonytė, Karta nuo Sibiro (Vilnius: Mintis, 2013), 180, 188.

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mountains, in the Uluzhai Gorge, was inaccessible, the exchange of earth took place at the top of Mount Lokhmatukha: Yes, the Uluzhai mission cannot be implemented, so we must shift it to the symbolic plane. We will remember my mother’s little sisters, Vida and Nijolė Mockaitytė, at the top of Mount Lokhmatukha. But will we succeed? At 3,000 meters, this mountain in Ust′-Kan is the highest peak in the surrounding area. . . . At the top of Lokhmatukha, in a cosmic silence, we remember little Vida and Nijolė by scattering the remaining Lithuanian soil in all four directions. As children we would become blood brothers with our best friends—we would make a cut in the skin of our arms and press the wounds together to “mix up” our blood. The lands of Altai and Lithuania are blood brothers. For all times.51

Transporting earth or bringing it with one when travelling far from Lithuania is a symbolic means of connecting far-flung places, of according meaning to their connections or maintaining a tie with the homeland. Nor is this practice exclusive to burial situation. For example, political prisoner and deportee Prima Petrylienė “preserved a handful of earth from the Anykščiai area and, upon returning to Lithuania from Siberia in 1957, left it at the foot of Gediminas Hill.”52 When fleeing occupied Lithuania to the West during the Second World War, the actress Birutė Briedienė “left Vilnius with just a handful of Lithuanian soil and a Lithuanian flag that had hung at the radio station.”53 A handful of earth can serve as a connection to the native land. When it is taken from a gravesite or sprinkled into or onto a grave, it becomes a means of overcoming physical distance and symbolically doing what tradition requires Lithuanians to do—bury the dead in their own land, near their loved ones.

The ritual journey and the burial ritual The narratives told by deportees and their relatives are not limited to the transfer of remains. They are narratives about a ritual journey—the relatives’ 51 Ibid., 188. 52 http://www.anykstenai.lt/asmenys/asm.php?id=1073, accessed December 20, 2018. 53 Milda Kniežaitė, “Gyvieji liudijimai – iš už Atlanto,” Lietuvos žinios, February 19, 2014, http://lzinios.lt/lzinios/Istorija/gyvieji-liudijimai-is-uz-atlanto/174013, accessed March 6, 2014.

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journey to Siberia, and the journey of the deceased back to their homeland. These journeys are punctuated by many moments related to religion or customs that allow us to consider them as continuations of the initial burial ritual, as continuations of the process of sending the deceased deportees to the next life. Because exhumation of the dead is not part of traditional Lithuanian burial practices, people had to develop their own interpretations of burial rituals, adapting them to each reburial situation according to their own understanding. In this chapter we will examine the ritual actions and objects that are highlighted in narratives about burial rituals which, though they may only take as much time as relatives’ journeys to Siberia and back to the homeland, on a spiritual level span several decades. Through mythical and religious images that clearly identify the journeys as extended burial rituals, the narratives particularly focus on the surviving relatives’ relationships with the deceased, their beliefs, feelings, and dreams. Indeed, the journey can begin with a dream. A. J. relates how she dreamt of her mother, who was buried in the deportation, preparing the way for her children to visit her: Before making the trip to bring back remains, I had a dream. It was already the Sąjūdis period and there was talk, there was a conference of deportees to discuss bringing back remains. After all of this, one night I dreamt that I’m standing in a doorway, it is incredibly bright, and my mother is spreading a white tablecloth on a long narrow table, spreading it out with her hands. And I’m standing in the doorway and I say: “Mother, why are you doing that, why is it necessary?” And she is just laying and evening that tablecloth, and she then places one bouquet on the table, and then another. And those bouquets are just sticks with some dried black berries on them. She places the bouquets on the table in vases, at a bit of a slant, and says: “I just need to!” And then she disappears. I thought and thought about that dream, and finally came to the conclusion that she wanted us to go and bring them—my parents—back. And that the trip would be successful, because she anticipated everything, she knew, she smoothed things out for us. And those dried berries, those bouquets—that was their graves. The bouquets were at a slant because it hadn’t been possible to bury my parents side by side. My father lay about five or six meters away from her, at an angle. . . . Those sticks were their old graves, the dried berries—old tears.54 54 LTRF cd 1132.

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This dream narrative contains traditional folklore images—the long white tablecloth representing a path, berries representing tears. But their details are interpreted originally by the narrator—she sees the smoothed out tablecloth as a path free of obstacles and the dried berries as tears long since shed and dried up. The dream urges people to undertake the journey, reminds of the dead, and prevents the living from feeling peace. Those buried in Siberia are understood as abandoned, lonely, and neglected. K. R., a former deportee herself, relates a dream in which she encounters her brother, who was buried in Siberia, tending a bonfire in a forest. When she asks him what he is doing, he replies, “I’m just living here alone.” In another dream, her brother asks her to visit him in hospital: she sees a large building with many small windows and no doors. Her brother is looking through the window and asking: “Visit me.”55 A common motif in such dreams is the dead complaining that they are hungry or cold. In traditional dream narratives, these kinds of images mean that the dead are asking for an offering (that a mass be held in their memory, which replaced more ancient forms of offering food or clothing). But people dreaming of loved ones buried in Siberia interpret complaints of hunger and cold as the dead asking to be brought home. K. R. dreamed that her brother was sitting in a deportee cafeteria, a tiny piece of bread, no bigger than a matchbox, before him. “Have you not had anything else to eat here, Vytukas?” she asks. “Ah,” says the brother. “That’s all they give me here. . . .” When she traveled to Tal′yany where he had lived in deportation, K. R. learned from a local woman, whom she had known since those times, that she too had dreamt of K. R.’s brother: he came to the woman in a dream and asked to borrow a broom; he wanted to tidy up his home because he was expecting guests. There is also the remarkable story of a dream that urged someone to go to Bykov promontory, by the Laptev Sea, and bring back the remains of a three-year-old boy named Jonukas (Jonas). In 1982, a Kharkov man named Kim Shuster was traveling by boat down the Lena River, near the Bykov promontory, when he saw a coffin with a cross from another grave lying on top of it. As he approached he saw that the cross was wrapped with a linen sash, with the inscription: “Lithuanian, Sirutis, Jonas, born 1939.VI.15, died 1942.X.13. Rest in peace, our dear young son, who left this world while still a 55 LTR 7898.

The Dead Want to Come Home

babe.” Though unable to read Lithuanian, Shuster understood from the dates that it was an epitaph and took the sash with the text. From local people he learned about a Lithuanian deportee cemetery on the Bykov promontory that was gradually being washed into the sea. While visiting Lithuania in 1989, Shuster learned that the name on the sash was well known from deportee memoirs. This helped him find Jonukas’s mother, Ona Sirutienė, and bring her a relic from her son’s grave—the sash with the inscription. But the story did not end there. In the same year, members of an expedition to Bykov were able to tell Ona Sirutienė that her son’s grave was still intact— that only the cross had slid down the slope of the cemetery. After these events the woman began to frequently dream of her son complaining that he was cold and asking to be brought home. In 1990, at Sirutienė’s request, three men—Arūnas Vyžintas, Algis Birbilas, and Jonukas Sirutis’s cousin, Julius Augulis—travelled to the Bykov promontory and, with enormous effort, chipped Jonukas’s remains out of the permafrost. Seeing her little son’s remains after nearly fifty years, Sirutienė said, “We are finally blessed,” and the dreams that had been tormenting her receded.56 Dreams do not only urge people to undertake challenging journeys; the dead can also help to locate graves. One such unusual story was told in a 1990 issue of the newspaper Tremtinys. In 1989 Stasys Tolvaiša and his wife Veronika, a couple from the city of Panevėžys, traveled to the town of Mina, in Krasnoyarsk region, to bring back the remains of Veronika’s mother, Mrs. Dambrauskienė, and Veronika’s brothers Bronius and Romualdas. Because, upon leaving Siberia, they had made a detailed plan of the cemetery, they found Veronika’s mother’s and Romualdas’s graves easily. But where Bronius’s grave should have been they found a fresh mound and a new cross with a different name, and there was no sign of the original grave. After a few days of fruitless searching, Bronius appeared to his sister in a dream and said: “Why are you looking for me in the wrong place? On the first day that you were looking, three tree stumps away there was a crow that kept squawking. You even remarked upon it. Following the plan, carefully measure the distance from those stumps and you will find where I am buried.”57 When they measured one more time, Bronius’s relatives discovered that his grave was right next to the new one. “It’s sometimes 56 Virginija Skučaitė, “Juodoji istorijos knyga—vis dar be pabaigos,” Kauno diena, June 16, 2007, http://kauno.diena.lt/dienrastis/kita/juodoji-istorijos-knyga-vis-dar-bepabaigos-48151, accessed September 15, 2018. 57 Jonas Stašaitis, “Mirusieji nori sugrįžti,” Tremtinys 3/18 (1990): 6.

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hard to imagine how the dead are nearby and can help us,” writes the article’s author at the end of the text. Locating remains in cemeteries was usually the most difficult challenge for relatives seeking to find deportee graves. A. J. describes this: “All through the fall and winter I wracked my brain and made plans for how to find those graves once I arrived there. I would even wake up at night and make plans.” And she did succeed in finding her parents’ graves. In locating graves, both rational factors (plans, photographs, help from local people) and intuition are important. A. J. says that she simply had a feeling about where her mother lay in Cheremkhovo cemetery: “It just had to be that place—I simply felt it, I knew that this was it.”58 I. Š. describes how, although there was no inscription left on her mother’s grave in the Tit-Ary deportee cemetery, and everything had changed, she found her mother’s grave instantly: I found it without any help—there was no inscription, no sign at all. . . . I got out of the vehicle and started walking, lowering my eyes so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the environment; I went up to a little mound, and it seemed to be my mother. The cross was completely different. When I had left, there had been no fence around the plot.59

When people located gravesites, they took time to show their respects before beginning to dig: they would say prayers, light a church candle that had been blessed in Lithuania, lay down a Lithuanian flag (A. J., K. R., I. Š., A. L.). Sometimes solemn ceremonies would be held. When they travelled to Martovka (Khabary district, Altai region) to retrieve the remains of their mother, Stefanija Bortkūnienė, her children found some older residents who put them up and helped them to hold a wake: “We were staying at Pavel Zaichenko’s home. We invited a few more oldtimers and held a funeral dinner,” wrote Jurgis Bortkūnas.60 When Romas Kaunietis, Stasys Svilas, and Eugenija Mackevičienė travelled to Tangut (Irkutsk region), they were not able to find any local people to help them to dig up a grave without the involvement of a local shaman. The female shaman who arrived said various spells, repeating “Devil, be gone!” as she poured vodka on the grave. But when the local helpers unearthed the lid 58 LTRF cd 1132. 59 LTRF cd 1136. 60 Jurgis Bortkūnas, “Kaip parvežėme mamos palaikus,” XXI amžius, August 29, 2003, http://xxiamzius.lt/archyvas/xxiamzius/20030829/mums_03.html, accessed January 15, 2014.

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of the coffin and began to jump on it, also shouting “Devil, be gone!,” the Lithuanians saw this as a serious act of disrespect toward the dead and sent them off.61 During a 1989 expedition to the Laptev Sea, a priest was present; before the exhumations began he held a mass for the dead (I. Š.), but this was an unusual occurrence.

Eugenija Mackevičienė prays by her grandmother’s exhumed remains, a candle burning by her head. Tangut (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation). Photograph by Romas Kaunietis.

As already mentioned, the most psychologically challenging moment was the removal of bones from a grave. But despite the horror and sadness involved, people describe having experienced a very close connection with their deceased loved ones. Narratives describe details of remains that serve as signs of recognition and identification. These could include a piece of clothing or an object that had belonged to the deceased, which their relatives now saw decades later, after having exhumed a coffin: a mother’s ruffled dress

61 Kaunietis, Jei laisve nebūčiau tikėjęs, 462.

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(A. J.), a father’s suit,62 a mother’s black dress with little green flowers,63 a mother’s necklace and gold teeth.64 In some instances the remains or shroud were in good condition. For example, when I. Š.’s mother was chopped out of the permafrost with axes, she looked as though she has just been buried, and younger than the woman herself (the mother died in 1946 at age forty-four, while in 1989 the daughter was by then sixty-one years old). For some people, holding a loved one’s remains stimulated intense, spiritual feelings. A. J. describes the incredible experience of holding her parents’ bones in her hands: It felt so good, it seemed, like touching something holy . . . I was especially moved by my father’s and my mother’s hair. I lifted their dear heads, marvelled at them, stroked them . . . My brother was working away, lining the boxes with cellophane, and then we spread them with white sheets, placed the bones and skulls inside, then folded over the white cloth and closed the boxes.  .  . . If I had [seen] my parents’ bones laid out next to each other, without it being clear which coffins they had been taken from, I would still have recognized them, I would have been able to say that this is my mother, this is my father. Everything was very familiar. Could you recognise them from the bones? More likely from the skulls. There was my mother’s hair on one of the skulls, braided as it usually had been. When we were traveling there, I had thought that, after all that exhuming, all those procedures and assembling everything, I wouldn’t be able to touch a bite. But when we had those bones in our hands it became very dear. I have not experienced anything more pleasant in my life than holding those bones in my hands. Perhaps because they were family bones. There were no feelings or fear or repulsion.65

In speaking about her parents’ remains A. J. repeatedly uses diminutive forms—“we left the cemetery with our dear remains [palaikiukai],” “we picked up our little packages [nešuliukus],” and so on. The dead are referred with great gentleness, in the kind of language—full of love, warmth, and care—that a mother uses when speaking about her babies. Regulations required that bones be placed in plastic bags and then in galvanized metal boxes that, in turn, were sealed (though this last step 62 63 64 65

Ibid., 466. Vladas Plikūnas’s memoir (LGGRTC). Bortkūnas, “Kaip parvežėme mamos palaikus.” LTRF cd 1132.

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was not always followed, especially by people traveling on their own). Regardless, most people first placed the bones they had retrieved on a white linen or cotton cloth, and only then wrapped them in plastic. When possible, efforts were made to maintain anatomically correct arrangements, for example, to place the skull facing upward (A. L.). After the remains were exhumed and the old grave filled up again, people would light a candle on the spot and say prayers.66 Some planted wildflowers or lay a bouquet on the old grave (A. B., I. Š.). But not everyone considered the old gravesites important. When asked if her parents’ former gravesite still meant anything to her, A. J. replied that it didn’t; her brother, however, said goodbye to “that little pit where Mummy had lain,” and stood there thinking for a while. A. J. took with her the little board with an inscription from the cross that had stood on her mother’s grave—it is now preserved as a family relic in her home. I. Š. described how, as they were leaving, the Tit-Ary expedition members left candles with scientists working at the local polar meteorological station, asking them to light them at the deportees’ monument during All Soul’s Day and other occasions, as many deportees still lay in that cemetery. In some cases, deportee relatives attached small boards to grave crosses indicating that a person’s remains had been taken back to Lithuania, or simply painted their last name on the gravestone. The fact that inscriptions such as “Has gone to the homeland” or “Returned to Lithuania” remained in cemeteries in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and elsewhere once more illustrates that reburial was understood as the dead themselves returning to Lithuania.67 But the most important part of the reburial ritual occurred in Lithuania, when people returned with their loved ones’ remains. Traditional burial ceremonies were held, some bigger and containing more elements, others more modest. We will review these events’ main elements as they are reflected in witness narratives and memoirs. In some cases, the ceremony began as soon as the plane touched down at the airport. Returning expeditions were met by large gatherings such as the one at Kėdainiai Airport that met the remains of deportees returning 66 Algimantas Maceina, Juoda dėžė (dokumentinis filmas), in Lietuvių dokumentinio kino antologija, DVD 2 (Vilnius: Meno avilys, 2014/1994). 67 For example, after exhuming Petras Šeinius’s remains from Novoilyinsk cemetery (Buryatia republic), his grandchildren wrote the text “Returned to Lithuania 1992.7.22” on his tombstone. This exhumation is depicted a 1992 film by Gintautas Alekna titled Kryžiai Sibiro žemėje (Crosses on Siberian Land).

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from Igarka and turned into an important political demonstration. But even individual travelers were often met ceremoniously by relatives and friends. Jurgis Bortkūnas writes: “We were met at Karmėlava Airport by a large delegation—relatives, colleagues—holding the national tricolour flag and candles.”68 But this was not always the case. A. L. remembers that when she arrived at Vilnius Airport with her brother’s remains, a single car met her and took her to the town of Šilutė, where her relatives were expecting her. Repatriated remains were buried in coffins and/or boxes. If a coffin was not purchased, the box containing the remains was decorated like a coffin. For example, the boxes containing remains brought back from Tit-Ary (at the Lena delta) were wrapped in black velvet (I. Š.). If a box was not very large, it might be placed within a coffin. Although expedition participants had been instructed to transport and bury remains wrapped in plastic and placed in galvanized metal containers, not everyone wanted to bury their relatives this way. A. L. describes how she removed her little brother’s remains from the box and placed the bones, wrapped in a cloth, in a child’s coffin. “We were supposed to put that cloth [containing remains] in plastic and then in galvanized steel, and only then into wooden coffin. I certainly was not going to bury him that way,” she recounted. In Algimantas Maceina’s film Juoda dežė (Black Box), which depicts the entire sequence involved in recovering and reburying deportee remains, we see how a deceased man’s son removes his father’s bones from a box and carefully and anatomically arranges them in a coffin lined with a white cloth. Some women carefully cover the bones with the cloth, and then the coffin is closed.69 Relatives, neighbours, friends, and colleagues would be invited to say their farewells to the dead. Jurgis Bortkūnas writes: “We organized the visitation of my mother’s remains at my brother Gediminas’s cottage in Ringaudai. The only way that it was different from a traditional burial was that instead of a coffin we had a black box that was wrapped in the national flag and tied with a black ribbon. There were many wreaths and flowers.”70 In the film Black Box we see a visitation that is as ceremonial as a traditional burial. The walls of the cottage are hung with woven tablecloths and a large photograph of the deceased that it is decorated with a palm leaf and a delicate linen cloth. The coffin stands on a table covered with a homewoven linen cloth. Flowers and wreaths brought by the numerous guests 68 Bortkūnas, “Kaip parvežėme mamos palaikus.” 69 Maceina, Juoda dėžė. 70 Bortkūnas, “Kaip parvežėme mamos palaikus.”

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are carefully arranged around the coffin. Inscriptions are visible on the wide ribbons decorating the wreaths. The people gathered pray and sing, and a group of about ten hired singers, both men and women, sit behind another table. The film reveals that this laying out of a repatriated deceased deportee is an essential moment in their return from Siberia: from remains they are once again transformed into an individual, their identity restored as their name is spoken out loud, with the photograph hanging on the wall, with the gifts of wreaths and messages, with the hymns sung for them during the wake. The person once again becomes a member of their extended family and community—they are accompanied to a cemetery in their own land with all the appropriate ceremonies. When it was not possible to organize a visitation in the home, the wake was more modest or was not held at all. For example, when A. J. returned home to her Kaunas apartment with her parents’ remains, she did not invite any relatives; only a few of their deportee friends came by. The next day she took the remains to her parents’ former homestead, then stopped to see an aunt in Biržai, where for a short time the remains were brought into her father’s sister’s apartment, and only here did more relatives gather. Afterwards the whole group drove to the church; here the remains, in their boxes, were placed in coffins and were driven to the cemetery in an open truck. Additional invited people—former neighbours and acquaintances—came straight to the mass; there was no separate visitation. The deceased couple’s son asked all of the gathered neighbours to “accept [his parents] into their circle and help him to bury them in Geidžiūnai Cemetery. He appealed to neighbours and residents of the villages to accept his parents into their community.”71 The most solemn moment in a Lithuanian funeral is the procession accompanying the deceased as they leave their home for the last time— this is when the largest number of people gathers. Bortkūnas notes that 150 people came to accompany his mother Stefanija Bortkūnienė’s coffin as it left her home for the cemetery, requiring fifteen cars, one bus, and an additional bus for the orchestra.72 As the funeral procession traveled to the church, the entire group stopped at Bortkūnienė’s native home in the village of Gegužinė. Because repatriated deceased deportees could rarely be lain out in their own homes, as was the traditional practice, during some funerals a stop was made at their former homesteads. This could also be done separately from the funeral procession. For example, A. J. briefly 71 LTRF cd 1132. 72 Bortkūnas, “Kaip parvežėme mamos palaikus.”

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took the boxes containing her parents’ remains to the site of their former homestead before the funeral itself began: “We found a more open space, got out, lifted them out and placed them on their land.”

A remains repatriation expedition returning home from Tsentral'naia Tochka (Asin district, Tomsk region, Russian Federation). June 24, 1990, LGGRTC, MTF 1008.

As in regular funerals, remains would be brought into the church before the start of the mass.73 Some funerals took place without a church, with a priest invited to accompany the remains from someone’s home to the cemetery (A. L.). In either case a solemn procession proceeds to the cemetery, where solemn speeches are made and hymns sung by a gravesite adorned with flowers. The individual’s close relations each throw a handful of earth, the coffin is lowered, and the gathered sing hymns.74 Following the burial, a wake is held—the deceased’s family invites funeral guests to join them at “mournful dinner.”75 Later, the deceased’s relatives erect a tombstone at the gravesite or engrave the person’s name, and dates of birth and death, on a family tombstone. In some cases the reburial date is also indicated, and the person is identified as a former deportee. This is the final act conducted on behalf of a deceased person whose remains have been repatriated from Siberia—from that point 73 Ibid.; also A. J. 74 Ibid.; Maceina, Juoda dėžė; also M. B., K. R. 75 Bortkūnas, “Kaip parvežėme mamos palaikus.”

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on they are included among a family’s dead and are honoured with the same traditional rituals: the grave is visited, prayers are said, candles are lit, and flowers are planted. The deceased individual has returned to their land and to their family. Now they can rest peacefully. They will no longer be doomed to wander, or appear—cold, lonely, and hungry—in their loved ones’ dreams. * * * The narratives examined in this study indicate that the repatriation of deportee remains to Lithuania not only completes the deceased person’s journey: it also liberates their relatives from the burden they felt until their dead relation’s final, deathbed wish of returning to their homeland was fulfilled. As Bielskis writes, “Bringing the dead back home and burying them in a cemetery near home is also important for the living.”76 People who traveled to Siberia to retrieve remains often described this journey as a duty: My dream, my task and my duty—to bring back my parents’ remains from distant Siberia—have been fulfilled.77 When I returned home with that precious parcel on June 29, 1989, I fulfilled Mummy’s dream, and my own duty and dream.78 How did you feel after all of it? That I had fulfilled my duty. It felt good that I had done that, that I had gone to bring back my brother. I had never forgotten my mother’s pain, how mournfully she cried when she lost her little boy. A duty to whom? To my family, to my little brother, to my parents.79

In some cases, repatriation of remains to the homeland was the fulfillment of a specific promise made before the individual died, or of an oath made after a loved one’s death. Regina Plančiūnienė, who traveled through many kilometers of taiga, wrote: “We fulfilled a request my mother had made when she was sick—she always spoke about how much she wanted

76 Bielskis, “Gyvenimai, tapę relikvija.” 77 Kaunietis, Jei laisve nebūčiau tikėjęs, 460. 78 From P. Motiekienė’s letter to V. Morkūnas, Vytautas Magnus War Museum, October 20, 1990. (LGGRTC). 79 A. L., LTRF cd 1133.

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to die in Lithuania and have a church funeral.”80 Julius Činčikas had vowed to his mother that he would bring her remains back to Lithuania, so he traveled to Siberia in the Soviet period, in 1974, well before independence: I can still see my mother’s burial clearly. Our relative Jonas Valonis, who had helped to take care of her in hospital, said sadly, “My greatest wish is to be buried in Lithuania.” I was only eleven, but those words moved me deeply. Soon afterwards he too lay in a pit next to my mother. And I swore that I would fulfill his will and would bring my mother home.81

The greatest challenge for those traveling to Siberia was not the physical hardship or the bureaucratic obstacles, but the fear of not finding the grave they were looking for. Before leading an expedition to Siberia, Antanas Petrokas had worried that former deportees might not psychologically withstand returning to the places where they had suffered famine, cold, humiliation, and loss of loved ones. But he discovered that immeasurably more painful than these personal memories was the loss of a grave. When, on the first day of the expedition, an older couple traveling with him were unable to locate their daughter’s grave, the husband almost had a heart attack. “But what consolation the couple experienced the next day, when they finally found their beloved daughter’s grave,” Petrokas recalled.82 Jonas Kirlys wrote about a similar experience: These days [deportee descendants] travel to Siberia—through Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Vorkuta, the Inta taiga—looking for their parents’ or brothers’ graves, hoping to bring their bones back to the homeland. In their searches they traverse bogs and rummage through scrub. If they find nothing they return home with empty hearts. But if they locate their loved ones’ bones, they bring the remains back to their parents’ gravesites, bury them in a cemetery, and then they can breathe easily. Dear Mother, Father, sister, and brother, I did what I could so that you could rest in peace.83

When they fulfilled their duty, the deceased person’s loved ones felt happy. “I was the happiest man when I brought my father’s remains back from Siberia and buried them alongside my mother in the Pandėlys parish 80 81 82 83

LGGRTC, 6362 KĖ-653. Klimaitė, “Apie laisvę sužinojo per savo jubiliejų.” Gediminas Vakaris, “Tėvynėje,” Laiškai lietuviams 10 (1989): 353−356. Jonas Kirlys, “Mintys gūdžią Vėlinių naktį,” XXI amžius, October 31, 2007, http://www. xxiamzius.lt/numeriai/2007/10/31/laik_03.html, accessed January 12, 2014.

The Dead Want to Come Home

cemetery,” remembers Romas Kaunietis.84 Regina Plančiūnienė inscribed a photograph of herself, her husband, and her brother carrying bags of remains through the taiga with the words “Returning happy with the remains.”85 Having brought home the remains of his mother and other relatives, Julius Činčikas said, “My heart is bursting with happiness.”86 A. J. stressed that, despite the sadness and grief involved, the feeling she had upon bringing home and burying her parents’ remains was such a pleasant one that she likes to remember it to this day. In 1990 P. Motiekienė wrote: Thank God that I lived long enough that I could retrieve the greatest treasure— my dear mother’s remains. . . . The more we are able to bring remains back to Lithuania, where they can rest in peace . . . the more we can collect our homeland’s sons’ and daughters’ remains and give them Catholic funerals, the better, the happier, and the wealthier we will be. We will be stronger.87

Although narratives about the repatriation of deportee remains from Siberia and their reburial in Lithuania recount fairly recent historical events, they also bear witness to an ancient tradition of burying the dead on their land, in their birthplace or homeland. For more than four decades, Soviet occupation and the restriction of deportee rights prevented these people’s loved ones from fulfilling that duty—a duty to the dead that was finally fulfilled as political conditions made that possible. The narratives of individuals who performed these duties reveal that their determination and perseverance were inspired by clear and unquestionable motivations: the living must bury the dead in an appropriate place and following the necessary rituals, in this way returning them to the homeland and laying their path to the land of the dead. This is why the repatriation of remains to Lithuania was and is considered a continuation and completion of the burial ritual. Thus narratives about the repatriation and burial of remains also constitute a verbal form of ritual: they allow the narrators to make sense of the duties they have performed, and inform listeners (beginning with relations who participate in the funerals) that the burial ritual has been carried out.

84 Kaunietis, Jei laisve nebūčiau tikėjęs, 467. 85 LGGRTC, 6361, KĖ-653. 86 Klimaitė, “Apie laisvę sužinojo per savo jubiliejų.” 87 From P. Motiekienė’s letter to V. Morkūnas, Vytautas Magnus War Museum, October 20, 1990. (LGGRTC).

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List of informants A. B.—woman, former deportee, born 1940 in the village of Pakalniškiai (Skuodas region), resides in Kaunas. In 1990 travelled to recover her father’s remains from Bolshaya Rechka (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation). Spoken with on August 1, 2014, and August 6, 2014. A. J.—woman, former deportee, born 1935 in the village of Geidžiūnai (Biržai region), resides in Kaunas. In 1989, together with her brother, travelled to Cheremkhovo (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation) to recover her mother and father’s remains. Spoken with on March 27, 2014. A. L.—woman, former deportee, born 1946 in the village of Bikavėnai (Šilutė region). In 1990 travelled to Artyugino (Krasnoyarsk region, Russian Federation) to recover her brother’s remains. Spoken with on July 3, 2014. B. P.—woman, former deportee, born 1930 in the village of Kveciai (Kretinga region). In 1959 the remains of her husband, who died in the deportation, was brought back to Lithuania. In 1990 her husband’s sister travelled to Bolshaya Rechka (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation) to recover her father’s remains. Spoken with on July 28, 2014. D. R.—man, former deportee, born 1935 in the village of Mergiūnai (Joniškis region), resides in the village of Vyčius (Kaunas region). In 1989, together with his wife, travelled to Tal′yany (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation) to recover the remains of his wife’s brother. Spoken with on November 26, 2011, April 1, 2013, and October 19, 2013. I. Š.—woman, former deportee, born 1928, resides in Kaunas. In 1989 travelled to the island of Tit-Ary in the Lena River delta by the Laptev Sea (Yakutia [Sakha] republic, Russian Federation) to retrieve her mother’s remains. Spoken with on July 16, 2014, and August 6, 2014. J. M.—man, born in the deportation in 1946 in Trofimovsk. In 1989 participated in a deportation commemoration and remains repatriation expedition to the Lena Delta. Lives in Kaunas. Spoken with on July 16, 2014. K. R.—woman, born 1937 in the village of Vyčius (Kaunas Region). In 1989 travelled to Tal′yany (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation) to recover her brother’s remains. Spoken with on October, 6, 2011, November 26, 2011, April 1, 2013, and October 19, 2013. M. B.—woman, former deportee, born 1932 in the village of Vyčius (Kaunas region), resides in the village of Pagiriai (Kaunas region). 1989 relatives

The Dead Want to Come Home

recovered her brother’s remains from Tal′yany (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation). Spoken with on October 6, 2011. R. K.—man, born 1944 in the village of Buivydžiai (Rokiškis region), resides in Panevėžys. In 1989 travelled to Tangut (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation) to recover his father’s remains. Spoken with on January 1, 2013. V. P.—man, former deportee, born 1929 in the village of Pakalniškiai (Skuodas region), lives in Kretinga. In 1990 travelled to Bolshaya Rechka (Irkutsk region, Russian Federation) to recover his father’s remains. Spoken with on July, 28, 2014.

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Chapter 4

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories Lina Būgienė

Introduction While conducting fieldwork in Eastern Lithuania in 2010–2012, a group of researchers focused their attention on collecting a series of autobiographical narratives (life stories) by the local people, which inevitably reflected painful moments in the people’s historical experience. This experience—or, rather, its subjective interpretation—constitutes the object of this study. During recent decades, folklore research in Lithuania became increasingly entangled with history and sociology, since representatives of these branches of scholarship actively employ the method of oral history—namely, interviewing informants regarding their experiences and recollections of the past, and subsequently turning these interviews into historical sources available for research purposes.1 Generally, oral history researchers tend to focus on the “little people”: not exceptional historical figures but the average village or city residents whose voices are still not sufficiently heard in the great global and national narratives.2 However, 1 Oral History Association (OHA), The Core Principles of the Oral History Association, https://www.oralhistory.org/oha-core-principles/, accessed April 9, 2020. 2 These include especially women, whose recorded memories constitute even separate archives and form the basis for numerous publications, such as Dalia Leinartė, Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality. Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–1970

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the original proponents of oral history are particularly concerned with problems of sufficient representation and reliability of their sources, since they are mostly interested in the factual side of the narratives.3 Folklorists, on the other hand, proceed from a different angle: they are mainly interested in whose viewpoint the story represents, and how this is revealed in the narration. “Thus, while historians focus on the event, folklorists concentrate on the reciprocal connections between the event and the narrator.”4 In analyzing the narratives collected during our fieldwork,5 we were most concerned with what, in the course of each narrative, was remembered and what was suppressed; who the narrator identified with (whose side they took in the case of a conflict); which details the narrator considered important; which means of expression they used; and what all of this said about her or him. We analyzed not only what the person remembered, but also how they reflected upon it: why the things being told seem significant to the speaker, how they give meaning to their accumulated experience, etc. Material collected in oral interviews is also interesting and valuable because, in contrast to written autobiographies, it is “unpolished” and (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010); She Who Remembers Survives: Interpreting Estonian Women’s Post-Soviet Life Stories, ed. Tiina Kirss et al. (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2004); Carrying Linda’s Stones: An Anthology of Estonian Women’s Life Stories, ed. Suzanne Stiver Lie et al. (Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2006); or disidents—the hidden part of the Soviet society, see Kažkas tokio labai tikro. Nepaklusniosios sovietmečio visuomenės istorijos, ed. Ainė Ramonaitė et al. (Vilnius: Aukso žuvys, 2015); or migrants, for example, Oral History: Migration and Local Identities, ed. Ieva Garda-Rozenberga and Mara Zirnite (Riga: University of Latvia, 2011). There are exceptions, however, since in Lithuania, especially historians working on oral history occasionally engage in making lengthy interviews and recording recolections by prominent intelectuals or artists. See, for example, works by Aurimas Švedas, based on his interviews with famous Lithuanian historian Edvardas Gudavičius (Visa istorija yra gyvenimas. 12 sakytinės istorijos epizodų. Edvardą Gudavičių kalbina Aurimas Švedas [Vilnius: Aidai, 2008]), celebrated artist Petras Repšys (Piešimas buvo tarsi durys. Petrą Repšį kalbina Aurimas Švedas [Vilnius: Aidai, 2013]), or intellectual and outstanding theatre critic Irena Veisaitė (Aurimas Švedas, Irena Veisaitė. Gyvenimas turėtų būti skaidrus [Vilnius: Aukso žuvys, 2015]). 3 See, for example, detailed discussion regarding “scientific” qualities of oral history as presented in Sakytinė istorija kaip sovietmečio tyrimo metodas, ed. I. Vinogradnaitė et al. (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2018), 25–30. 4 Tiiu Jaago, “Genre Creation within Memory Collection,” in Estonian Approaches to Culture Theory, ed. Valter Lang and Kalevi Kull (Tartu: University of Tartu, 2014), 289. 5 This narrative material was collected using the method of semi-structured interviews: after the researcher asked an introductory question (thus defining the theme that interested them), the respondent was free to decide what to relate, while the interviewer asked additional questions in order to clarify certain key moments.

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therefore offers the possibility of observing examples of authentic verbal and paraverbal expression: vivid expressions, repetitions, pauses, awkward moments, laughter, tears, silence, and the like. The form of the narration sometimes reveals its content from a completely unexpected angle, thus adding considerably to the possible interpretations of the narrative.6 Folklorists worldwide have already accumulated considerable experience in this kind of narrative analysis.7 When assessing autobiographical narratives from a folklorist’s, rather than a historian’s point of view, one is concerned not so much with revealing objective truths or with some kind of verification of accumulated memories, but rather with the subjective interpretation of these memories and with locating meaning within the narratives about

6 In Lithuania, analysis of written autobiographies is mainly reserved to literary scholars, dealing with life histories of famous writers, and so forth. While historians and particularly folklorists prefer collecting and analysing oral narratives, considering them more immediate and “authentic” form of rendering. 7 Scholars from different countres have created and continue to develop original methods of narrative analysis. For example, see Gillian Bennett, “‘And I Turned Round to Her and Said . . .’ A Preliminary Analysis of Shape and Structure in Women’s Storytelling,” Folklore 100, no. 2 (1989): 167–183; Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Narrative and Narrating. Variantion in Juho Oksanen’s Storytelling (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1996), and her other works; also, Ulf Palmenfelt, “Expanding Worlds: Into the Ethnography of Narrating,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 37 (2007): 7–19, and “Contemporary Uses of Narrative,” Elore 16/2 (2009): 1–12, etc. As a consolidation of the Nordic folklorists’ perspectives on various uses and ways of narrative analysis, the anthology Narrating, Doing, Experiencing. Nordic Folkloristic Perspectives, ed. Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Barbo Klein and Ulf Palmenfelt (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2006) may be mentioned. In Latvia, these issues are most actively dealt by Ieva Garda-Rozenberga: see, for example, the collections Oral History: Dialogue with Society, ed. Ieva Garda Rozenberga (Riga: University of Latvia, 2013) and Oral History: Migration and Local Identities, ed. Ieva Garda Rozenberga and Mara Zirnite (Riga: University of Latvia, 2011), and her numerous articles. Among Estonian folklorists dealing with life stories, works by Ene Kõresaar should be mentioned, including the books that she edited: Soldiers of Memory: World War II and its Aftermath in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), and Baltic Socialism Remembered: Memory and Life Story since 1989 (London: Routledge, 2018). Also, Tiiu Jaago seems particularly active not only in researching the actual narrative materials, but also in defining the problematics and basic notions of the field; see, for example, Tiiu Jaago, Ene Kõresaar, and Aigi Rahi-Tamm, “Oral History and Life Stories as a Research Area in Estonian History, Folkloristics and Ethnology,” Elore 13/1 (2006): 1–15. The author of this article has contributed to this kind of research as well; among other works, see the collective monograph: Jurga Jonutytė, Lina Būgienė, and Aleksandras Krasnovas, Lietuvos pasienio miestelių atmintis ir tapatybė: Valkininkai, Vilkyškiai, Žeimelis (Vilnius: Vilniaus universitetas, 2013).

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

them.8 It is interesting to observe how individual stories are capable of powerfully reflecting the great historical narratives and enriching them in various ways, thus revealing such narratives’ fundamental multiplicity and the questionable foundations of their origins.

The workings of history in the memories of Eastern Lithuanians The middle of the twentieth century, and especially the 1940s, was a particularly dramatic period for all European countries and peoples. Lithuania, including its Eastern part, was no exception; indeed, this land and its inhabitants were doomed to find themselves on the crossroads of hostilities between the biggest and fiercest political powers of the century. The most dramatic example is probably the so-called Vilnius region, where mid-century political cataclysms took a particularly extreme course. All of these historical turbulences are still alive in the memories of local people (and particularly the elderly generation) and are manifested in their life stories, which often reveal rather unconventional perspectives and judgments as well as echoes of the horrific tragedies that marked their personal lives. The focus of our analysis is the small local community of Valkininkai, situated in the southeastern part of Lithuania, in the Varėna district, which belongs to Vilnius region. Today, Valkininkai is about thirty kilometers from the current Lithuanian border with Belarus. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, this region was under Polish rule, having fallen to Poland during the Polish military’s quick and effective campaign of 1920. The Vilnius region, including Valkininkai, fell back to Lithuania only in 1939, and for barely several months. The Soviet occupation of Lithuania began in 1940, followed by occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941; finally, at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet occupation resumed in 1944, complete with its characteristic methods—deportations, repressions, and forced collectivization. Inhabitants in this region therefore had to face numerous and frequent historical changes and shifts. The period of 1939–1941 was perhaps the most dramatic, when, in the course of just two years, four different armies marched across this land and four different regimes replaced each other like shapes in a kaleidoscope. As a local Valkininkai 8 Alistair Thomson, “Making the Most of Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1999): 291–301.

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historian puts it, “perhaps because of its geographic position, all the historic whirlwinds, the dramatic and tragic events of the past affected Valkininkai in one way or another.”9 One could add that perhaps this historical situation led to the development of unique kind of borderline existence typical to this particular area. Among our interview subjects the older residents of these areas— those born in the 1920s or somewhat later—saw many of these dramatic historical events with their own eyes. The complex workings and events of twentieth-century history touched their lives in one way or another and are therefore invariably reflected in the autobiographical narratives collected for the purposes of our research.10 Although the current study draws on information collected from numerous Valkininkai residents, the main analysis focuses on five narrators: three women and two men. Their life stories, fragments of which are cited below, form the basis of this analysis. A greater degree of attention was inevitably given to an especially talented narrator who has an exceptional memory and a unique view of life: A. B., who was born in 1927 and during our fieldwork was living in the village of Degsnės, not far from Valkininkai. We met with him three times, each meeting lasting several hours. He is an educated, self-aware individual with a clear sense of his national, political, and religious identity, which he asserts very openly; he holds critical views of many things and is able to effectively defend his positions. In addition, he is perhaps the best storyteller that I have encountered while conducting fieldwork: he is capable of spinning a rich and engaging narrative from the most banal events, not to mention his dramatic historical experiences! A. B.’s narratives are therefore given the most attention in this analysis, while material recorded from the other informants serves more to provide context (though in some cases they, too, provide valuable material). By concentrating on one narrator in this way it is possible to fully reveal the subjectivity of the history he narrates—how its interpretation depends on the details of his life, his understanding, his flexibility of mind and imagination, and, finally, his eloquence. From the multi-colored narrative material collected during our research on Valkininkai and the surrounding areas, the following historical themes were most distinct: 9 Romualdas Arlauskas, Valkininkų kraštas istorijos verpetuose (Vilnius: Gamta, 2005), 13. 10 Cf.: Tiiu Jaago, “Cultural Borders in an Autobiographical Narrative,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 52 (2012): 15–38; doi:10.7592/FEJF2012.52.jaago.

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

1) the question of ethnicity (Lithuanian-Polish relations during the years of the Polish occupation, the war (the “bloody Pentecost” incident), and in later years); 2) the tragic fate of the Jewish community; 3) the partisan struggle during and after the war. In a land of such a dramatic fate, all of these themes are marked by particular nuances and a great deal of local specificity. Below we will discuss how they are reflected and interpreted in individual autobiographical narratives.

“My passport says that I’m Polish . . . .” How ethnic relations are reflected in life stories In Valkininkai, as in the rest of eastern and southeastern Lithuania, ethnicity, national awareness, and identity formation are very specific and marked by a long and complicated history. It could be said that, for many centuries and up until the beginning of the twentieth century, local inhabitants’ identities were not clearly defined by native language. Here the use of language (Lithuanian or Polish) was not so much an indicator of ethnic, but rather of social belonging: wealthier, and especially higher-born inhabitants saw themselves as Poles and generally spoke Polish, because knowing that language was a matter of prestige and a sign of higher social status. The lower, less advantaged classes (especially peasants) spoke Lithuanian; a good number of inhabitants of the region spoke both languages depending on the situation.11 From 1920 Polish military and civilian authority was established in Valkininkai, as in the rest of the Vilnius region, resulting in a fierce and persistent Polonization of the local population: last names were Polonized, Lithuanian schools were constrained, Lithuanian teachers and anyone demonstrating stronger Lithuanian self-awareness were persecuted, use of Lithuanian was banned in official institutions, arrests were made, and fines

11 A similar situation existed during the nineteenth century throughout the territory of ethnic Lithuania. Lithuanian was spoken mostly by the peasantry, while representatives of all social strata higher than them, such as the šlėktos (Polish-speaking landed gentry, who “called themselves Poles of Lithuanian descent”) avoided speaking and reading Lithuanian even if they knew it, using that language only to communicate with peasants, see Juozas Jurginis, Lietuvos valstiečių istorija (nuo seniausių laikų iki baudžiavos panaikinimo) (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1978), 220.

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imposed.12 The people of the region had to fight long and hard in making every step toward strengthening Lithuanian identity, whether it was to have the right to have their children taught in Lithuanian, to celebrate national holidays, to participate in religious ceremonies, and so on. And keeping in mind that the peasants who already struggled to farm the region’s sandy soil were subjected to high taxation by the Polish authorities, it is hard not to agree that “the impoverished Vilnius and Valkininkai region suffered a double oppression: on both socio-economic and—through education, culture, and the Church—national levels.”13 On the other hand, deeper exploration of historical material reveals that the Polish government’s policies of oppression and prohibitions in a sense had the reverse effect of strengthening Valkininkai inhabitants’ Lithuanian national consciousness and stimulating their desire to oppose forced Polonization.14 For example, a 1928 resolution adopted by the teachers’ conference of the Vilnius “Rytas” Society stressed that the district of Valkininkai was entirely Lithuanian, despite the fact that it only had two truly Lithuanian schools.15 Despite the threat of enormous fines by the authorities, the peasants and small farmers of most villages were determined not to send their children to the Polish schools and gathered many signatures on petitions demanding more Lithuanian schools.16 The conflicts and grievances experienced for the 12 See Mykolas Biržiška, Vilniaus Golgota (Vilnius: Mintis, 1992), and Zigmas Zinkevičius, Rytų Lietuva praeityje ir dabar (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1993). 13 Arlauskas, Valkininkų kraštas istorijos verpetuose, 77. 14 In speaking about the broader context of early twentieth-century Lithuanian history, the sociologist Romualdas Grigas calls this kind of actively emerging language-based Lithuanian national consciousness among the peasantry an example of “national determination” (Romualdas Grigas, Paribio Lietuva: sociologinė paribio gyventojų integravimosi į Lietuvos valstybę apybraiža [Vilnius: Lietuvos filosofijos ir sociologijos institutas, 1996], 17). He also notes that the “intolerance of Lithuanians toward anything Polish” was the result of Poland’s active expansion and the perceived threat that, “surrounded by more powerful and aggressive neighbours, Lithuanians could simply disappear” (ibid., 21). 15 Biržiška, Vilniaus Golgota, 636. 16 Arlauskas, Valkininkų kraštas istorijos verpetuose, 85. According to historical data, in the eastern Lithuanian provinces parents had to campaign for their children to receive schooling in Lithuanian as early as in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although at the time this territory was part of the Russian Empire, the Polish language was nevertheless considered the predominant language of culture and education. For instance, the supervisor of the Ukmergė region’s schools issued a decree in 1824 demanding all schoolchildren to be taught in Polish, except for “only those children whose parents would specifically request teaching in Lithuanian” (Jurginis, Lietuvos valstiečių istorija, 221).

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sake of going to school in Lithuanian are still vivid in the memories of any Valkininkai inhabitants who experienced them directly. In remembering his childhood and school years, the aforementioned A. B., for example, says that it angers him to hear about Poles currently living in the Vilnius region demanding Polish schools, universities, and street name spellings. He inevitably compares these demands to the situation of Polish-occupied Lithuania, which he remembers well from his childhood. According to A. B., during that period Lithuanian language instruction at school was limited to barely two hours a week and even these had to be fought for by sending official letters to the authorities in Warsaw. Nor were there any Lithuanianwritten signs anywhere—all the village names were written only in Polish. “I can remember it all . . . I know, after all,” said our interviewee, half-jokingly and half-angrily suggesting that similar policies could be directed at the Lithuanian Poles now making great demands for cultural autonomy.17 Other individuals that we interviewed during our research also expressed vexation about such restrictions experienced in the past. According to most witnesses, the Valkininkai parish was almost entirely inhabited by Lithuanians. The same interviewee recalls how joyfully the Lithuanian army was met when it entered Vilnius region in 1939. The cadets looked very fine. “And the horses—it was so beautiful. They were specially picked—hussars!” The words of the hussar commander remained lodged in the child A. B.’s memory. Getting out of the automobile that had brought him, the officer remarked that they had not met any Poles on the way, that they had not had a chance “to exercise their arms,” that is, to have a good fight. “Because we’re all Lithuanians here!” noted A. B. Nevertheless, there were, and continue to be some Polish-speaking inhabitants in the Valkininkai area. They have a derogatory view of Lithuanians, whom they call klumpiaki (from the Lithuanian word for cheap wooden clogs—klumpės). While the Lithuanians jokingly call the Poles gudai, because their Polish language is not the standard one spoken in Warsaw.18 During the course of our fieldwork, more than one of our 17 The interview took place on August 3, 2012. Further in the article, I refer to the oral life stories collected during the fieldwork of 2011–2012 in the Valkininkai parish; the informants are indicated by their initials for ethical considerations. 18 Gudai—Lithuanian slang term for Belarusians. Indeed, linguists recognize the Polish language spoken in Lithuania as an independent linguistic phenomenon (polszczyzna litewska, according to Zinkevičius, Rytų Lietuva praeityje ir dabar, 290). In effect, it is a blend of Polish, Belarusian, Russian, and Lithuanian that in the Vilnius region is currently called po prostu [just simply] or the tiuteišių [local people’s] dialect or

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interviewees mockingly quoted things said by local gudai in their broken Polish dialect, full of Lithuanian words. Rather proud of himself, A. B. gave us an eloquent account of an incident in which, when he was still working in construction, he sang a Polish song that he remembered from his prewar school years to a group of colleagues who considered themselves Poles but spoke very incorrect Polish. His listeners decided that he had the pronunciation of someone from Warsaw, adding, “From his accent you could never tell he’s Lithuanian!” So, the correct Polish he learned in school allowed A. B. to put the local Poles in their place, even though, as he later admitted, he had been taught Polish during the interwar years by a “Lithuanian from Švenčionys.”19 When the Vilnius region was transferred to Lithuania in 1939, a different teacher arrived, but only stayed for a year, until the war began. During that year the school received a library of Lithuanian books, while the Lithuanian Riflemen’s League collected gifts for “children in the Polish-occupied region”; this also bears witness to the Republic of Lithuania’s policies of that time regarding the region, and the first efforts to counterbalance past Polonization policies with efforts to strengthen Lithuanian national identity. These and other inhabitants’ memories illustrate that the population of the Valkininkai parish was multicultural and multilingual, and that ethnically based quarrels and even conflicts were therefore inevitable. Besides education, the Lithuanians’ most notable efforts to consolidate their ethnic identity were related to the Church. In his explorations of ethno-confessional relations between the inhabitants of southeastern Lithuania, the historian and journalist Virginijus Savukynas pointedly remarks that “language and identity are related to the degree that one or another language is used in church. . . . Understanding of national identity is founded on the sacredness seme. In everyday life, in the space of the profane, one can speak any language—one’s identity is not under threat. But when one enters a sacral space, . . . language becomes significant.”20 He uses this argument to explain a historical phenomenon that was quite frequent in Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth language (mowa prosta, język tutejszy [simple speech, local language]). Some believe that its foundation is the Belarusian, rather than Polish, language; perhaps this is why those who speak it are called gudai? 19 A town currently in northeastern part of Lithuania. 20 Virginijus Savukynas, “Etnokonfesiniai santykiai Pietryčių Lietuvoje istorinės antropologijos aspektu,” Kultūrologija 10 (2003): 88–89.

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

century—disputes about which language would be used in church prayers and hymns: “[In] seeking to consolidate Lithuanian language rights, it was first essential to establish them within the context of the Church.”21 From what we can glean from the narratives recorded during our fieldwork, battles over “Lithuanianness” in churches in the Valkininkai region were still active during the 1920s and 1930s. This, of course, is simply more evidence of the problematic situation of the Lithuanian language and the ethnic identity based on it during the years of the Polish occupation of the region. According to one woman whom we interviewed, who distinctly identified as a Lithuanian, the local Poles were very proud and arrogant. “They were so boastful and full of themselves that it seemed, polski fason [Polish fashion], that even their gumboots were shiny!” said a woman from Čižiūnai (a village, next to Valkininkai, that had always considered itself especially Lithuanian). She also recalled, from her youth, an ethnically based conflict that took place in their church, which had two flags—one belonging to the Lithuanians, the other to the Poles. There was even a skirmish over which one would be carried during a procession: And we didn’t give in to them . . . We kept at it, and so did they. . . And there weren’t that many of them, those poliakai [Poles]. Some of them were from Paklėštarė. But they were so zachalni [obnoxious], you can’t imagine! What good-for-nothings.

Another woman, L. A., born in 1927 in so-called “Polish” Paklėštarė (an area at the other end of Valkininkai town, which was always in conflict with “Lithuanian” Čižiūnai), even several times proudly stressed that, in church, “under the Poles, mass was said in Lithuanian.” Though, in her opinion, “Things were not great under the Poles. We were all very poor, including the Poles.” Indeed, this same interviewee flatly refused to identify herself as either Lithuanian or Polish, and stressed that she knew her prayers in both languages, so “it was all the same to [her].”22 In general, in analysing the narrative material we collected, it gradually becomes clear that the supposedly ethnic (Polish–Lithuanian) conflict in Valkininkai, which had long simmered between the two ends of the town, conceals an older and more universal competition between villages, that has deeper, if now perhaps forgotten, social roots. The local people mention 21 Ibid., 89–92. 22 Jonutytė, Būgienė, and Krasnovas, Lietuvos pasienio miestelių atmintis ir tapatybė, 59.

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an earlier, bloody conflict between two families, in which a man from Paklėštarė killed his cousin from Čižiūnai. This act was, in turn, avenged. They also mention a horrific story of the six Jančikas brothers who, on Christmas Eve, supposedly snuck up on and killed a neighbor, who had wronged their father, and some of that man’s supporters. It appears that the so-called Polishness of Paklėštarė and Lithuanianness of Čižiūnai, of which their respective residents are so proud, is simply a means of collective identity construction based on the opposition between us and them, and which is needed for each village’s sense of its own exclusivity. In this region the question of (Polish or Lithuanian) identity was essentially a matter of personal (or family, or community—as in the case of the above-mentioned two villages) choice. But it was also sometimes simply a question of chance, which, amid the workings of history, could have especially tragic consequences, as the story of “Bloody Pentecost” illustrates. Most of the elderly residents of Valkininkai whom we interviewed remembered this event. This senseless incident, which resulted in the tragic deaths of more than twenty men on the Feast of the Pentecost on May 25, 1942, is thoroughly described (based on the recollections of Valkininkai inhabitants, including eyewitnesses) by Romualdas Arlauskas.23 Summarizing the material he collected, this author came to the conclusion that the tragedy resulted from a family conflict: a man who was angry with his father threatened him with a gun. The incident was reported to the German commandant. Because possessing a weapon was prohibited by the occupying Nazi authorities, the Germans set out to arrest the guilty party. The man shot one of the Germans, and then died himself during the shooting. Valkininkai was at risk of experiencing a large-scale tragedy (as occurred in the nearby village of Pirčiupiai; see below), because the Germans planned to avenge the death of their soldier by executing one hundred locals. In his book, Arlauskas interprets the events that followed: Led by the local, Nazi-appointed town administrator, the Lithuanian collaborators tried to convince the German military administration that the provocation was likely a terrorist act on the part of “Polish partisans.” All those with Lithuanian passports issued in 1940 were released, and a decision was made to hunt down all young local Polish men. . . . As a result, during

23 Arlauskas, Valkininkų kraštas istorijos verpetuose, 139–144.

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

that Pentecost twenty-two men were killed, twenty-one of whom were innocent. Their deaths were completely senseless.24

While collecting our fieldwork material we were able to record four more versions of events from different local witnesses. The basic facts of their narratives correspond to the account of events in Arlauskas’s book, but many details, and especially their interpretations, differ significantly. The first account, by L. A., from the above-mentioned village of Paklėštarė, which suffered the greatest losses in the tragedy, seems quite neutral; it simply emphasizes the tragic nature of the events and the carelessness of the man who initiated the conflict: Two brothers had an argument. But they weren’t living in the same house. They were both members of the Arlauskas family. There—that’s the house, up on the hill. They had an argument. Kaziukonytė was a friend of theirs. Here’s the house. Apparently they had a record player. So, they had this argument. But I can’t really say . . . Well, about that record player, whether he took the record player or not, but he went off, and the army barracks were right there, and there were some Germans standing there—and he snitched. But what did he actually say . . . who can know what he said? And then he went off . . . The one that ran away . . . why was it necessary to shoot that German? He shouldn’t have done it. And then maybe it wouldn’t have happened. But a German was shot. The Kaziukonis family’s house stood right here, by the Merkys River; that Marytė was a friend of mine. So . . . he was shot. And then, after, whether that Arlauskas was shot, or he shot himself .  .  . And then the tragedy happened. They rounded up all the Poles and shot them the next day. There’s the grave, next to this . . . So twenty young men were shot. And my husband’s brother. He had even kept his passport, to show he was a Lithuanian, apparently; he had kept his passport. Then my husband went to see what was happening, he rushed over there, but he was already shot. Holding his passport, that said Andriuškevičius. And they still shot him? They were all shot, and they were all young. And many children were left orphaned, it was so sad. So that’s the kind of tragedy it was. What was it all about—who knows? It’s hard to say.

Another version of the narrative was offered by S. P., a man born in 1924, from the adjacent village of Užuperkasis. According to S. P., he barely 24 Ibid., 141.

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managed to avoid the roundup himself, as his passport identified him as Polish;25 he only survived by hiding in his attic: There was this Arlauskas. He had a girlfriend, you know, in the same village but a bit farther. As it was, he was here on the Pentecost, and he had this old-fashioned record player. He lived with his parents, and he wanted to take that record player and give it to his girlfriend. His father wouldn’t give it to them, so they argued. They were hunters, so the guy grabbed a gun and began threatening his father. So the father ran out of the house. It was under the Germans, so there was a barracks, and some Germans there, so the father went to talk to them. The Germans were walking along the street and he [the son] saw they were coming, so he dropped to the ground and shot and hit one of the Germans. So the shooting started and he was killed on the spot. There you go. Then right away people were saying it was the Polish partisans, so the Germans started going through all the villages, the town. Here in Užuperkasis they were saying: “Your passport says you’re a Pole?” And they’d grab them by the neck and take them in. The next day they drove them away, over there, a bit past the cemetery, past the road. So they drove the truck to that spot near the little cemetery and set up their machine guns . . . Nineteen or twenty men, I can’t remember exactly, were shot. Then they drove back through Užuperkasis, through the street, and got another five men. Right there on the street? They’d go into a house. The town administrator was with them, you see. There you go. Because the Germans, on their own . . . how could they know? So they picked up five more—three here and two at the factory—and drove them over there, near the school, and shot them, so five more were buried here. . . . They’d just look at a passport—if you were a Pole, you were finished.

The third version of the narrative is quite different, as we recorded it from the daughter of the above-mentioned town administrator, who lived in Čižiūnai—the man who, according to the other interviewees, conceived of blaming the Poles. During a previous conversation, the woman (born in 1929) more than once spoke about how much she loved and respected her father, how people held him in high esteem; understanding, it seemed, that the way his behavior was described by others did little to preserve his 25 It should be noted that during the Polish occupation some coercion was used when people were identifying their ethnicity in their passports, and sometimes “there was simply no question: [officials] just wrote ‘Pole’” (Petras Kalnius, Etniniai procesai Pietryčių Lietuvoje XX a. antrojoje pusėje [Vilnius: Žara, 1998], 40).

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

honor, in her own account of “Bloody Pentecost” this woman arranged the narrative very differently. According to her, it was the Germans who thought of settling scores with the Poles, while her father, being Lithuanian, did not know the Polish inhabitants of Paklėštarė (which was at the opposite end of the town from Čižiūnai), so recommended that the Germans speak with his assistant, who was Polish. Moreover, this narrator incorporated a rather romantic motive for the beginning of the conflict, saying that she had heard that everything had started because the German and a young local man had an argument over a girl: It happened here, in Valkininkai. A German was dating some girl, who another guy was seeing. He didn’t mean it, but he didn’t want to lose her, so he shot that German. And because of that German they arrested fourteen people. They were all paliokai [Poles]. It seems they singled them out. My father was the town administrator at the time.  .  . . My father says, “I am Lithuanian, you know.” And [one of the Germans] replies to him, “Give me the Poles.” In other words, it was the Poles who were responsible—it was a Pole that shot the German. “So give me this many people.” So my father says, “You know what—my assistant, from Paklėštarė, is Polish. He knows everyone there. Go and see him and he’ll explain everything to you.” And you know, that’s what they did. That’s what they did. They drove over there, they went there and selected people. If the passport said a man was Lithuanian, they let him go. If the passport was Polish—into the pit! Into the pit! . . . The pit, and that was it. Right here, by these huts, there’s the cemetery.

In the end, we heard the most radical assessment of “Bloody Pentecost” in the narrative of an especially patriotic Lithuanian: the above-mentioned A. B., from the village of Degsnės. In his opinion, the decision, mentioned by others, to blame the Poles, was a great stroke of luck, as it helped avoid a much bigger massacre and a far greater number of deaths. In order to make his narrative more convincing, A. B. draws on accounts from people who allegedly witnessed the events with their own eyes: I worked with a man whose brother is the one who shot [the German]. He told me about it himself. He said, I had an argument with my brother, who, because he had a gun, said, “I’ll shoot you!” So this younger brother went to the Germans, and tells them, “Listen, my brother says he’s going to shoot me.” So [the Germans], there were two or three of them, I don’t know . . . so they went back with him. “Where’s your brother?”

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But that brother had crossed the Merkys and was on the other side, in the woods. And when the German climbed over the fence, he shot him—he shot him dead. It’s good that the police chief was there. They had already gone to get the police, so the Lithuanian police chief was there. So then he says … [The Germans] demanded that a hundred people be killed—shot! It was horrific! That’s the way they worked. So then he says (he was Lithuanian, this police chief), he says, “It’s a Pole who shot [the German].” So they did it according to passports. How they found them, well, I don’t know, how it happened. But when the police chief, his name was Arlauskas, said that it was a Pole . . . So then they went looking for Poles. They left the Lithuanians alone. And if they hadn’t, many more would have been shot!26

We can see that interpretation and assessment of the same events always depends upon the narrator’s personality and position. Depending on who he or she is, the narrator clearly chooses a particular expository strategy that downplays some details and highlights others. What is a great tragedy to one, another might see as something of a success. What causes one to feel shame, another might see as an achievement. It is clear that, in each case, the truth is not historical but rather personal—that it is therefore impossible to verify it, no matter how much historians might worry and be frustrated about the quality of the information provided by their oral history sources.27 On the other hand, we can, here, recall the words of Italian American scholar Alessandro Portelli, who points out that this field is indeed distinct because it not so much provides information about historical events, but about their meaning. According to Portelli, the most valuable aspect of oral history is, in fact, its subjectivity: its sources “tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, what they now think they did.”28 Indeed, this scholar firmly believes that subjectivity is by no means a less valuable objective of history

26 For more on the Polish-Lithuanian conflict in the Vilnius region in 1939–1944 and its representation in the Lithuanian and Polish discourses of memory culture, see Irena Šutinienė, “Negotiating Borders: Conflicting Memories of World War II Participants in Lithuania,” in The Dynamics of Cultural Borders, ed. Anu Kannike and Monika Tasa (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2016), 174–177. 27 Compare to Aurimas Švedas, Sakytinės istorijos galimybės ir ribotumai sovietmečio epochos tyrimuose, http://www.llti.lt/failai/Sakytines_istorijos_ribotumai.pdf, accessed January 12, 2019. 28 Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop 12 (1981): 99–100.

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than more tangible “facts.”29 It is not difficult to see what makes oral history so appealing: as we have seen from the above-cited examples, its object is more “humanized” and individualized historical information—material that is based in the speaker’s personal experience and attitude.

“The Jews were good people!” Valkininkai inhabitants’ memories of the Jewish tragedy The large and colourful Jewish community was an integral part of the life and culture of Valkininkai, as it was in other Lithuanian towns. Although attitudes toward the Jews were inconsistent, and the depiction of Jews is an integral element of Lithuanian folklore as a whole30, there are some specific aspects to the life, culture, and fate of the Jews of Valkininkai that may be unique in Lithuanian history. The people of Valkininkai primarily speak about Jews as merchants who provided many essential goods to the inhabitants of the region, and with whom friendly relations existed. Here is a typical comment that is reflective of such relations: “All the Jews were traders and merchants. Every farmer had a Jew with whom he bartered, giving [the merchant] what he could.” There were many Jews in Valkininkai, and their cottages took up the entire town center. The individuals we interviewed stress that the Jews’ level of wealth was inconsistent—some were wealthy and some were poor. Our informants are captivated by the warm relations and mutual support that existed between the Jews, as well as their commercial talents, which were manifested in the merchants’ efforts to please their clients. For example, some remember how, during the potato harvest, Jewish residents sometimes even brought herring to the diggers working in the fields: “To the potato field. And that herring was so white, and rich, and delicious—you can’t get herring like that anymore!” Jews are described as being good, helpful people: “If you needed to buy something, they’d even let you pay later . . .” Although Lithuanians typically believed that Jews did not work the land,31 29 Ibid., 100. 30 See Laima Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo universiteto leidykla, 2006). 31 This was related to long-standing official prohibitions against Jews owning land. Throughout Europe Jews’ land ownership rights were constrained; in some countries land ownership was prohibited. In the Russian Empire efforts were made to push

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in the village of Degsnės (about three kilometers from Valkininkai), the resident Jews did own land, some of them as much as forty hectares or more, and hired local peasants to work it.32 Most of the Lithuanians of the region saw the Jews as decent and generous employers, and believed that it was better to work for them than for Lithuanian farmers. The Jews of that village also engaged in an unusual form of business: they took in mentally disabled people (“idiots,” in the words of some Valkininkai inhabitants) in exchange for government grants. These grants could be quite substantial, so, according to one interviewee, five or six Lithuanians also decided to take these kinds of people in. The Jews of Degsnės also remained memorable to the inhabitants of Valkininkai for another aspect of their behavior. When the village of Pučkornė burned to the ground on June 4, 1940, Jews from Degsnės arrived in their carriages and returned home with the refugees. According to A. B., who witnessed these events, “The Jews took all of them in, they didn’t leave a single soul. They even tried to convince my father to [go and live with them]. He was wealthy, you know, so he was good friends with the Jews. . . . The Jews took them all back with them.” But this story about the refugees from Pučkornė has a very shameful sequel: some of the people who were sheltered later helped the Nazis round up and murder the very people who had helped them—the Jews of Degsnės. Although most current inhabitants of Degsnės are very reticent to speak about this shameful question and generally deny its veracity, B. K. (though born later, in 1946) the daughter of one of the sheltered refugees, spoke very emotionally about the Jewkillers’ actions and later fates: [The Jews] were driven out. These were our people, from Degsnės, who were working for the Germans. They’re all gone now. [Those killers of Jews] were deported to Siberia, but then, when they returned, they received benefits. Good Lord, good Lord! They drove the Jews [to their deaths], Jews out of villages and towns and into big cities. Only in the nineteenth century did the situation begin to change—within the former territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania the tsarist government offered Jews land and encouraged them to engage in farming; see Jewish Space in Central and Eastern Europe—Day-to-Day History, ed. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė and Larisa Lempertienė (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 32 According to historians, the village was established by Jews in around 1844; by 1941, at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, Degsnės consisted of approximately seventy homes (see Rūta Binkytė et al., “The Jewish Village of Degsnė: A Case Study,” in Jewish Space in Central and Eastern Europe—Day-to-Day History, 185–194).

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

they took the Jews’ property; then they were deported to Siberia, and when they returned they were given homes and received benefits because they survived Siberia! Some deserved to be deported to Siberia, there are some like that. . . . There was the Lithuanian police chief, there were others. And they grabbed all the [Jews’] valuables: earrings, gold earrings, everything. There were even some .  .  . who took things straight from the Jewish women. . . . There were three of them. They shot a young Jewish kid on that hill, as he tried to run away . . .”

According to A. B., there were four local men who participated in the killing of Jews. Later, after the Soviet invasion, these men were arrested and imprisoned: They each got twenty-five years. But one of them never made it to trial. He met his end in a basement in Trakai. I do not know how. Their families were deported. One of them came back. His last name was Sabaliauskas; he even worked for me as a builder.

The motif of the tragic end met by thieving Jew-killers—tales of which usually end with some moralizing about how riches obtained through crime never lead to anything good—is so common across all regions of Lithuania, and so organically intertwined with folklore, that they can certainly be considered a continuation of traditional folklore.33 Nevertheless, there was certainly authentic pain expressed each time witnesses spoke, with bitter sighs, about the Jewish tragedy: “I wish I had not seen [how they herded the Jews] . . . It’s still right there before my eyes . . . Our own people.” It is clear that despite the fact that, as not ethnic Lithuanians, Jews were traditionally seen in a variety of ways in the Valkininkai area, the Degsnės inhabitants almost exclusively see the Jews in a positive light, and view the collaborators-executioners as degenerate villains who deserved deportation to Siberia (and, for a people who suffered greatly from the Soviets’ mass deportations, this is an unusual perspective!) or a base and cruel death. Indeed, punishments for especially heavy, sacrilegious crimes are generally “sanctioned” in folkloric tradition.

33 Compare with Vilma Daugirdaitė, “‘Svetimas turtas neina į gera’: poholokaustinės refleksijos iš folklorinės perspektyvos,” Tautosakos darbai 40 (2010): 80–96.

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“There were white ones, and red ones, and green ones”: Ambivalent assessments of partisan activity in Valkininkai The multicultural environment of the Valkininkai parish and the ethnic, social, and ideological variety of its inhabitants could not fail to be reflected in the choices they made during the war and, especially, the postwar years. Here, as in much of Lithuania, and especially throughout its southeastern portion, called Dzūkija, which was famous for intense, active resistance and the partisan activity—going into the forest with a weapon in one’s hand occured on a large scale.34 But here again, the region had its own specificities: at different points, but also sometimes at the same time, there were partisans belonging to several different ideological orientations. During the Nazi occupation, there were Soviet partisans (the “reds”), and toward the end of the war the Valkininkai vicinity saw some Polish partisan activity (the “whites”); following the second Soviet occupation, an extended armed Lithuanian partisan resistance (the so-called “forest brothers” or the “greens”) lasted until 1953. It is therefore not at all surprising that the inhabitants of Valkininkai whom we interviewed in our fieldwork spoke about a veritable ideological “rainbow” of partisan activity, while also, interestingly, often questioning the point of these different groups’ activities. For example, L. A., who repeatedly stressed her “apolitical” position, spoke about the partisans as follows: There were white ones, and red ones, and green ones. I can’t even remember what the differences were between them! . . . So when they go on about the partisans, I don’t know—here they were all thieves, not partisans. Nothing more.

According to another narrator, the above-cited S. P. from the village of Užuperkasis, during the Nazi occupation the “reds” [the pro-Soviet partisans] were joined by Jews who had escaped the Holocaust: Only four Jews were left, and they fled. There were two from the Lukoševičius family—Chaimas and Uskė. Chaimas later joined the partisans.  .  . . Jews fought with the [pro-Soviet] partisans because they were against the Germans. You know, they would show up in the villages. If you had any bread or meat, they would take it all. They needed to eat. . . . They didn’t come to Valkininkai, where we were, because there were police there. 34 See various publications of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania at: http://genocid.lt/centras/lt/1977/a/.

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The faintest memories were of the “whites”—the Polish partisans: “There were all sorts of partisans. Lithuanian, Russian, and the ‘whites.’ But they didn’t come around where we were. They were more around Eišiškės.”35 The inhabitants of Valkininkai spoke the most disparagingly about the “reds” (the “Russian,” that is, Soviet) partisans. In this region, the “reds’” struggle against the Germans is openly connected to the famous Pirčiupiai tragedy, which has remained vivid in Valkininkai inhabitants’ memories. Pirčiupiai was a village about eight kilometers away from the town of Valkininkai; having accused the villagers of supporting the Soviet partisans, the Nazis rounded up all of the inhabitants of the village, locked them in several buildings, and burned them alive. Later, under the Soviet regime, the Pirčiupiai tragedy was represented as a symbol of heroic opposition to the Nazi occupation and was heavily idealized: an impressive monument was erected in the village, the whole story was written about in the press and in literary works, and even became the subject of a film. But the people we spoke to in Valkininkai preserved memories of sheer, elemental horror and suffering—traits that are characteristic of narratives related to traumatic experience, which are generally fragmented, incoherent, and often reduced only to first impressions (in this case, screams and smoke): “When that village was burning even we, here in Čižiūnai heard the screams. The barn was filled with people . . . And set afire!” Nevertheless, with the passing years there were also efforts to analyze and more rationally understand the tragedy, and not always in ways that corresponded to the version imposed by official ideology. Perhaps the most original interpretation of the Pirčiupiai tragedy was offered by self-taught historian and political scientist A. B., as seen in this longer excerpt: They [the Germans] were brutal only when aggravated. If you should offend them .  .  . So there, they burned down Pirčiupiai. But the people burned themselves. What do you mean by “themselves”? It’s very simple. After all, a man called Simokaitis is still alive. He was still a child when he fled. He was with his grandparents, so he fled. [Some partisans] shot at [some Germans]. There was a car driving from Eišiškės, and it was shot at. A German car?

35 A neighboring town not far from Valkininkai.

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Yes, a German one. Maybe they were killed, maybe they weren’t. I don’t know exactly how it happened. But they had to have killed them, if [the Germans] took revenge in such a way. And they had been warned. They had gone into the woods, to the Russian partisans. Three of them, from that same village of Pirčiupiai. From New Pirčiupiai. To the Russian partisans? Yes, to the Russians. . . . They shot [at the German cars] more than once. But maybe they didn’t hit them, or kill them, whatever. But that would have been forgiven. They [the Nazis] ordered that all the weapons be brought in—that then they wouldn’t bother anyone. But what do you know, even an idiot can shoot at a car, or a person, from behind bushes. That’s not a problem, and that’s not what I call being heroic. It’s not heroic! You’re putting the whole village in danger . . . So they did some shooting, then [the Germans] drove back to Eišiškės, came back with armored trucks, and surrounded the village. And where were those “heroes” [the partisans] then? You can bet that they ran back into the woods! They were too scared to open their mouths! Even an idiot can shoot from a hiding place, but there you go, that’s how it went. If they’d at least engaged in some crossfire, at least more people could have gotten away. At least people could have gotten away. But no, they all got rounded up—mothers, fathers, children, and those guys are just sitting there, watching. What kind of heroes were they?! There’s no other way of putting it—they too were executioners! They too did the killing. They drove the women with their children, the old people, into a barn, blocked the door, and set it on fire .  .  . Burned them alive! What you didn’t hear there—howling, screaming, everything! .  .  . And they [the partisans] could easily have shot at them [the Nazis] from the forest . . . The forest is right there, after all! And there was forest all around. One hundred and nineteen souls . . .

Having begun to speak about this topic reluctantly, and only with repeated encouragements, the speaker became increasingly excited and eventually launched into an unbridled and emotional critique of the good-for-nothing “red” partisans. Listening to his narration, it was difficult not to conclude that he had long been developing this critique and his own version of the tragedy, apparently having for many years felt irritation and anger about Soviet rhetoric around glorification of the “heroic” partisans. The interpretation he offered was, naturally, quite unexpected and questionable: A. B. (perhaps unwittingly) laid the blame

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

for this crime against humanity not on the Nazis, who actually burned down the village, but on the “reds,” whose actions were the pretext for the act of revenge. Nevertheless, A. B.’s original thinking and emotional narration are captivating and force the listener to question the version that was long-imposed by the Soviets, and to recognize the significance of depending on stereotypical thinking. Our interviewees spoke most positively about the Lithuanian partisans, known as the “greens” or “forest brothers.” Their courage and acts of resistance, even under the most complicated conditions, inspired our speakers’ admiration and respect. Speaking about a “forest brother” whom he for some time hid in his village, A. B., who had so disparaged the “red” partisans, said: “He was a brave man!” However, the material we collected certainly does not indicate that the Lithuanian partisans received universal adulation from the people of Valkininkai. To many of this multicultural region’s inhabitants, the “greens’” choice—to fight for Lithuania—seemed incomprehensible and sometimes even accidental. Some interviewees point out that there were young men who went to fight in the forest simply because their friends had already done so—that it was a largely unconsidered decision, made for the sake of good company. For example, in speaking about how her brother joined the “green” partisans, a woman from Čižiūnai, who was born in 1929, stressed that what concerned her most was to take him some food every evening, while the question of which partisans he had joined mattered little to her (even after repeated questions from us about which partisans her brother joined, the woman remained confused and unable to remember). According to her, young men at first simply ran away from home, and later “went to either one side or the other.” In summary, it can be said that the people we interviewed in the Valkininkai parish assessed the activities of different partisan groups ambivalently and sometimes even condemned them for stealing food or other goods (while at the same time recognizing that the partisans needed to eat somehow, and had to obtain food from somewhere). It appears that long-term experience of conflicts and tragedies related to armed battles has led the people of Valkininkai to develop unsympathetic attitudes toward all of the different partisans “hanging out in the forest,” regardless of their ideological “color” or orientation. * * *

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Analysis of these autobiographical accounts from Valkininkai indicates that these narratives clearly reflect the local historical specificities and complex fate of this corner of Lithuania. Tangled ethnic and linguistic relationships, four changes of government over two years, long-term constraints upon developing national identities, and the complex circumstances of the wartime and the postwar years—these are but some of the themes that have painfully affected the lives and fates of this area’s inhabitants. The region’s history dramatically disrupts each individual’s personal history, and each individual has his or her own way of experiencing, surviving, reflecting upon, and relating that history. This is inevitable, of course, because the place where one lives plays a central role in every autobiographical narrative. An individual’s identification with certain places—for example, personal narratives or life stories about what happened to a person and where it happened, and how what happened changed and affected their social identity—is always one of the most important and complex aspects of any political or historical narrative.36 That kind of political-historical narrative slowly takes shape from many inevitably fragmented individual narratives. They reflect both direct personal experiences (people’s lived histories) and historical memory—that which is appropriated, verbally experienced, and reflected upon, but was not a matter of personal historical memory of experienced events.37 An absolute and inevitable component of such historical reflection, and perhaps its most fundamental characteristic, is subjectivity: through their narratives, the narrating individuals sometimes reveal themselves even more distinctly and more impressively than the events they are describing. And the multifarious interpretations of the same conflictual situations—the focus on completely different moments and views—helps the listener (and researcher) clearly grasp that historical experience is never uniform, just as the truth is not and can never be one: “the boundary between what takes place outside the narrator and what happens inside—between what concerns him or her and what concerns 36 Pertti J. Anttonen, Tradition through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005), 108. 37 On this distinction between experienced history and historical memory, see Laura Valauskaitė, “Istorijos refleksijos prie Neries,” Šiaurės Atėnai, April 18, 2008. Somewhat similar distinction has been made by Estonian researchers as well—they distinguish “between ‘memories’ and ‘life story’, pursuant to the reciprocal connection between the narrator and the events: in memories, the narrator positions him/herself in the outskirts of the events, but in a life story, at the centre of the narrated events,” see Tiiu Jaago, “Genre Creation within Memory Collection,” 290.

Borderland Lives: Historical Reflections in Eastern Lithuanian Life Stories

the group—becomes quite thin, and personal ‘truth’ may coincide with collective ‘imagination.’”38 It seems, however, that in the narratives we analyzed, in each case personal “truth” reflects only certain aspects of the common collective “imagination” or the official historical discourse. Moreover, our research reveals that bitterness and residue from past grievances and supposedly experienced injustices tend to shape people’s current attitudes and cultural practices (for example, current attitudes toward the Lithuanian– Polish question), which can, in turn, impact a society’s future social and cultural development. Expanding upon this conclusion, it can be asserted that strategies typical of so-called borderland lives—that is, the subtle balancing between opposing or competing political regimes—can be seen as characteristic not only of the inhabitants of Valkininkai and other borderline communities, but of the whole Lithuania. Similar experiences of frequently changing regimes, of being subjected to one occupation after another, and of never knowing which aspect of an (adopted) identity may turn out to be profitable (or even life-saving) in the short term and which may prove to be fatal, were characteristic to this country as a whole and for extended historical periods. In this sense, Lithuania can generally be seen as a borderline zone between East and West; the Soviet and the capitalist regimes; and, earlier still, between Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox faith. We have all developed our strategies of survival and mediation— strategies that can be revealed, at a grassroots level, in our personal life stories.

38 Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” 99.

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Chapter 5

Life in Folktales or Folktales in Life? How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions Jūratė Šlekonytė

Introduction Folktales draw us in through both their fantastic elements and the ways that they reflect reality back to us. But it is not only the content of a folktale that is important. Unlike songs, folktales do not have clearly defined structural frameworks ensuring a consistent flow of events or narrative details. That is why it is impossible to find two identical narratives. One way or another, an informant who has been asked to tell a story will tell it differently each time. There is no doubt that a narrator is the creator, re-creator, and performer with regards to a narrative; the content and artistic form of a narrative therefore depend on that person’s memory, character traits, skill in improvisation, and other abilities. It is through their masterfulness and narrative ability that they attract and hold listeners’ attention. That is why “in no other form of folk poetry does personality play such an important role as in the folktale.”1 Folklore scholars were already studying folklore performers-narrators as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the first studies of this nature appeared in German—a modest 1926 monograph by 1 Linda Dégh, Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1995), 38.

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Russian folklorist Mark Asadowski that analyzed the repertoire of Siberian storyteller Natalia Vinokurova had a great impact on scholars concerned with the context of folklore performance.2 Several Hungarian researchers should also be mentioned. Gyula Ortutay conducted similar research.3 His countrywoman Linda Dégh, who conducted most of her folklore studies while living and working in the United States, expanded the concept of “folktale biology” (Märchenbiologie) to describe ethnographic narratives, and thus made a significant mark on international folklore studies. This researcher gained substantial recognition with her monograph about the Hungarian tradition of folktale narration community.4 The study of folklore performers’ personalities has also been heavily influenced by the American school of folklore context analysis, which focuses on narrative situations and the folkloric meanings that flow out of them. The so-called folklore performance theorists must be mentioned here, as they studied the folklore narrative as a specific performance situation.5 For these and some other scholars, the object of research became the folklore performer and the folklore performance situation; their thoughts and insights led to great strides in folklore performance analysis. For a long time Lithuanian folklore studies were dominated by the textual analysis of folktales, with relatively little attention devoted to storytellers as individuals with specific life circumstances. The first to devote more attention to storytellers was the Lithuanian folklore researcher Norbertas Vėlius, who paid very close attention to the character traits of talented storytellers and the circumstances in which they offered their narratives.6 Lithuanian narrators and singers, and the singularities of 2 Cf.: Mark Asadowski, Eine sibirische Märchenerzählerin (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1926). 3 Cf.: Gyula Ortutay, “Folk-Life Story in Hungary,” in Hungarian Folklore (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadō, 1972), 15–63. 4 Linda Dégh, Märchen, Erzähler und Erzählgemeinschaft (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962). 5 Richard Bauman, Story, Performance and Event. Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Dan Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” The Journal of American Folklore 84/331 (1971): 3–15, Robert A. Georges, “Toward Resolution of the Text / Context Controversy,” Western Folklore 39, no. 1 (1980): 34–40. 6 Cf.: Bronė Stundžienė, “Folkloro rinkėjo laboratorija iš arti: Norbertas Vėlius ir jo rankraščiai,” Tautosakos darbai 36 (2008): 15–36. Vėlius was the first professional folklore collector to regularly include in his collections concise information regarding his informants. These short descriptions frequently amount to colorful miniatures, since Vėlius not only described the basic facts regarding the storyteller’s life, age,

How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions

their repertoires, were thoroughly described by the folklorist Leonardas Sauka: he studied the best storytellers, their folktale repertoires, and the idiosyncrasies of their narrative styles.7 Feeling an urgent need for studies focused on performance, in 2004 researchers of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore organized a conference dedicated to folklore performance and performers; a portion of the papers delivered at the conference appeared as articles in the research journal Tautosakos darbai (Folklore Studies).8 The traditional content of a folktale is, of course, important. But when we are analyzing a specific folktale, the question naturally arises: what is the individual storyteller’s relationship to the folktale? To what degree is the person relating the folktale free to tell it the way they want, and to what degree are they constrained by community needs and norms that require that the plot be turned in a certain direction? It is clear that, because the function of a folklore piece depends on its performance context, which can be different every time the folktale is performed, any analysis of folktales must be based on thorough knowledge of both the history of the narrative and of the narrator’s environment.9 While reading older manuscript versions of folktales preserved in folklore archives, one often discovers a lack of information about the informant’s personality and the context in which a folktale was related. occupation, and so forth, but also noted some curious traits of their behavior, manner of narrating, their favorite folklore genres, or other peculiarities that he was very apt at noticing. Although Vėlius was especially active in seeking talented storytellers, however, he maintained that every person that folklore collector approached was worth attention. 7 Leonardas Sauka, Tikra ir netikra liaudies kūryba (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1983), 109–118. 8 Leonardas Sauka was also writing about international and Lithuanian folklore performers, including storytellers (Leonardas Sauka, “Apie tautosakos atlikimą ir atlikėjus svetur ir Lietuvoje” [Studies of folklore performance and performers in Lithuania and abroad], Tautosakos darbai 22/29 [2005]: 23–42). Although the author of this text has also published an article (Jūratė Šlekonytė, “Apie pasakų sekimo ypatumus,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 [2005]: 86–99) about how the environments in which folktales are told are reflected in both ethnography and folkloric material itself, that article did not explore narrators’ personalities or their relationships with the stories they told in greater depth. Radvilė Racėnaitė (“Novelinė pasaka ‘Edipas’ [AT 931]. Individualaus atlikimo atspindžiai užrašytame pasakos tekste,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 [2005]: 100–110) has discussed reflections of individual performance in the novella tale “Edipas” (“Oedipus,” AT 931), while Lina Būgienė has written about the folk belief legend tradition and the individual repertoire of the storyteller (Lina Būgienė, “Sakmių tradicija ir individualus pasakotojo repertuaras,” Tautosakos darbai 22/29 [2005]: 58–66). 9 Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, “The Narrator as Reporter or Performer,” Fabula 52, nos. 1–2 (2011): 2.

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Sometimes the collector who recorded the particular piece has left some notes providing basic information about the informant; more thorough collectors also describe the circumstances in which the folktale was related and some of the informant’s non-verbal actions. But these are rare instances, and it is certainly best when the researcher records such material directly, that is, during the course of the fieldwork. This article is based on material collected by folklorist Bronė Stundžienė in 2006 in the town of Viekšniai (in the Mažeikiai region in northwestern Lithuania),10 and material collected by this author during fieldwork conducted in Eastern Lithuania in 2009–2010. One of the goals of this article is to more deeply explore the personality of the folktale narrator and to reveal how their inner world and personal experience are reflected in their narratives. Another goal of this article is to examine what meanings a folktale can acquire in a contemporary context, especially in cases when the researcher is able to observe the performance situation and assess it from the perspective of contemporary folklore studies. This study also analyzes paradoxical situations in which the content of a folktale becomes intertwined with reality and how narrators behave in such situations.

Folktales and contemporary narrators Although folklore has long been primarily defined as collective folk creation, it would be more accurate to see it not as original creation but, rather, modification of existing information. This makes it possible to see folklore not as communal creation but as communal recreation.11 This definition makes it possible to better assess the contribution of the individual—the narrator—to the overall folkloric tradition. The folktale is usually seen as a traditional, archaic folkloric genre in which the experiences of multiple generations have been collected. Although different versions of the same folktale reveal both stable, essential elements and shifting, traditional details, in each version one will find some original elements which one way or another reflect the narrator’s experiences,

10 The author of the article is grateful to Bronė Stundžienė for her kind permission to use her fieldwork materials. 11 Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” 7.

How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions

thoughts, and sensations.12 Nevertheless, one can agree with the idea that “tales have a wider range for textual variation, retain stability of meaning in a variety of contexts in a single culture, and thus have lower contextual dependency.”13 In the past, relating folktales was a natural action that was an act of community building, information, and communication. The narrator of a folktale was someone with a good memory and vivid imagination, and who knew how to interact naturally and engage his or her listeners. A good storyteller has to sense their audience’s needs: “Storytelling allows for the expression of personal identity, but only within a collective framework of norms, aesthetic as well as social. If the story does not meet these norms the narrator will be told to hold his tongue.”14 That kind of story will not be retold by other members of the community and will therefore not survive. This is exactly what has happened in modern society, where, both for ideological reasons and because of the breakdown of traditional societies, the telling of folktales began to die out, so that, in its traditional form, this oral genre has virtually ceased to exist. Today, we often hear regrets expressed about the death of the old storytelling tradition and the fact that, if any traces of it remain it is the form of memories about specific moments in the past. The Hungarian folklorist Vilmos Voigt is somewhat more optimistic in this regard. He offers three contemporary Hungarian examples of educated and well-read rural individuals who, as a result of life circumstances, began to tell traditional folk narratives, and exaltedly concludes that “folktales are quite a bit more enduring that we thought!”15 Here we will perhaps not be quite as optimistic in this respect and will agree that folklore scholars must adapt to changing contexts and focus on recording what is said and thought about today.16 Paradoxically, as folklore scholars increasingly abandon the quest to record the greatest quantities of works for more qualitative approaches, the field of inquiry 12 Siegfried Neumann, “Ich Erzählung,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwőrterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung, vol. 7, ed. Kurt Ranke et al. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 11. 13 Dan Ben-Amos, “‘Context’ in Context,” Western Folklore 52, nos. 2–4 (1993): 213. 14 David M. Hopkin, “Storytelling, Fairytales and Autobiography: Some Observations on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memoirs,” Social History 29, no. 2 (2004): 196. 15 Vilmos Voigt, “Ar labai tamsūs pasakojamosios tautosakos horizontai?,” Tautosakos darbai 19/26 (2003): 58. 16 Lina Būgienė, “Objekto problema šiandienos tautosakos moksle ir naratyvų analizės perspektyvos,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 42.

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seems to have narrowed. This offers new opportunities to grasp the function of the traditional folklore today. Of course, with efforts to record folklore samples as thoroughly and authentically as possible (especially when the goal is to record something especially rare and “archaic”), the narrating situation can still sometimes be seen as being of secondary importance. On the other hand, a folklore researcher can hardly expect to capture an authentic narration context when, during fieldwork, they visit an informant unexpectedly and for a short time, and therefore do not create the conditions for a natural storytelling process to take place. Such cases again risk collecting only disparate fragments, which will later simply be stuffed into certain information “drawers.” That kind of work must be conducted, so it is common that, during fieldwork trips, we ask people we visit whether they remember any folktales—whether they had any told to them as children or whether they themselves told any stories to their own children or neighbors. Although the answer is usually negative, occasionally—as we will see shortly—we come across stunning exceptions. In Lithuania, the generation from which we hope to hear folktales belongs to the era of Soviet collective farms—these people are closely connected to postwar rural society and have vivid memories of the lively gatherings of singing and dancing. But memories of folktales can also transport such individuals to the prewar period and to early childhood, when their parents and grandparents told them folktales. It is also possible to meet very elderly informants who learned folktales while working as wandering laborers. Most of these people no longer told them to their own children, or did so only from books. They are therefore no longer able to reconstruct the narratives they heard as children: they can only remember that folktales were told to them when they were little and, if anything, can recall some of the characters they contained. Nevertheless, one sometimes encounters especially creative and expressive storytellers who still today enjoy telling their stories and who steadily work on expanding their narrative repertoires. Such narrators are generally men, and they are quite well known in their communities for their talents. Most creative narrators are active—they strive to learn new stories, which they remember for a long time, waiting for the opportunity to recount them. According to some researchers, a narrator must mature, develop their skills, and gain authority, and only then can they activate their knowledge in such a way that their audience will receive it. Most informants are of an advanced age when they are discovered by folklore researchers—because

How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions

they are no longer active storytellers and have no listeners, it is only possible to discuss their past storytelling practices.17 But fieldwork experience inclines us to disagree, at least partially, with this thesis. One example of a different kind of storyteller is an informant encountered during a 2009 fieldwork in Eastern Lithuania, where, in the village of Didžiasalis in the Ignalina district, we met a wonderful eighty-three-year-old singer and storyteller who was very eager to interact with the researchers who had come to visit him. Asked if he could tell us some stories, he related a good number of anecdotes and jokes, as well as etiological and folk-belief legends.18 Seeking to stimulate his memory and hear some new samples, we would ask him if he knew certain stories. After having been asked this several times, our informant understood that we shared some of the knowledge he possessed. This led him to say that he would not tell us any more stories until we recounted examples of the folktales that we were asking about, but were unfamiliar to him. It was clear that, in doing so, our informant was trying to expand his narrative repertoire, which he was obviously still making use of, as inhabitants of the village were very aware of this man’s storytelling abilities. Of course, this kind of question presents the researcher with a difficult dilemma: whether or not they should relate theoretically wellknown folktales heard from other informants, in this way interfering with the oral tradition (this was, at least, the view in times when the telling of folktales was an everyday phenomenon). On the other hand, when both sides share folktales, a more natural narrating situation in created—one in which informants-experts recount and an audience listens. It also dissolves the tension created when strangers enter a person’s home and attempt to establish an artificial narrator-listener situation. After hearing the author of this article tell a story about a matchmaker, our informant stated that he did not know it, but then told one that he knew about matchmaking. Naturally, the new narrative that he heard was incorporated into his repertoire and will likely be used in the future. In addition to the folklore researchers, the informant’s wife was also present; she listened actively and repeatedly reminded her husband to tell certain stories or would add that she had not heard about certain story plots and wanted to hear how they are resolved. One can conclude that, for 17 Linda Dégh, “Erzählen, Erzähler,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwӧrterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzӓhlforschung, ed. Kurt Ranke et al. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 331. 18 LTRF cd 372-374, recorded by Lina Būgienė and Jūratė Šlekonytė.

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narrators who do not have regular audiences, visits from folklorists provide good opportunity for self-expression. Moreover, when a villager receives visitors from the city, his or her social status among and assessment by neighbors naturally rises. As Dégh notes, “general regularities in the life of the folktale can be recognized by the observation of communities geographically and temporally and the distinctive performances of individual storytellers hold the key to understanding the nature of the tale.”19 Because there are so few storytellers left, long-term observation of a single location is no longer possible; as a result, natural folktale narration situations do not arise. Folklorists must therefore content themselves with accidentally finding and observing individual informants and analyzing the unique aspects of their storytelling. Close analysis of individual storytellers has its advantages: it allows for more thorough examination not only of the person’s narrative abilities, but also of their living circumstances and how these have shaped their worldview. The following article will therefore offer an analysis of two folktale informants whom we met during the above-mentioned fieldwork trip.

The rational narrator Whether or not one comes across some folktale narrators (or, at least, people who might remember certain stories) is generally a matter of chance and depends on a variety of factors. Such individuals can be discovered during the process of initiating a conversation and asking about folktales, or they are pointed out by neighbors. These days, when storytelling traditions have almost died out, it is rare that local people with such abilities are widely known. Because the centuries-old demand for folktales no longer exists, storytellers have either forgotten the plots they knew or, adapting to the new situation, rework narratives to make them more appealing today. During fieldwork in Eastern Lithuania, the folklore collector asked one informant if she could tell any folktales. The woman responded rather skeptically, but then offered an interesting narrative that was quite unlike traditional folktales: Oh, stories . . . what are stories? They’re all the same—the ones I heard when I was little, the ones I told my children, and today it’s the same ones. But here’s a story that isn’t a story. . . . So there was this Mardvynas, down there, beyond 19 Dégh, Narratives in Society, 38.

How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions

Kaltanėnai. That Mardynas’s land goes from Švenčionėliai, on that side of the Žeimena River, somewhere that way, but I don’t know where his land ended. . . . Now this Mardvynas, he was a landowner, but he was quite good with hands too. Those landowner types used to go to church—they would be in the same church in Kaltanėnai as us, there you go. . . . Have you even been to Kaltanėnai? No? Oh, you haven’t . . . What a pretty place it is—you should see how nice our church is. No one builds churches like our church any more. No one! Any other churches I’ve been too, all you see is a lot of columns. But you should see our church—what vaults, and no columns! Now that’s what I call a church. It’s a bit scary . . . those people, those people who built that church, were holy; I always thought they must have been holy. There it was on the banks of the Žeimena, and near the bridge there were some highlands, there was a place they called a tearoom. But you really could have called that tearoom a tavern. It’s where the local women would go. . . . So then this one time, there were these two landowners talking in there. And this guy Bukauskas asks, “How are things going for you?” So that Mardvynas says, “Oh, it’s not going well for me, not going well. I have all these debts, and the taxes on the land are so high, and my children don’t help out—it’s just give, give, give with them.” . . . So the other guy says, “Let me tell you, I was once having a rough time. . . . But then I kept hearing that in some other village there was this sorceress. ‘Go see her,’ people would say, ‘She’ll tell you what to do.’” . . . So then that [Mardvynas] drove over to see her. So then that old woman (or maybe it was an old man, I don’t know) gave him a plain little box, all covered in paper, and said, “Every morning, carry this box all around your estate: wherever anyone is plowing, haying, cooking, weeding, or whatever else they do . . . And in half a year bring it back to me. But if you open it, if you take the paper off of it, everything will fall apart, do you understand?” Before, when he went around his estate, where there should have been plowing, the horses were let free and the ploughman was asleep; where hired hands were supposed to be haying, they too were asleep; where they were supposed to be weeding, no weeding had been done, or nothing else that should have been done. But now, after half a year of going around with the box, things were going better for him. So he goes back to the sorceress and says, “Now show me what is in this box. Half a year has gone by and everything’s going better for me.” So then the other one peels off the paper and says “There you go—there’s nothing in it. But you spent time everywhere and you saw what was going on with all your workers. And that’s why things started going better for you.” So there you go. So then in our

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region . . . so I told it in our own region one year, at some festival called “The Songbird” or something. So at this festival I went and said: here in our region them higher-ups need to go around to every corner of the region and then they’ll know what’s going on. There’s a story for you. There’s your story.20

At first glance, this narrative may seem disjointed because the woman approached her topic indirectly, introduced various local details, mentioned the names of local characters, expressed emotions, and tested her audience’s knowledge of the area. Robert A. Georges offers special terminology for describing such speech acts, and this terminology can help us distinguish between targeted narration and more abstract talking. Georges distinguishes between narrating and storytelling. The latter term is defined as “an entity-transmitting-and-receiving act,” thus stressing that “the story is more important than the telling.”21 On the other hand, narrating encompasses a broader concept than the communication of a folklore piece as a specific unit. Rather, narrating includes all of the emotional, associative passages that lead the narrator away from their main theme and then back to it again. That is exactly what we see in the above narrative. Of course, if we are looking for a more strict typological assessment, we can refine our approach and allocate this narration to a certain narrative category. Thematically, this plot has connections with the realistic tale “Find the Treasure in Our Vineyard!,”22 which describes how a dying father tells his sons that he has left a treasure in the garden. In searching for the treasure, the sons aerate the soil, and later enjoy a good harvest. The informant’s narrative is distinct for its especially strong didactic intention. Because the informant clearly grasped the essence of the tale, she could easily connect it to her life: she stressed that a similar situation had developed with her region’s local authorities, who, in her view, are not concerned with simple people and do not even bother coming to see how they live. The story that this woman remembered is not an autonomous narrative—it was developed further as she remembered, and commented upon, additional folktale plots. She did not always tell entire stories;

20 This narrative was recorded and written down by Bronė Stundžienė from a seventyeight-year-old woman. This and the text presented further is from Stundžienė’s 2010 fieldwork trip to the Švenčionys region. 21 Robert A. Georges, “Do Narrators Really Digress? A Reconsideration of ‘Audience Asides’ in Narrating,” Western Folklore 40, no. 3 (1981): 250. 22 ATU 910E.

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sometimes, sensing that her listener could easily recognize the plots of classic narratives, she mentioned only their most characteristic details.23 That’s how it is with those stories, whatever stories you’re talking about . . . They’re the same, like how our uncle used to tell them to us. [1] So there was a cellar, and that cellar was full of gold, and all you needed to know was the password: Open Sesame. Then a person goes in, the doors close, and he doesn’t know the password for getting back out, so he dies there with the pile of gold. And they call that a folktale. Those aren’t folktales—real folktales are from life. Like the story about [2] the young orphan Sigutė, who goes out looking for violets in January. And this was a long time ago . . . but for violets to bloom in January? I don’t know, but isn’t that a folktale? I’d say it’s a folktale! They say it’s a folktale, so it’s a folktale. There you go—violets and windflowers blooming at the end of January. It happened, and not that long ago, maybe a few years back. You see—all folktales are taken from reality. . . . What kinds of stories are we talking about? Stories are stories, and they come from life. [3] There was a man who had a lot of gold. Back in the day, my father used to travel to Siberia to work, and they would ask him—you know, the employers, the engineers—they would ask him, how do you want to be paid, in gold or in rubles? Do you understand? Back in the day. So what, so his parents . . . his mother had five sons and one daughter, and she had to weave enough to clothe them, and get shoes on them, and she couldn’t do all of it herself, so she would hire a woman. So she wrote him a letter and said: “Take the rubles. Where will I put the gold? Because with gold, you have to keep it somewhere, right? So there, take the rubles. . . .”

What is significant here is the actual situation, which conceptually corresponds with the image conveyed in the story, so that the narration incorporates fragments from the following folktales: [1] “The Forty Thieves,”24 [2] “Winter Berries,”25 and, finally [3] a parable that is thematically close to “Midas’s Short-Sighted Wish.”26 This case is a perfect illustration of Dégh’s claim that “a good memory is only one of the important virtues of the narrator, and that close adherence to the text is not in itself a guarantee

23 The numbers in square brackets that are inserted in the following text indicate “summaries” of the plots of traditional folktales being used by our informant. 24 ATU 954. 25 KbLPTK 403B. 26 ATU 775.

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of quality.”27 The narratives related by our informant are not so much classically told folktales as expressions of her opinions about and attitude toward the present, as though she were using folktale plots as a means of illustration. But if our informant’s speech at first seems disjointed, we can see that it is marked by a precise plot line leading to a narrative culmination. What is worth examining is why an individual chose those specific folktales—what personal motivations and social contexts led them to shape and perform those specific texts. As Degh points out: [We] need to study the storyteller’s life and creativity the way literary historians study poets and novelists; studying the personal creativity of storytellers may enlighten us not only about how personal variants originate but also what function the tale can fill in the life of person.28

The woman quoted and discussed above is a typical inhabitant of her village and has barely stepped out of her native area—“I was born here and I’ll die here.” People living in the area consider her to be a good storyteller, singer, and local ethnographer, and, most importantly, an excellent communicator and someone who is very easy to talk to.29 In other words, local people describe this woman as a kind of expert who is worth listening and paying attention to, and recommend her to anyone who wants to learn more about the past and life in days of old. Her local status, grasp of the principles of life, and faith in her personal philosophy, all based on multi-generational experience, allow our informant to use a didactic narrative model. Agreeing with Ben-Amos’s claim that “the transference of any folklore text to a different literary, historical, or cultural context grants it a new meaning,”30 it must be noted that, in this case, the informant adapts the plot to existing circumstances. This allows her to emphasize certain thoughts that unsettle her, identify instances of evil, and express her personal position, all of this based on substantial personal experience. In short, through her story this woman actualizes that which is important to her; the story is therefore but a form and means she deploys to express her personal principles. In this way, the story becomes a personal narrative full of colorful emotion and local detail. It is interesting that our informant does not see her tale as containing 27 Dégh, Narratives in Society, 166. 28 Ibid., 39. 29 These qualities are described in Stundžienė’s notes from her 2010 fieldwork in the Švenčionys region. 30 Ben-Amos, “‘Context’ in Context,” 210–211.

How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions

any of the fantastic elements that are typically considered key elements in a folktale, thus demonstrating her ability to connect the worlds of story and reality: “märchen elements appear both in the daily life of villagers and in the world of magic.”31 In short, our informant’s thinking is quite traditional: it corresponds to ancient rural storytellers’ views of the folktale as either a kind of reflection of reality or an interweaving of mythological fantasy, artistic imagination, and a grasp of the principles of human existence.32 Our informant remembers and communicates folktale plots suitable for different situations precisely because she understands them as images of reality that continue to have relevance today. She actively counters the opinion that a folktale is a work of pure fantasy or fabrication, or something that serves only to entertain. Perhaps that is why these narratives do not contain the usual artistic devices, such as introductory or concluding sections or the tripartite formula that creates the effect of waiting, culmination, and denouement within a story. What is most important here is the communication of a purified essence and interpretation of a narrative, often through associations with things in the real world. We can conclude that this woman is an example of the rational narrator as a type. This kind of narrator has a clear goal in telling a story—to provide a concrete example that contains real-life elements and can serve a didactic function.

The traditional storyteller As fieldwork experience has shown, male informants are more inclined to remember comical folktales or anecdotes; this often helps them to preserve their repertoires and continue to draw audiences. We were able to see what such an “old-fashioned” storyteller looks like in a contemporary context when, during our fieldwork, we met an exceptional man who was able to coherently and expressively relate a series of narratives belonging to the classical folklore genres—folktale and legend.33 This informant was well aware of his exceptional storytelling abilities. For example, he warned the folklore collectors who had come from Vilnius to visit him: “I know so

31 Dégh, Narratives in Society, 41. 32 Donatas Sauka, Tautosakos savitumas ir vertė (Vilnius: Vaga, 1970), 57–58. 33 The texts cited below were recorded in 2006 by Bronė Stundžienė from a ninety-threeyear-old informant (born in the village of Šiaudinė in Šiauliai Region) living in the Mažeikiai Home for Children and the Elderly.

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many stories that you won’t be able to get back to the city for a month!”34 This tendency to exaggerate when speaking about their abilities is typical of good storytellers.35 The man would likely have received the same kind of praise from his neighboring villagers, who liked to listen to his tales and, indeed, had referred him to the folklorists as someone capable of telling many stories. And the man was not lying about his remarkable talent—with each of the folklorists’ visits, he was able to remember new narratives. In all he related fifty-two narratives: folktales, folk-belief legends, local legends, anecdotes, as well as biographical and ethnographic stories. Of these, a considerable number—twenty-one—were folktales. These days, it is especially difficult to record tales of magic, as they are the longest and most complex among the folk narratives. But this informant was able to tell more than one such tale.36 One of these, a narrative about a general’s daughters and a soldier, is especially interesting because it does not correspond to any international classifications, though certain details in the story have connections to “Running away from the witch.”37 Although this folktale was notable for its marked erotic tone, the informant was not perturbed either by the narration, which verged on obscenity, or by the fact that his listeners were women. A good portion of his repertoire was made up of jokes, which tend to survive longer because of their comical content. These stories are close to, and sometimes identical to anecdotes. The storyteller discussed here remembered a variety of such stories,38 including some realistic tales,39 one tale about stupid devil,40 some tall tales,41 and a religious tale.42 This 34 From Stundžienė’s 2006 Viekšniai fieldwork notes. 35 Dégh, Narratives in Society, 170. 36 These included “The Animal Bride” (ATU 402), “The Journey to God (Fortune)” (ATU 460A), “The Blacksmith and the Devil” (KbLPTK 330A) and a combined version of the religious tale “The Tailor in Heaven” (ATU 800), “The Strongman” (KbLPTK 650A1), and others. 37 KbLPTK 313H*. 38 “The Old Woman as Trouble Maker” (ATU 1353), “Cleverness and Gullibility” (ATU 1539), “The Trickster Discovers Adultery: Food Goes to Husband instead of Lover” (ATU 1358C), “Who Gives His Own Goods shall Receive It Back Tenfold” (ATU 1735), and others. 39 “Observance of the Master’s Precepts” (ATU 910B), “Becoming Convinced of the Value of Advice” (KbLPTK 911*). 40 “Squeezing the (Supposed) Stone” (ATU 1060) combined with “Throwing a Club” (ATU 1063) and “Other Means of Killing or Maiming Livestock” (ATU 1007). 41 “Buying Fire by Storytelling” (ATU 1920H), “The Great Animal or Great Object” (ATU 1960). 42 “The Devil Does Penance” (ATU 810A).

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informant’s repertoire was truly substantial and comprised various genres, and nor were his capacities exhausted during the sessions with the folklore researchers. This informant’s repertoire also contained a good number of classical folklore narratives of a different kind: the researchers who visited him recorded fourteen folk legends. These included etiological legends about why Jews do not eat pork, how goats came to be, how God created woman, how a man’s life was extended, how a lazy man married an industrious young woman, why men have bones in their necks, why storks have black patches on their backs, and so on. Among folk-belief legends, this informant told stories about the mythical Lithuanian house gnome kaukas, ghost-lights, burning money, devils appearing in different forms, and more. There is no doubt that this man is a true, traditional storyteller who needs an audience. Although the recording of stories during fieldwork creates a somewhat artificial performance situation, in which the folklorist seeks to elicit and record as many narratives as possible, it appears that this was not a serious stumbling block for this informant. He began by telling folk-belief legends, and then went on to tell a series of folktales interspersed with more legends and other kinds of narratives. Thematic connections seemed to help the informant to remember groups of narratives about similar themes. For example, he would tell two or three thematically related etiological and folk-belief legends about devils. It should be noted that at the time of this fieldwork the informant was already less active than he had been in the past. He was less and less frequently asked to tell stories, and this was reflected in gaps in his memory and when he skipped details that he later returned to and clarified. The folklorists’ repeated visits stimulated the informant’s memory, and this, over time, helped him to recall most of the narratives he knew. One can safely assume that this storyteller’s repertoire was once even more substantial and diverse. He told his stories in dialect, speaking expressively and with appropriate intonations, occasionally pausing when he wanted to remember something or formulate a sentence more precisely. While telling comical stories, he laughed and giggled, which clearly indicated that he liked them and kept them in his active memory, and he probably still liked to tell these stories to friends and neighbors to see what reactions he could elicit. Although the informant related folktales in the “classical” manner, by incorporating original, playful details, he also sometimes unexpectedly connected his narratives with past and present realities. This is the manner in which he related the tale of magic “The

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Strongman.”43 This story tells of a woman who eats a pea and then, several weeks later, gives birth to a very strong boy. When the boy grows up he goes off to work on a landlord’s estate, where he is put to work thrashing grain. For payment he asks to be able to take home as much grain as he can carry; he takes home a large bag of grain and gives it to his mother. He offers to work for another landowner in exchange for the chance to give the landowner three flicks to his forehead. Over several days the young man ploughs and seeds the fields and hauls back a good quantity of timber from the forest. Frightened, the nobleman gives the young man several difficult tasks, hoping that these will do him in: he sends the young man off to a mill inhabited by devils, and orders him to travel to the king to recover a debt. The strongman fulfills all of these tasks. The landowner gives him all the money he can to ensure that he not receive the flicks to his forehead. The young man returns home and builds himself a house. The informant related this folktale in the traditional manner: he included introductory and concluding elements, and mentioned plenty of details related to everyday life, including farming tasks (the threshing and fanning of grain, the plowing and seeding of fields) and traditional tools (beaters and threshers). But our attention is drawn by certain particular episodes and details (a collective farm, a tractor) that make it possible to identify the time period during which this story would have actively existed. The action of the story does not take place “a long, long time ago,” but is connected to the existence of Soviet collective farms, that is, the period during which the informant came of age. This type of narration, which uses the realities of a concrete time period to introduce a story, is characteristic of various narratives performed by this man, though in the other cases certain details refer listeners to interwar Lithuania. An example of this is folktale “Buying Fire by Storytelling,”44 which begins by comparing nighttime animal herding to contemporary life: “These days there are people who like to steal cars—people drive cars, so it’s cars that are stolen. But before it used to be horses. . . .” The above-mentioned story about the strongman is related to the present in yet other ways. For example, in describing how, in exchange for his work, the strongman receives grain, which he then plans to pour into a cloth sack, the storyteller inserts a comment about how he himself helped out with the 43 KbLPTK 650A1 44 ATU 1920H.

How Storytellers Influence Folk Traditions

sewing of the sack: “I was a tailor, so I helped to sew that sack.” And there was truth in what he said—in his youth he had worked as a tailor, so he knew how to sew. While the storyteller related this tale in the third person, this subtle insertion about how he was involved in the action caused listeners to prick up their ears and smile. We can tell that this was not a chance detail from the fact that, when adding it, the narrator briefly shifted to a mocking tone. This could be a characteristic medial formula used by this storyteller, as he adds a similar insertion to the story attributed to ATU 1358C: “That gentleman gave him this beautiful black horse—I saw it with my own eyes .  .  .” This allows him to present himself as a witness of the events he is relating, and to briefly play with using “I.” Theoretically, such use of the first person can be seen as proof of the story being true. In this case, this usage could have one of two purposes: to emphasize the veracity of the narrated events or to clearly indicate that the narrator is lying.45 In the latter case, the storytelling becomes more playful and the listener understands perfectly well that the narrator is spinning a fantastic yarn. On the other hand, use of the first person reinforces the rule that a story often contains autobiographical elements from the narrator’s life: a storyteller can insert personal experiences without even realizing it.46 When asked where he learned so many folktales, this narrator explained that, as a clothier, he had travelled a good deal and had met many people. The period during which this man actively heard and learned folktales corresponds with the apogee of his professional life and can be dated as Lithuania’s interwar period. His personal experience echoes a much earlier model of the travelling craftsman during the nineteenth century or earlier. The archetypical image of the travelling tailor—turned excellent storyteller—probably dates from that period, and blends perfectly into the whole of the story. Offering their services as they travelled from cottage to cottage, wandering craftsmen were ideal carriers of news, knowledge, and traditional folklore. Some of these individuals’ names have even been preserved as a significant part of Lithuanian cultural heritage. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the famous Lithuanian folklore collector Matas Slančiauskas recorded folkloric material while making a working as a tailor in various regions. At the same time, he was an important promoter of storytelling tradition: he often wrote folktales 45 Lutz Röhrich, Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1964), 224. 46 Ibid., 227.

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down from memory, some time after hearing them, while still succeeding in conveying folk wisdom and attitudes.47 Hired farm workers were also mobile and carried oral knowledge as they changed residence and workplace with each season. Another group of people who were often considered good storytellers and experts in regional news were beggars, who moved around not for professional reasons, but in their constant search for sustenance. In other words, a storyteller’s abilities were also determined by their activities: the more someone travelled and changed professions, the more colorful their tales became.48 One can imagine that our informant’s folktales, folkbelief legends, stories, and anecdotes are a treasure that he accumulated over a long period of working as a travelling craftsman. To return to the tale of magic under discussion, it should be noted that it gains realism from the inclusion of local detail: its narrator mentions places he knew well (the hero goes to Viekšniai or Mažeikiai, and travels to a mill in Majauskynė). While such place names do not mean much to a folklore researcher from a different region, the mention of familiar and specific places certainly stimulates local listeners’ imaginations and makes it easier to grasp a story. Like the relating of a story as though one is narrating things that “really happened” to a friend, such inclusion of local places gives a narrative a feeling of quality. This produces an ambiguous effect: a narrative containing both personal and local details is told with a folktale’s typical introduction, presentation, and conclusion. When a storyteller incorporates themselves into the story, a folktale to some degree becomes a personal experience narrative. * * * If we compare these contemporary storytellers, we can see that there are significant and interesting differences between them. The first is a rational interpreter who does not pay much attention to aesthetics and focuses on conveying the essential elements that most precisely reflect her worldview and position. This woman adapts traditional narratives that she knows to her contemporary context, and does so for didactic purposes. The second informant is a traditional storyteller with a vast repertoire of classical 47 Norbertas Vėlius, “Matas Slančiauskas ir jo pasakos,” in Šiaurės Lietuvos pasakos: surinko Matas Slančiauskas, ed. Norbertas Vėlius and Adelė Seselskytė (Vilnius: Vaga, 1974), 9–36. 48 Dégh, Narratives in Society, 171.

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narratives, and is someone who pays great attention to narrative details. He is one of a very small number of surviving storytellers who can still transport listeners to those past times when storytelling traditions were still in their prime. It is therefore clear that the content and quality of a narration is not only a factor of the framework provided by a tradition, but also depends on a storyteller’s personality, social situation, and overall creativity.49 When interacting with storytellers in fieldwork situations one can begin to form the impression that perhaps the “non-typical” narrative or unexpected story is a form of personal expression on the part of the narrator—even a part of their very being. Such narratives must, therefore, be accepted and analyzed just as they are and without preconceptions or attempts at systematization; nor should they be dismissed as mere verbal expression or as ballast existing beyond the boundaries of classical folkloric tradition and unworthy of our attention. When we look at contemporary storytellers’ creativity and range of expression it is natural to imagine that such creative people existed in the past. As Dégh puts it so well: It is possible that similar narrators have always existed but that the researchers appreciated only the faithful bearers of tradition, not those who recreated what they acquired. These did not fulfill the expectation of the collector and were dismissed as individual formulations that deviate from the canon and unnecessarily “water up” the story instead of observing tradition. Maintenance of type models, replication of literary abstractions were sought as expressions of communal creation.50

Although we cannot deny that, in the past, every community had unwritten rules controlling its members’ self-expression, it also appears that storytellers carved out spaces for original narrative interpretation. Whatever type of storyteller a person is—rational interpreter or traditional narrator—they had in the past, and will continue to have, the right to creative verbal expression. One can only hope that they will not run out of listeners.

49 Dégh, “Erzählen, Erzähler,” 315. 50 Dégh, Narratives in Society, 45.

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Chapter 6

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs, or Why Do We Need Proverbs Today? Dalia Zaikauskienė

Introduction Among international paremiologists it is universally recognised that the proverb1 genre has survived the challenges of modern communication, has spread into new uncharacteristic spheres, is taking on new forms, is changing and continuously developing. The goal of this article is to present contemporary Lithuanian proverb usage within an international context in order to highlight both its cosmopolitan aspects and national singularities. We will review how contemporary Lithuanian proverbs are used and how they can be applied in the public sphere; we will present what kinds of proverbial expressions are used by the contemporary Lithuanian-speaking community and how they are modified in order to achieve linguistic and

1

This article will explore proverbs in the broadest sense: it will discuss not only traditional proverbs but also proverbial sayings and short sayings that are close to proverbial sayings, such as certain situational expressions, etiquette formulae, phraseological combinations, aphorisms, maxims, and literary quotes.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

paralinguistic goals; and we will attempt to draw conclusions about the intentions behind the use of proverbs in contemporary communication. Lithuanian paremiology stands on a solid tradition of studying proverbs: substantial historical comparativistic2 and aesthetic paremiological3 studies are complemented by Lithuanian ethnolinguistic works.4 Researchers only started paying attention to contemporary proverb usage at the end of the twentieth century,5 when they began to collect new combinations such as reworkings of traditional proverbs (anti-proverbs) and began to examine 2

Kazys Grigas, “Litauische Entsprechungen zu germanisch-romanischen Sprichwörtern bei Dü-Ringsfeld,” Proverbium 15 (1970): 43(459)–45(461); 17 (1971): 631–641; 18 (1972): 687–691; 20 (1974): 760–766; Kazys Grigas, Patarlių paralelės: Lietuvių patarlės su latvių, baltarusių, rusų, lenkų, vokiečių, anglų, lotynų, prancūzų, ispanų atitikmenimis (Vilnius: Vaga, 1987); Lilija Kudirkienė, “Lietuvių ir latvių paremijos: raiška ir funkcionavimas,” Tautosakos darbai 30 (2005): 43–56; Lilija Kudirkienė, “Patarlės interpretacija: diachroninis aspektas,” Tautosakos darbai 33 (2007): 13–26, and others. 3 Donatas Sauka, Tautosakos savitumas ir vertė (Vilnius: Vaga, 1970); Donatas Sauka, Lietuvių tautosaka (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1982), second supplemented and enlarged edition, 2007, and others. 4 Birutė Jasiūnaitė, Šventieji ir nelabieji frazeologijoje ir liaudies kultūroje (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2010); Kristina Rutkovska et al., Vertybės lietuvio pasaulėvaizdyje (Vilnius: Akademinė leidyba, 2017); Marius Smetona, “Some aspects of Snake Euphemisms in Lithuanian Names Based on Appearance, Habitat, and Behavior,” Etnolingwistyka 29 (2017): 191–208, and others. 5 Recent decades have seen a steady increase in research about contemporary folklore: Lithuanian folklorists are increasingly studying new forms of traditional folkloric expression, changing aesthetic attitudes, and new means of dissemination. Cf.: Gražina Skabеikytė-Kazlauskienė, “Telefoninis folkloras,” Tautosakos darbai 19/26 (2003): 265–277; Povilas Krikščiūnas, “Interneto folkloras: rūšis ar sklaidos būdas?” Tautosakos darbai 20/27 (2004): 21–31; Povilas Krikščiūnas, “Folkloriniai ir folklorėjantys motyvai internetiniame profesionalaus krepšininko įvaizdyje,” Tautosakos darbai 54 (2017): 49–69; Radvilė Racėnaitė, “Citrinos su ŽIV įdaru, arba ko bijo šiuolaikinis žmogus,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 52–69; Laima Anglickienė, “Šiurpės ir jų parodijos,” Tautosakos darbai 38 (2009): 15–29; Laima Anglickienė et al., Šiuolaikinis moksleivių folkloras (Vilnius: Gimtasis žodis, 2013); Živilė Dapašauskaitė, “Pagrindinės šiuolaikinių mokyklinių atminimų teminės grupės,” Liaudies kultūra 5 (2010): 29–34; Ingrida Šlepavičiūtė, “Mistinės jaunimo patirtys interneto pasakojimuose,” Tautosakos darbai 43 (2012): 70–84; Austė Nakienė, “Tradicinės kultūros poslinkiai. Dainos XX– XXI a. didmiestyje,” Tautosakos darbai 49 (2015): 171–192; Aelita Kensminienė, “Mįslių suvokimo raida: nuo refleksijos tradicinėse mįslėse iki termino metaforinio išskydimo masinėse žiniasklaidos priemonėse,” Tautosakos darbai 54 (2017): 26–48; and the project Tradicijų tęstinumas ir kaita šiuolaikiniame lietuvių folklore: tyrimai ir sisteminimas [The continuity and change of tradition in contemporary Lithuanian folklore], conducted by Vytautas Magnus University and the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in 2008–2010.

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the specifics of new communications contexts. Until then, Lithuanian folklorists did not consider modern proverbial expressions to be equally valuable as older texts—they saw the parodying of traditional proverbs as a sign of the degradation of folklore and considered new derivations as removed from the purview of paremiology and as atypical, non-traditional, and individual witticisms. As a result, researchers noted and recorded such sayings only inadvertently, or as paremiological curiosities. It is now evident that tendencies in contemporary Lithuanian proverb usage are similar to those taking place in other linguistic communities worldwide. The most distinct signs of these tendencies are: a changed and continuously changing pool of proverbs; the spread of proverbs to multiple communications fields; changes in the functions of proverbs; the tendency to improvise on and re-phrase traditional sayings, to modify them and create so-called anti-proverbs; and the active borrowing of proverbs. Within the context of international contemporary paremiological phenomena it becomes possible to look for national particularities—in terms of linguistic expression (for example, different models of anti-proverb model formation are popular in different languages); political, social, and cultural environment (each nation’s active paremic fund reflects that culture’s realities and going concerns); and aspects of national identity.

Shifts in the Lithuanian proverb pool: levelling of traditional indicators, modification of traditional proverbs, and the folklorization of non-paremic expressions Each nation’s paremic pool to some degree changes with the passage of time, but the changes seen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are especially active and marked: while the array of what were considered traditional expressions is diminishing, the national fund is expanding with new formations such as so-called anti-proverbs and non-folkloric expressions including advertising and political slogans, song excerpts, and so on. It is also evident that the national paremic fund is open to proverbs that are popular in other linguistic communities. The process through which some expressions recede from active usage and new ones continuously appear is an entirely natural one.6 Proverbs die 6 Archer Taylor, The Proverb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 76–77; Kazys Grigas, “Lietuvių liaudies patarlės ir priežodžiai,” in Patarlės ir priežodžiai, ed.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

out for a variety of reasons: “The moral lesson involved in the proverb may not seem so significant as it once did, the symbol employed may have lost its force, the essential element of the metaphor may have ceased to be part of common experience, the language may have discarded an essential word.”7 Proverbs die out together with lifestyle shifts, disappearing professions, and vanishing archaic vocabulary. A little used and no longer “popular” (a key mark of a proverb) saying loses its status and becomes a revoked proverb.8 In the twenty-first century, many Lithuanian sayings that contain vocabulary or phraseology (usually related to now extinct realities and practices) that is no longer accessible to contemporary people only survive in proverb collections. For example, if we look at the general collection titled Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai (Lithuanian proverbs and proverbial phrases—LPP), or the related electronic database (http://archyvas.llti.lt/patarles), we will find many expressions related with the agrarian lifestyle that are both irrelevant and incomprehensible to contemporary Lithuanians: “Abraką uždirbsi, kepalą pradirbsi” (You’ll earn a slice, but you’ll lose the loaf) LPP I Nr. 7 (the experience of more loss than benefit). “Duodi arklį, duok ir peilį kartu” (If you give someone a horse, give them a knife too) LPP I Nr. 618 (a peasant so values his horse that he should not lend it to anyone). “Gražus abrozas, menkas gaspadorius” (He may be handsome, but he’s a lousy landlord) LPP I Nr. 14 (looks good but is not useful).

On the other hand, the proverb fund is steadily supplemented with new, more modern sayings; however, it remains difficult to recognize new sayings as being worthy of proverb status.9 When it comes to the question of the vitality of the proverb genre, our attention is first drawn to traditional proverbs and proverbial sayings Kazys Grigas and Ambraziejus Jonynas (Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1958), 8; Wolfgang Mieder, “Proverbs,” in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 598–600; Kimberly J. Lau et al., Introduction to What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life, ed. Kimberly J. Lau et al. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004), 1; Damien Villers, “Proverbiogenèse et Obsolescence: La Naissance et la Mort des Proverbes,” Proverbium 32 (2015): 412. 7 Taylor, The Proverb, 77. 8 Villers, “Proverbiogenèse et Obsolescence,” 414–418. 9 Wolfgang Mieder, “‘New Proverbs Run Deep’: Prolegomena to a Dictionary of Modern Anglo-American Proverbs,” Proverbium 26 (2009): 269.

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that have survived to this day, a variety of which contemporary Lithuanians continue to use. The most popular ones are well known, often international, flexible, and are suitable for different situations (e.g., “Obuolys nuo obels netoli rieda” (An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), “Neperšokęs griovio nesakyk op” (Don’t say “hop” before you’ve jumped over the ditch), “Nekask duobės kitam—pats įkrisi” (Don’t dig a hole for someone else— you’ll fall in yourself), “Sotus alkano neužjaučia” (He who is sated doesn’t feel sorry for the hungry), “Vilką minim, vilkas čia” (Speak of the wolf and you’ll see his tail) and many others). We have noted that when traditional proverbs appear in today’s mass media they to some degree differ from those published in proverb collections: they contain simpler syntax, more familiar grammatical forms, and more common, everyday vocabulary. But despite the tendency to use simpler proverbs, in both private and public settings Lithuanians continue to use sayings that are marked by their distinct traditional ethnographic origins: “Še tau, boba, Devintinės!” (It’s Corpus Christi Day, old woman!)—this is said to express surprise if someone has had bad luck. Example: “Še tau, boba, Devintinės: Eligijus Masiulis įtariamas paėmęs kyšį” (It’s Corpus Christi Day, old woman: [Politician] Eligijus Masiulis is suspected of having taken a bribe); 2016, silutesetazinios.lt. “Neišsižadėk lazdos, tiurmos ir ubago terbos” (Don’t imagine that you’ll be able to avoid cane, prison, or the beggar’s bag)—this is said to stress that no one is protected from bad luck. Example: “‘Sveikajai’ visuomenei norėtųsi priminti: niekuomet neišsižadėk nei tiurmos, nei ligos, nei ubago lazdos. . . .” (We should warn our “healthy” society: don’t imagine that you’ll be able to avoid prison, illness, or the beggar’s cane . . .); 2007, alfa.lt.

This bears witness to the endurance of the old tradition of proverb usage and shows that, in the consumer’s consciousness, traditional proverbs are associated with traditional values. In different contexts such proverbs serve as an effective means both of upholding and defending traditional values, and of critiquing them. Depending upon the reader’s position, a traditional proverb can acquire either positive or negative connotations. An example of this would be a proverb that has frequently been mentioned during recent debates about the use of physical punishment against children, “Mylėk kaip dūšią, krėsk kaip grūšią” (Love like your soul, shake like a pear tree), which appeared in the following headline: “Mylėk kaip dūšią, krėsk kaip grūšią. Lietuvoje nerimsta ginčai: vaiko mušimas yra jo auklėjimas ar žalojimas?”

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

(Love like your soul, shake like a pear tree. Debates rage in Lithuania: is beating children a way of raising or abusing them?); 2013, silelis.info. The observation that modern society has appropriated knowledge of proverbs and the ability to use them is supported by the fact that we can see how, in different contexts, proverbs are not only used in their traditional forms but are creatively interpreted using paraphrasing, allusions, and references. This has recently become popular in media articles. Here the act of communication is only successful if the receiver is able to decode a reference to a proverb (see below). The fact that the tradition of proverb usage endures in rural settings, or that people at least remember old proverbs is evident from field research conducted during recent decades.10 Traditional proverbs are only one aspect of the proverb pool alongside anti-proverbs and new sayings of various origins.11 Although, like other folkloric genres, proverbs have always been parodied, throughout the history of Lithuanian proverb development we have not seen the scale of proverb modification that has taken place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Scholars interpret this popularity and generation of anti-proverbs in post-Soviet societies as being related to the democratization of language, the abolition of censorship, and the growing influence of youth

10 Collections accumulated at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore’s archives in 1990–2018 include over 37,000 proverbs and proverbial sayings. 11 Anti-proverb (Lith. antipatarlė, Ger. Antisprichwörter, Rus. antiposlovitsa or antipogovorka, Hung. antiproverbiumok, Pol. antyprzysłowia)—any kind of deliberately created version of a proverb in which the saying has been reworked and some part of it removed or added using wordplay. See Wolfgang Mieder and Anna Tóthné Litovkina, Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs (Burlington: The University of Vermont, 1999), 3. This term was first used by Wolfang Mieder and Lutz Röhrich, Sprichwort (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977). At first the term anti-proverb was used to refer to proverbs that had been reworked to refer to a topical social issue, often in a satirical manner (ibid.); later authors used it to refer to any reworkings of proverbs; there is currently no unified meaning of the term. Other related terms include twisted proverb, fractured proverb, and faux proverb; proverb reworkings are also referred to as quasi-proverbs and altered image proverbs (Elena Zhigarina, Sovremennoe bytovanie poslovits: Variativnost′ i polifunktsional′nost′ tekstov [Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2006], http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/zhigarina6.htm, accessed March 20, 2014), and metaproverbs (Villers, “Proverbiogenèse et Obsolescence”). Some scholars are inclined to use the concept of proverbial parodies or proverb parodies (David R. Mayer, Review of Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs by Wolfgang Mieder and Anna Tóthné Litovkina (Burlington: University of Vermont, 1999), Asian Ethnology 59/1 [2000]: 155).

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language.12 The popularity and active generation of anti-proverbs can also be explained through the principles of natural language and proverb genre development: much more so than other folklore genres, proverbs and proverbial sayings adapt to shifting linguistic, social, political, and cultural environments, while the entire modern environment, for its part, changes very rapidly. According to Andrey Reznikov, one of the most characteristic traits of anti-proverbs is how they reflect the realities of modern times.13 It is possible that the growing instances of proverb distortions (the creation of anti-proverbs) is related to linguistic developments and changes in the mediascape, and also to attitudes toward folklore in general, in particular the shift of folklore to the world of entertainment. On the other hand, because the connection to tradition (whether conscious or not) is still strong in Lithuania, the generation of anti-proverbs can be seen as a search for new forms, originality, and self-expression. Indeed, sometimes a supposedly ironic reference to traditional things is in fact a way of at once drawing attention to the traditional values contained in classic expression and supporting the survival of the genre. Having examined the semantics and functioning of Lithuanian proverbs, we can identify inconsistent motifs in the reworking of proverbs and the different degrees to which it is related to the original saying. In some cases, a traditional text is reworked in order to illustrate some aspect of contemporary life (in these cases the act of reworking is not the goal, but the means); in others, the reworking of a proverb is the goal itself, that is, a traditional text is modified for the sake of creativity and entertainment. Proverbs that illustrate a situation are inseparable from the context in which they are used, and we can see a clear relationship with the concrete situation being described and the social, political, and cultural environment. In some 12 Harry Walter and Valerii Mokienko, “Russkie poslovitsy i ikh leksikograficheskoe opisanie,” Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 52, no. 1 (2007): 157–175. 13 Andrey Reznikov, “Old Wine in New Bottles”: Modern Russian Anti-Proverbs (Burlington: The University of Vermont, 2009), 7. It would be imprudent to claim that the generation of anti-proverbs is a contemporary phenomenon. Because “accidental” proverb variations were for a long time rejected as not valuable, it would be difficult to trace the evolution of the genre. As mentioned, anti-proverbs are closely related to social environments and conditions; it would therefore be more accurate to speak of anti-proverbs of different periods, for example, interwar Lithuania or Sovietoccupied Lithuania. We are aware that Soviet proverbs—referring to collective farms and peasants—were created in imitation of traditional proverbs (Lietuvių tautosaka, užrašyta 1945–1956, ed. Kostas Korsakas and Ambraziejus Jonynas. [Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1957]).

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

cases, these kinds of anti-proverbs preserve the original proverb’s most general meaning, but, depending upon the situation described, will render it relevant and specific to the context, as in the following examples: “Dieve, apsaugok nuo bado, maro ir tokios klientūros . . .” (God, protect me from plague, famine, and clients like that); 2012, eFoto.lt; orig. “Apsaugok, Dieve, nuo maro, bado, vainos ir nuo bobos nespakainos” (God, protect me from plague, famine, war, and annoying women). “Nepagautas—ne vagis, o tik seimo narys” (If you aren’t caught, you’re not a thief, just a Member of Parliament); 2006, coll.; orig. “Nepagautas—ne vagis” (If you’re not caught, you’re not a thief). “Dievas davė dantis, duos ir kompensaciją” (God gave us teeth, God will give us a subsidy); August 18, 2006, LRT; orig. “Dievas davė dantis, duos ir duonos” (God gave us teeth, God will give us bread too)—this is a way of reassuring someone complaining of want: God created people, so God will take care of them.

These kinds of reworked proverbs could be considered variations on original proverbs.14 In other instances reworked proverbs that illustrate current social and political issues are semantically distant from the original saying; these appear in everyday speech, internet comments, and media articles. These anti-proverbs are a direct reflection of the social, political, and cultural life of the society and are often typical examples of social and political satire. They flash by briefly to illustrate a current issue or event and then disappear as soon as they are no longer relevant. Another, politically neutral kind of humor plays with basic human and everyday issues. The reworking of a traditional text for its own sake is a process of creative amusement: seeking to achieve wit by twisting the original text, an 14 Noticing inconsistencies in reworking techniques in which the idea within the original proverb is fundamentally altered, proverb researchers suggest calling such texts anti-proverbs, and recommend referring to cases in which the original is only slightly modified (and thus made more current and specific) as versions of traditional proverbs (Erik Aasland,“Kazakh Proverbs and Discourse Ecologies,” Proverbium 35 [2018]: 6). Similarly, Anna Konstantinova calls texts anti-proverbs only when a different idea from the original proverb is expressed; she calls other neologisms “hapaxes” or nonce proverbs (Greek hápax eirēménon—[something] said [only] once) (Anna Konstantinova, “Proverbs in Mass Media,” in Introduction to Paremiology. A Comprehensive Guide to Proverb Studies, ed. Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt and Melita Aleksa Varga [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014], 282). This article employs the concepts of anti-proverb, reworked proverb, and modified proverb synonymously.

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author can contradict a traditional idea as they try to create new semantic content, as in the following: “Dovanotam konspekte į braižą nežiūrima” (Nobody looks a gift of lecture notes in the handwriting); 2002, Šiaurės Atėnai [ŠA]; or “Trojos arkliui į dantis nežiūrima” (Don’t look at the teeth of a Trojan horse), 2004, ŠA; orig. “Dovanotam arkliui į dantis nežiūri” (Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth). “Nuo meilės iki neapykantos tik vienas kartas” (There’s only one time between love and hate); 2007, www.cha.lt; orig. “Nuo meilės iki neapykantos vienas žingsnis” (There’s s only one step between love and hate). “Dievas davė į dantis, duonos nebereiks” (God hit you in the mouth, now you won’t need any bread); 2006, ŠA; orig. “God gave you teeth, God will give you bread too.” “Kol septynis kartus pamatuosi—kiti jau nupjaus” (While you measure seven times someone else will cut it off); 2004, balsas.lt; orig. “Devynis kartus pamatuok, dešimtą pjauk” (Measure nine times, cut once).

While some of these anti-proverbs were penned by well-known authors, others are works of anonymous “popular authorship” appearing on internet sites, social networks, in special entertainment newspapers or magazine columns.15 Original Lithuanian reworkings of proverbs are one of the most popular ways of playing with language, and therefore of folklore, today. The line between signed and anonymous proverb creations often becomes blurred, with texts migrating from authored publications to anonymous proverb lists, and sometimes even the reverse. For example, two variants, “Atitiko kirvis galvą” (The axe matched the head)16 and “Atitiko kirvis protą” (The axe matched the mind)17 have been recorded, both developed from the original proverb “Atitiko kirvis kotą” (The axe 15 It is worth also mentioning specific proverb publications and collections: Andrius Šiušas’s Sizigijos (published in the cultural weekly Šiaurės Atėnai [ŠA] from 2004 to 2008, see the list of references), and Valdas Striužas’s column “Galas turi dvi lazdas” [The End has two sticks] in Šiaurės Atėnai in March 10, 2006, as well as Kostas Ostrauskas’s “interpretations” of traditional proverbs (Kostas Ostrauskas, Spec(tac) ulum mundi [Čikaga: Algimanto Mackaus knygų leidimo fondas, 2003]), Vytautas V. Landsbergis’s Rudnosiuko liaudies patarlės [Rudnosiukas’s folk proverbs] (Vilnius: Vaga, 2004), the actor Rolandas Kazlas’s original proverbs that have appeared in the television program “Nekenčiu reklamos” [I Hate Advertising] (2000–2001, BTV), as well as the fantasy proverbs created and posted by fantasy fans in the fantasy website http://www.qedata.se. 16 Landsbergis, Rudnosiuko istorijos, 132. 17 Šiuša, “Sizigijos (XXXVII),” Šiaurės Atėnai, October 20, 2007, accessed 2011, pramogos. delfi.lt.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

matched the handle). The only marked difference here (as we will see from the examples of phonetic substitutions below) is that when writers deploy reworking mechanisms, the results are usually more subtle and inventive. In comparison with anti-proverbs variations, anti-proverbs created for their own sake are more independent, and the most successful become independent proverbs, as was the case with the following expressions: “Nėra to blogo, kas neišeitų į internetą” (There is nothing bad that won’t make it into internet); “Nėra to blogo, ko nesuvalgytų studentas” (There is nothing bad that a student wouldn’t eat); orig. “Nėra to blogo, kas neišeitų į gera” (There is nothing bad that does not bring good). “Nekask duobės kitam, lai pats išsikasa” (Don’t dig a hole for someone else, let them do it themselves); orig. “Nekask duobės kitam—pats įkrisi” (Don’t dig a hole for someone else—you’ll fall in yourself).

The particularities of anti-proverb creation (their models of composition) are similar across most languages, and this is especially the case in terms of structural models of composition. Semantic reworking methods are more closely related with the particulars of a language—wordplays based on multiple meanings and homonyms, the patronymic attraction and contextual synonymity of traditional proverbs and their fragments, and double semantic actualization. Some researchers of anti-proverbs identify the principle of surprise as one of the methods of creating them: they consider it to be the basis for the generation of most,18 if not all19 such sayings. The following Lithuanian anti-proverbs are clearly based on the principle of surprise: “Davė Dievas dantis, duos ir belarusą stomatologą” (God gave you teeth, He’ll will give you a Belorussian dentist too; 2010, LNK, DvŽ). “Kas anksti keliasi, tas anksti miršta” (He who rises early, dies early); 2007, cha.lt; orig. “Anksti kėlęs, jaunas vedęs nesigailėsi” (You’ll never be sorry to get up early or marry young).

And this reworking of the Latin maxim: “Atėjo, pamatė ir . . . nutarė nesusidėti” (He came, he saw, he decided not to get involved); 2002, coll.; orig. “Atėjau, pamačiau, nugalėjau” (I came, I saw, I conquered; Lat. “Veni, vidi, vici”). 18 Reznikov, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” 124. 19 Тatiana Valdaeva, “Anti-Proverbs or New Proverbs: The Use of English Anti-Proverbs and Their Stylistic Analysis,” Proverbium 20 (2003): 383.

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We will not here present a thorough analysis of anti-proverb generation models,20 but will mention only the most nationally specific and popular models. Most Lithuanian anti-proverbs are created using the mechanism of substitution. There can be a variety of alterations—from one phoneme to a completely modified text in which the relationship with the original text only remains on an associative level. Phonetic substitutions are rare but fascinating. Like the exploitation of the polysemousness of a word, these are the most subtle, most “Lithuanian” methods of generating antiproverbs because they require a highly developed sense of the language. It is noteworthy that most of the anti-proverbs we collected that were created through phonetic substitution were the work of specific authors. Because this kind of proverb alteration requires considerable creative skill, spontaneous generation of such texts is difficult to imagine: the original text is modified so inventively that the resulting adaptation is both meaningful and playful. Some such alterations are especially successful. For example, the expression “Ranka ranką pjauna” (One hand cuts the other),21 orig. “Ranka ranką plauna” (One hand washes the other; Lat. “Manus manum lavat”) expresses not the idea of mutual aid but harm; the saying “Tu— man, aš—sau” (You for me, me for me), humoras.mikasbinkis.lt; orig. “Tu—man, aš—tau” (You for me, me for you) describes not a relationship of exchange but expresses an egotistical, self-interested attitude. These anti-proverbs indicate an ironic view toward both the values conveyed by traditional proverbs and contemporary attitudes toward life. In other cases the main idea of the original proverb is preserved but is accorded additional significatory tones and the situation described is narrowed: “Juokiasi tas, kas tuokiasi paskutinis” (He laughs who marries last);22 orig.: “Juokiasi tas, kas juokiasi paskutinis” (He who laughs last laughs best.) “Nuo meilės iki neapykantos vienas žvilgsnis” (There is only one glance between love and hate);23 orig. “Nuo meilės iki neapykantos vienas žingsnis” (There is only one step between love and hate).

One of the most popular anti-proverb models in both Lithuanian and other languages involves lexical changes. Compared with phonetic 20 Dalia Zaikauskienė, “Lietuvių paremijos XX–XXI a. sandūroje: tradicija ir inovacija” (PhD diss., Vilniaus universitetas, 2012), 91–135. 21 Šiuša, “Sizigijos (XXXIX),” Šiaurės Atėnai, January 12, 2008. 22 Šiuša, “Sizigijos (XXVI),” Šiaurės Atėnai, June 5, 2004. 23 Ibid.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

substitutions this is a simpler, but very effective, method. Sometimes one word in the original text is replaced with a similarly sounding one, that is, a paronym:24 “Čia Lietuva, čia litais lyja” (This is Lithuania, it rains in litas25 here); 2012, zebra.lt and others, orig. “Čia Lietuva, čia lietūs lyja” (This is Lithuania, it rains here)—a line by the Lithuanian poet Eduardas Mieželaitis; or a contextual synonym.26 Sometimes an anti-proverb’s contextual synonym acquires a traditional proverb’s connotations, especially when the traditional proverb’s imagery is created drawing on typically folkloric images—cat, pig, wolf—which have stable negative meanings in Lithuanian proverbs: “Vyriausybės balsas į dangų neina” (The government’s voice doesn’t reach heaven); 2009, lzinios.lt; orig. “Šuns balsas į dangų neina” (A dog’s voice doesn’t reach heaven). In another, not necessarily negative, type of transfer of connotation, contemporary political players are compared to the gods or kings of traditional proverbs, producing an ironic effect: “Davė Uspaskichas dantis, duos ir duonos” (Uspaskich gave teeth, Uspaskich will give bread, too); 2004, DvŽ LNK; orig. “Dievas davė dantis, duos ir duonos” (God gave teeth, God will give bread, too). 27 “Dangus aukštai, o Sakalas toli” (Heaven is high above, Sakalas is far away); 2003, Ekstra magazine; orig.: “Dievas aukštai, karalius toli” (God is high above, the king is far away).28

In addition to using anti-proverbs to draw attention to current political issues, Lithuanians also use them to make jokes about everyday life and articulate the “lazy man’s philosophy”: “Mažai kalbėsi, daug dirbsi” (If you talk little, you’ll work a lot); 2006, ŠA; orig. “Mažiau kalbėk, daugiau daryk” (Talk less, do more). 24 Anna Tóthné Litovkina calls this kind of substitution a “paronomastic pun” (Anna Tóthné Litovkina et al., “Punning in Anglo-American, German, French, Russian and Hungarian Anti-Proverbs,” Proverbium 26 [2008]: 251). 25 Litas—former Lithuanian currency. 26 Contextual synonym—term for words that become synonyms only in certain contexts, for example, when a word in a traditional proverb is replaced with another one it acquires a synonymous meaning, even though the two words are not synonyms (Reznikov, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” 110). 27 Viktor Uspaskich—entrepreneur, politician, former leader of the Lithuanian Labour Party, former Minister of Economic Affairs; Uspaskich was suspected of tax fraud and in 2013 he was sentenced to four years in jail. 28 Aloyzas Sakalas—Lithuanian politician, signatory of the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania, Member of the European Parliament; his family name Sakalas means “falcon.”

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“Ką gali padaryt rytoj, nedaryk šiandien” (If you can do something tomorrow, don’t do it today); 1999, coll.; orig. “Neatidėk rytdienai to, ką gali padaryti šiandien” (Don’t do something tomorrow if you can do it today).

Many anti-proverbs also contain a distinctly sexist subtext, or, as in the third example below, a barely discernible one: “Geriau žvirblis rankoje nei žąsis lovoj” (Better a sparrow in the hand than a goose in the bed); 2004, balsas.lt and others; orig. “Geriau žvirblis rankoj negu briedis girioj” (Better a sparrow in the hand than an elk in the woods). “Sava Marytė arčiau kūno” (Your own Marytė is closer to your skin); 2010, zizirskiene.lt; orig. “Savi marškiniai arčiau kūno” (Your own shirt is closer to your skin). “Geriau vėliau negu niekam” (Better later than for no one); 2004, omni. lt; orig. “Geriau vėliau negu niekada” (Better later than never). “Atėjau, pamačiau, nesusilaikiau” (I came, I saw, I couldn’t resist); 2002, coll.; orig. “Atėjau, pamačiau, nugalėjau” (I came, I saw, I conquered; Lat. “Veni, vidi, vici”).

The contemporary Lithuanian proverb fund has also been substantially supplemented by so-called new proverbs: phrases from literature, feature films, and songs, as well as original authored sayings and slogans. The process of genre migration, when certain quotes enter the realm of proverbs, can be seen at various stages of the genre’s development; for example, a considerable number of Lithuanian proverbs came from other folklore genres—folktales, jokes, folk and original songs. As literary works, original authored expressions have traditionally been distinguished by Lithuanian paremiologists from folk proverbs and proverbial sayings, bearing in mind that folklorized expressions are nevertheless considered to be proverbs or proverbial sayings.29 Two key elements are considered necessary conditions for folklorization: the disappearance of authorship and the saying’s detachment from its original situation (its origins, provenance).30 As we have already seen, in contemporary usage the relationship between anonymity and authorship is no longer so 29 Kazys Grigas, “Nuo pirmųjų įrašų iki sisteminio leidinio,” in Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai, vol. 1, ed. Kazys Grigas et al. (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2000), 8. 30 According to Lutz Röhrich, a phrase becomes a proverbial expression “when an expression that is characteristic of and originates in a certain sphere (for example, a craft or profession) begins to be used universally.” See Lutz Röhrich, Lexikon der sprichwörtlichen Redensarten, vol. 1 (Freiburg, Basel, and Wien: Verlag Herder, 1994), 41.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

important. To a large degree this is determined by the possibilities offered by contemporary dissemination: a successful proverbial saying can very quickly acquire the status of an established one (another question is how long it will last). What sets the current period apart is the simplicity and non-folkloric form of the new sayings. When quotes begin to be used in different contexts and acquire a certain semantic charge and connotative nuance, they become independent sayings, as in the following examples: “Imkit mane ir skaitykit” (Take me and read me)—a quote from Martynas Mažvydas’s Katekizmas (Cathechism), the first book printed in Lithuanian (1547); “Lietuviais esame mes gimę” (Lithuanians we are born)—the first line from a poem of the same title by Jurgis Zauerveinas (1879); “Lakštingala negali nečiulbėti” (A nightingale cannot stop singing)—a line from a poem by Salomėja Nėris (1945); “Tu dantų nešiepk ir svetimo neliesk” (Don’t show your teeth and don’t touch what is not yours)—a quote from the Soviet cartoon “Tops and Roots” dubbed in Lithuanian; “Pabudome ir kelkimės” (We woke up, let’s get up)—a line from a late twentieth-century Lithuanian patriotic song. Phrases said by politicians or other famous people can also become established sayings (for more about political rhetoric, see further in this article). A good number of new proverbs are borrowed and translated from other languages.

Proverb borrowings: The influence of large linguistic communities and the weakening of national proverbial identity One of the signs of global proverbial consumption is the exchange of proverbs between nations and the resulting constant circulation of proverbs: these are processes of adoption and borrowing that have been stimulated as much by political and social changes and contemporary communications media and devices as by general processes of globalisation and the weakening of national consciousness. It is evident that changes in the Lithuanian proverb fund and the scale of the parodying of traditional proverbs has been most greatly affected by Russian- and English-language cultures. Sovietera generations that were fluent in Russian, and in particular members of certain social strata and people who served in the Soviet army, to this day use Russian proverbs, as well as folklorized expressions related to Soviet pop culture, both in the Russian and in Lithuanian translations. Younger people are more receptive to English-language cultures—it is common for them to slip quotes and phraseologies from foreign languages (usually English) into their speech. We should remember that the Lithuanian proverb fund

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also contains Latin maxims, as well as aphorisms and quotes by famous authors.31 It is clear that the Lithuanian proverb consumer is happy to supplement their repertoire with proverbs that are typical of other cultures as well as such proverbs’ images and structures. We have adopted the following proverbs: “Tango šokama dviese” (It takes two to tango); “Kas nerizikuoja, tas negera šampano” (orig. Rus. “Kто не рискует, тот не пьет шампанское” [Those who don’t risk don’t get to drink champagne]); “Iš nugaros licėjus, iš priekio muziejus” (orig. Pol. “Z tyłu liceum, z przodu muzeum” [A lyceum from the back, a museum from the front]) and many others. The paremic images of the cart before the horse and green grass, among others, have been adopted, as well as the structure of the saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian (“Geras indėnas—miręs indėnas”), for example, “Geras mentas—miręs mentas” (A good cop is a dead cop); 2008, pajurionaujienos.com, “Ar geras romas yra miręs romas?” (Is a good Roma a dead Roma?); 2010, bernardinai. lt. As Wolfgang Mieder points out, English is becoming the world’s lingua franca, and this means that British and American proverbs are increasingly appearing in other languages. In Mieder’s view, sayings such as “Nobody’s perfect,” “A picture’s worth a thousand words” (Lith. version: “Geriau vieną kartą pamatyti negu šimtą kartų išgirsti”), and “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” belong to the global proverb fund.32 Sometimes proverbs from other cultures are transferred through the English language, as in the example of the image of the baby being poured out with the bathwater, which was originally a German proverb:33 “Su nešvariu vandeniu neišpilkime ir kūdikio” (Let’s not pour out the baby with the bathwater); 2010, lietuvosdiena.lrytas.lt.

31 Certain English expressions arrived with the translations of English authors, beginning in the nineteenth century. Hamlet’s famous phrase “To be or not to be” began its Lithuanian life with the publication of Jurgis Zauervainas’s 1880–1884 poem (Vincentas Drotvinas, “Frazeologizmai iš rusų kalbos,” Gimtoji kalba 1 [2011]: 3–9). Lithuanians eventually began to use it in various contexts as an independent expression. 32 Wolfgang Mieder, “‘A Proverb is Worth a Thousand Words’: Folk Wisdom in the Modern Mass Media,” Proverbium 22 (2005): 168. 33 Wolfgang Mieder, “‘(Don’t) Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater’: The Americanization of a German Proverb and Proverbial Expression,” De Proverbio 1, no. 1 (1995), https://deproverbio.com/the-americanization-of-a-german-proverb/, accessed January 23, 2019.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

“[Kūrybos procese] svarbu su vandeniu neišpilti kūdikio” ([During the creative process] it’s important not to pour out the baby with the bathwater); 2018, zmones.lt. “Neturėtume su geldos vandeniu išpilti ir kūdikio” (We shouldn’t pour out the baby with the trough water); 2018, etaplius.lt.

Lithuanian material indicates that, in both the public and private spheres, these and many other expressions (“Laikas—pinigai” [Time is money]; “Nuo meilės iki neapykantos vienas žingsnis” [There is only one step between love and hate]; “Klientas visada teisus” [The customer is always right]) coexist on equal terms with traditional Lithuanian sayings, including those that are still connected to rural oral traditions. Sometimes the borrowings even drive out their local semantic equivalents. For example, the Lithuanian sayings “Kur mūsų nėra, ten veršiai midų geria” (Where we are not, calves drink mead), “Kur mūsų nėra, ten miltų kalnai” (Where we are not there are hills of flour), and “Kur mūsų nėra, ten ir upės pienu plaukia” (Where we are not even the rivers flow with milk) have been replaced by the rather simpler image of “Ten gerai, kur mūsų nėra” (It’s good there, where we are not) and the recently adopted proverb “Kaimyno žolė visada žalesnė” (The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; The grass is always greener on your neighbour’s lawn). The millstone, which served as the symbol of slowness in Lithuanian folklore (“Juda kaip apatinis girnų akmuo” [He/she moves like the bottom part of a millstone]), is being replaced by the image of the turtle: “Greitas kaip vėžlys” [As fast (that is, as slow) as a turtle]). Some foreign sayings have become so familiar that there aren’t even any doubts about their “Lithuanian” origins. A good example of this is the above-mentioned phrase “Vežimą prieš arklį statyti” (Putting the cart before the horse), which has served as the basis of various proverbial sayings: “Vežimas prieš arklį” (The cart before the horse); 2018, ksjmc.lt. “Arklys paskui vežimą” (The horse after the cart, 2010); lzinios.lt. “Nereikia vežimo statyti pirma arklio” (The vehicle should not be placed before the horse); 2013, biciulis.net.

There is no evidence that this saying, which has been used in Western Europe since at least the eighteenth century, was previously used by Lithuanians, who likely adopted it in the late twentieth or perhaps only the twenty-first century.

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In his comparative study of the international aspects of classical proverbs, the famous Lithuanian paremiologist Kazys Grigas debated what could have determined the international nature of some older proverbs: was it a question of typological analogies, or of genetically connected elements adopted from some common source as a result of interactions between cultures and languages.34 Contemporary proverb borrowing processes are in effect determined by geopolitical factors (the so-called effect of the language of power) as well as various rapidly occurring social, economic, and technological changes in modern life: smaller languages adopt things they don’t have, or that seem appealing for various reasons, from neighbouring larger ones. This naturally one-directional flow makes it possible to speak about the openness of small language communities, even their lack of resistance to proverbial phrases from other languages. The contemporary user of proverbs is generally not concerned with ethnic qualities of figurative sayings (on proverb, catchy expressions, and folk wisdom websites, Japanese, French, and other proverbs appear alongside Lithuanian ones)—what is most important is the sayings’ aesthetic and pragmatic value. We need new expressions because of general socio-cultural shifts: with the predominance of urban culture, the traditional proverb fund no longer offers enough sayings to illustrate certain aspects of contemporary life. For example, in the context of sayings related to economics and business, in addition to the above-mentioned “Klientas visada teisus” (The client is always right), “Pinigai nekvepia” (Money doesn’t stink), “Laikas—pinigai” (Time is money), we see the appearance of “Nedėk visų kiaušinių į vieną pintinę” (Don’t put your eggs in one basket); 2016, veidas.lt; in the context of entertainment sector—“Šou turi tęstis” (The show must go on); and in the lifestyle media—“Deimantai—geriausi merginų draugai” (Diamonds are a girl’s best friend). The Lithuanian proverb fund has also been supplemented as a result of the practical demands of translation. At the end of the twentieth century, with the regaining of independence, Lithuania was inundated with translated literature. In their efforts to find analogues for figurative expressions, professional translators try to find Lithuanian versions, but do not always succeed (of course, sometimes they do not really try; they do not recognize a proverbial or phraseological expression and translate it literally 34 Grigas, Patarlių paralelės, 15–16.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

and sometimes the Lithuanian version of a proverb simply does not work in a particular literary context).35 The establishment of some sayings can be explained by changing linguistic styles: like the above-mentioned “The grass is always greener,” a foreign saying can sometimes better meet contemporary language requirements for simplicity and conciseness. The impact of other languages on the contemporary Lithuanian proverb fund is also reflected in the fact that, although the parodying of traditional sayings is a very individual and specific process, we even adopt antiproverbs. In this case, the biggest influence comes from Russian-language culture. From the examples we have it is evident that the most important factors are a saying’s content and potential subtexts. Only in rare cases is an attempt made to adapt the form of a saying to Lithuanian tradition. For example, “Sava Nataša arčiau kūno” (Your own Natasha is closer to your body); 2019, sveikinimai.com, from the Russian “Своя Наташка ближе к телу,”36 was adapted to “Sava Marytė arčiau kūno” (Your own Marytė is closer to the body). Even if we adopt foreign sayings easily, their adaptation still takes place according to the principles governing both the Lithuanian language’s internal rules and the proverb genre itself. Lithuanians try to translate all sorts of well-known English expressions, but they certainly do not all catch on. For example, the structure of the English proverb “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is syntactically not conducive to Lithuanian, making it difficult to translate in a way that preserves the saying’s artistic imagery and rhythmic structure. One can still, however, find some fairly successful attempts to squeeze it into the typical syntactic framework of the Lithuanian proverb: “Obuolį po vieną—daktaro nė vieno” (One apple— no doctor); this was the slogan of a program promoting healthy diet, that is, eating apples, 2016, ve.lt. In this case we can see a conscious effort to adapt a foreign saying, so that perhaps, over time, it will get “worn in” and 35 On translation errors cf.: Laima Rapšytė, “Frazeologizmų vertimo bėdos,” in Meninio vertimo problemos, ed. Eugenijus Matuzevičius and Arvydas Valionis (Vilnius: Vaga, 1980), 367–375. 36 Reznikov, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” 33. The original Russian proverb is: “Своя pyбашка ближе к телу” (One’s own shirt is closer to the body). In the Russian antiproverb the word “рубашка” (rubashka, shirt) is replaced with the similarly sounding word “Наташка” (Natashka), which changes the meaning of the expression: the traditional proverb means that people are most concerned with what is close to them, while the anti-proverb acquires an additional sexual subtext.

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will become more appealing to users. On the other hand, it is not difficult to understand why the proverb “The early bird catches the worm” has not caught on, because there is an even more evocative traditional Lithuanian saying: “Ankstyvoji varna dantis rakinėja, vėlyvoji varna akis krapštinėja” (The early crow picks at teeth, the late crow scratches at eyes), a proverb that has analogues in Latvian, Russian, Belorussian, and German. This proverb is popular to this day and appears in various contexts: “Folk wisdom says: ‘Ankstyva varna dantis krapšto, o vėlyva—akis’” (The early crow picks at teeth, but the late one at eyes); 2013, Gargždų “Banga,” facebook.com. “But, as they say, better early than late, or in other words—‘Ankstyva varna dantis rakinėja, o vėlyva akis krapštinėja’” (The early crow picks at teeth, the late crow scratches at eyes); 2009, spiningavimas.lt.

The foreign sayings that best adapt to local traditions are the ones with easily understandable metaphors and which generate an artistic image that captures familiar contemporary realities. In the introduction to his book Patarlių paralelės (Proverb Parallels), Grigas considered this question of what is necessary for an expression to spread. Is it a matter of chance or of the quality of the proverb? Is form or content more important?37 Some borrowed expressions are created on the basis of imagery, and imagery is one of the factors stimulating the proliferation of proverbs; this is also the case in modern society. Although Grigas argues that a strong idea is more significant than the existence of imagery,38 I believe that for contemporary Lithuanian society strong figurative, metaphorical expression is indeed important as a convenient and appealing means of interaction. In a concrete communication situation, what is most important to the proverb user is that the saying maximally meet their needs—both pragmatically and stylistically. And if it becomes clear—or merely appears to—that there is no suitable Lithuanian proverb, another nation’s proverb, or even a saying in another language, will be used. For some time there have been discussions about the real and imagined threats to Lithuanian posed by the English language,39 along with concerns about the weakening 37 Grigas, Patarlių paralelės, 20. 38 Ibid., 22. 39 Loreta Vaicekauskienė, “Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos inžinerijos karkasas,” in Lietuvių kalbos ideologija: norminimo idėjų ir galios istorija, ed. Loreta Vaicekauskienė and Nerijus Šepetys (Vilnius: Naujasis Židinys-Aidai, 2016), 263–267.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

of Lithuanian national identity in an increasingly globalized world. In this context it would be interesting to conduct a socio-paremiological study into how a small nation’s proverb user views a proverb’s “national” or “international” qualities, and to what degree their attitudes are determined by sociological factors (age, level of education, political views). The Lithuanian material currently available allows us to claim that proverbs are a vibrant genre that is undergoing something of a renaissance in contemporary communication.40 The genre’s vitality does not wane because it continually evolves: we fill in the gaps that appear in our proverbial worldview as a result of changes to modern life with metaphors borrowed from foreign languages. The arrival of each new saying is both a test of the strength of our tradition and a test of the foreign body’s ability to survive in another local tradition. Any effort to make a foreign saying our own—to adapt it according to Lithuanian language and proverbs structures—can be seen as very positive.

Methods of dispersion and areas of use: the relationship between tradition and modernity The use and dissemination of the Lithuanian proverbs (by nature a spoken language genre) were significantly affected by two important turning points within the history of proverb tradition—the growth of writing and written culture in the late nineteenth century and the appearance of contemporary communications technologies. With the growth of written Lithuanian, proverbs move into the sphere of written culture; written language becomes the place where they are preserved and disseminated, and later a medium in which they thrive. Lithuanian proverbs began to be published relatively late: in sixteenthand seventeenth-century publications they were presented as linguistic examples and illustrations of the national character. The biggest store of proverbs from this period can be found in Jokūbas Brodovskis’s (Iacobo Brodowsky) German-Lithuanian and Lithuanian-German dictionary. 40 The significant role of cultural heritage promoters and institutional, state-level efforts to consciously preserve and promote national heritage must be noted here: the study of folklore, including traditional proverbs and proverbial sayings is included in school curricula, and efforts are made to present this material to children and youth through appealing pedagogical forms and methods, such as various educational and creative projects and popular proverb publications.

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In nineteenth-century Lithuania, with the spread of Romanticism and the beginning of the national movement, proverbs, like other forms of verbal folk culture, begin to appear in educational publications, school textbooks, and calendars, as well as in separate publications. With some pauses at the beginning of the Soviet period, the tradition of including proverbs and proverbial sayings, as well as other folkloric texts, in school textbooks continued through most of the twentieth century and is alive today. Lithuanian proverbs began to be published in émigré periodical publications in the late nineteenth century in the United States, and they received particular attention in the Lithuanian press after the repeal of imperial Russia’s press ban on Lithuanian books in 1904.41 To date there have been no studies examining when proverbs began to be used in the Lithuanian media for pragmatic purposes (in newspaper articles, advertising, and so on). The new communications media that appeared in the twentieth century—television, radio, and the electronic media that became accessible to Lithuanians in the late twentieth century—presented a whole new set of possibilities for proverb dissemination. The internet is the most convenient means of making something widely accessible to society, and folklorists already treat it as a specific repository, means of dissemination, and space where proverbs flourish.42 The use of proverbs in such “non-traditional” contexts as newspaper headlines, column headings, advertising slogans, classified ads, political caricatures and so on have drawn the attention of proverb scholars since about the 1970s and continue to be actively studied.43 41 Grigas, “Nuo pirmųjų įrašų iki sisteminio leidinio,” 25–42; Aurelija Arbačiauskaitė and Ingrida Korsakaitė, Lietuviški elementoriai (Kaunas: Šviesa, 2000). 42 Lithuanian paremiologists develop internet databases (http://archyvas.llti.lt/patarles, http://etnologijadb.vdu.lt), and amateurs create special internet sites in which entire lists of proverbs are published. The latter become both repositories of traditional proverbs (www.patarles.lt; patarles.dainutekstai.lt, www.technologijos.lt, and others) and lists of anti-proverbs (www.cha.lt; www.marskineliai.lt). 43 Cf.: Lutz Röhrich, “Die Bildwelt von Sprichwort und Redensart in der Sprache der politischen Karikatur,” in Kontakte und Grenzen: Festschrift für Gerhard Heilfurth zum 60 Geburtstag, ed. Hans Friedrich Foltin et al. (Göttingen: Verlag Otto Schwartz and Co., 1969), 175–207; Max Lüthi, Volksliteratur und Hochliteratur: Menschenbild, Thematik, Formstreben (Bern and München: Francke, 1970); Wolfgang Mieder, “Verwendungsmöglichkeiten und Funktionsverte des Sprichwortes in der Wochenzeitung (Untersuchung der Zeit für das Jahr, 1971),” Muttersprache 83 (1973): 65–88; idem, “Sprichwörter im modernen Sprachgebrauch,” Muttersprache 85 (1975): 65–88; Galina Petrovicheva, “Nekotorye nabliudeniia nad upotrebleniem narodnykh poslovits v iazyke tsentral′nykh gazet,” Voprosy teorii i metodiki russkogo iazyka 110

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

As a whole, these studies bear witness to the continued dissemination and relevance of proverbs in Anglo-American and other cultures. Although studies of contemporary Lithuanian proverb usage, which are unfortunately still few, indicate that the general tendencies are very similar to those in other linguistic communities, when compared to international proverb usage, Lithuanian usage is not as prolific in all areas. Understandably, proverb use is barely possible in strict administrative and information contexts or in scientific texts. On the other hand, the use of proverbs is quite likely in texts by humanities scholars, and especially folklorists: there are examples of proverbs incorporated into philological article titles (“Neformalioji leksika eteryje, arba kuo toliau į mišką” [Informal language on the air, or as deep as possible into the forest]);44 “Kuo gilyn į Žemaitiją, tuo daugiau baidymų” [The deeper you get into Žemaitija (Western Lithuania—Trans.), the greater the haunting]).45 This (1972): 67–80; Maja Boskovic-Stulli, “Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions in a Zagreb Newspaper,” in Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Dégh, ed. Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl (Bloomington: Trickster Press, 1980), 180–186, according to Kevin J. McKenna, “Proverbs and Perestroika: an Analysis of Pravda Headlines, 1988–1991,” Proverbium 13 (1996): 215; Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs Are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age (New York: Oxford, 1993); Kimberly J. Lau et al., Introduction to What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life, ed. Kimberly J. Lau et al. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004), 1–19; Timothy Akinmade Akande and Mosobalaje Adebayo, “The Use of Proverbs in Hip-Hop Music: The Example of Yoruba Proverbs in 9ice’s Music,” Proverbium 31 (2014): 35–58; Minas Al Alexiades, “Anti-paroimies se diafimiseis tuo paradosiakou typou,” in Entypi diafimisi kai laikos politismos (Athens: Amos, 2014), 113–131; Anna Konstantinova, “Proverbs in Mass Media,” 276–293; Aristeides N. Doulaveras, “The Function of Proverbs in Our Days,” in 14 + 1 Studies of Phraseology and Paremiology, ed. Carlos Alberto Crida Alvarez (Athens: Ta Kalos Keimena, 2015), 170–193; Charles Clay Doyle, “Rules Are Rules: Maxims in Our Time,” in “Bis dat, qui cito dat.” “Gegengabe” in Premiology, Folklore, Language and Literature: Honoring Wolfgang Mieder on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Christian Grandl and Kevin J. McKenna (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015), 121–126; Guzel Gizatova, “A Nation without a Language is a Nation without Heart: On Vanishing Tatar Idioms,” in Language Endangerment. Disappearing Methapors and Shifting Conceptualizations, ed. Elisabeth Piirainen and Ari Sheris (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), 175–199; Sylvia Jaki, Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014); Marina Vager, “Variability and Modification of Proverbs in the Bulgarian Mass Media: A Systematic Approach,” Proverbium 32 (2015): 359–382, and others. 44 Giedrius Tamaševičius, “Neformalioji leksika eteryje, arba kuo toliau į mišką,” in Lietuvių kalbos idealai: kaip keitėsi geriausios kalbos idėja, ed. Loreta Vaicekauskienė (Vilnius: Naujasis Židinys-Aidai, 2017), 215–238. 45 Vita Ivanauskaitė, “Kuo gilyn į Žemaitiją, tuo daugiau baidymų: Pamąstymai apie ketvirtąją ekspediciją vakarų Lietuvoje,” Tautosakos darbai 34 (2007): 344–351.

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practice can also be seen in international folklore scholarship.46 The fields in which Lithuanian proverbs are most frequently used in contemporary communication are colloquial language, journalism, and internet comments, as well as advertising and various aspects of the entertainment industry. Proverbs have long been used in Lithuanian literature: they are incorporated into prose texts, passages of colloquial dialogue, poetic verses, and improvisatory passages.47 As mentioned above, one of the fields which provides plenty of examples of contemporary proverb usage is the media: Internet news sites (www.delfi. lt, www.15min.lt, www.alfa.lt and others), daily and weekly newspapers and their corresponding websites (www.lrytas.lt, www.respublika.lt, lzinios.lt, and others), television and radio programs, and television channel websites. Researching the application of proverbs in journalism, paremiologists seek to understand to what end these shorts texts are used and what functions they perform in the journalistic text, while also examining the goals, personality, and creativity of the journalist author.48 They have concluded that “modern media texts are permeated with proverbs.”49 We have considerable Lithuanian data and can identify an analogous phenomenon, especially during the last decade. Indeed, it appears that it has almost become fashionable to title an article with a proverb or proverbial saying. Lithuanian journalists spice up their articles with both traditional proverbs and their modifications, and new expressions. Journalistic texts generally contain single proverbs, which appear either in the title of the article, the beginning of the text, somewhere in the middle, or at the end. Some Lithuanian journalists use proverbs and other expressions more copiously: one can assume that they do this consciously, seeking to make their texts more appealing and expressive, and to distinguish their personal style. Sometimes phraseology provides structural support for an entire text. For 46 What Goes Around Comes Around: The Circulation of Proverbs in Contemporary Life, ed. Kimberly J. Lau et al. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004). 47 One of the first examples of proverb use in Lithuanian literature is Metai [The Seasons, c. 1765–1775], a poem by Kristijonas Donelaitis. See Kazys Grigas, “Smulkioji tautosaka. Patarlės ir priežodžiai,” in Lietuvių tautosaka, vol. 5, ed. Kazys Grigas (Vilnius: Mintis, 1968), 25. 48 Risto Järv, “Is Providing Proverbs a Tough Job?,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 10 (1999): 77–106, http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol10/toughjob.htm, accessed March 20, 2014; Anna Konstantinova, “Individual Authorial Expressions on the Basis of Traditional Paremias in the Modern Anglo-American Press,” Proverbium 26 (2009): 171–186. 49 Konstantinova, “Proverbs in Mass Media,” 277.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

example, an almost allegorical article by a journalist known for his especially biting and expressive style is ironically packed with journalistic and literary clichés, allusions, and at least ten proverbial expressions: “Jaunos ylos lindo iš sudilusio maišo” (Young awls crept out of a worn-out bag), “Ne tik sena ranka ranką plauna” (It is not only an old hand that washes the hand), “Senas arklys vagos negadina” (An old horse doesn’t ruin the furrow), and others.50 Several characteristics of proverbs make them handy in journalism and other public communications areas: they can be used to support a wide range of views, and they are recognizable, colourful, and compact. It is easy to imagine that in using a proverb, especially at the beginning or end of an article, a journalist hopes that the reader will more easily remember the text and its author. An introductory proverb “will reveal the general tonality of the story or provide it with an imposing final chord.”51 It seems that we ought to treat the appearance of a proverb at the beginning of a verbal text as a characteristic of contemporary usage; in traditional usage it was more typical to use a proverb to support a conclusion, summary, or argument at the end of a dialogue. According to Risto Järv, this kind of usage “can be regarded as relatively ‘non-folkloric’; such application of proverbs is rather a calculated action than a spontaneous reaction to the situation.”52 On the other hand, the appearance of a proverb at the beginning of a text is a reaction to a certain situation (some traditional proverbial sayings and situational expressions are used in this way), which the author wants to present to the addressee (the reader), except that the reader does not know about it in advance. We have noticed that the popularity of some paremic 50 Rimvydas Valatka, “Kriptovaliutos dėsnis—jauni meilužiai meta seną tautą,” delfi.lt, Fabruary 25, 2018, https://www.delfi.lt/news/ringas/lit/rimvydas-valatka-kriptovaliutosdesnis-jauni-meiluziai-meta-sena-tauta.d?id=77264263, accessed January 23, 2019. The European tradition of using multiple proverbs dates from the Middle Ages and has connections to proverb iconography (Konstantinova, “Proverbs in Mass Media,” 283). There are examples of the multiple use of proverbs as a method of structuring texts not only in journalism but in literary texts (both prose and poetry). A perfect example is a song by the comedy theatre troupe Keistuolių Teatras (Weirdo theatre): “Tuk tuk tuk į medį tris kartus” (a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”), which is composed entirely of proverbs: “Aš niekada nekasiau kitam duobės / Bijojau vilko ir į mišką nėjau. / Nors tiesiai arčiau—aplink greičiau, / Aš neskubėdavau ir būdavau pirmas [I’ll never dig a ditch for someone else / I was afraid of the wolf and didn’t go into the forest. / Though it’s closer to go straight, it’s faster to go around, / I never rushed and was always first] . . .” (dainutekstai.lt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN-UisAbmfY, accessed January 21, 2019). 51 Järv, “Is Providing Proverbs a Tough Job?,” 93–94. 52 Ibid., 94.

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images increases during certain periods; for example, in recent years the motif of stepping on a rake has occasionally appeared in journalism as a way of suggesting repeated errors or some kind of threat (“Įvertino S. Skvernelio galimybes: užsipuldamas žiniasklaidą gali užlipti ant grėblio” [(Prime minister) S. Skernelis’s possibilities were assessed: by attacking the press he may end up stepping on a rake]; 2019, 15min.lt). We can surmise that the choice of a phraseologism containing a reference to an agricultural tool was not accidental and is an allusion to the current governing party in Lithuania—the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union. Other sayings that are popular with journalists include: “Ranka ranką plauna” (One hand washes the other): “STT: Ranka plauna ranką—ligoninių rėmėjus lydi sėkmė” (The Special Investigation Service: one hand washes the other—patient supporters find success); 2018, lrytas.lt. “Ta pati panelė, tik kita suknelė” (Same girl, just a different dress): “Žemgrobystė: ta pati panelė, tik kita suknelė” (Land-grabbing: same girl, just a different dress); 2008, lietuvosdiena.lrytas.lt. “Išlindo yla iš maišo” (The awl crawled out of the bag): “Yla išlindo iš maišo, arba kodėl politikai bijo pažiūrėti į veidrodį? (The awl crawled out of the bag, or why politicians are afraid of looking in the mirror); 2015, manokrastas.lt.

In modern proverb usage it is common to use a proverb to name things—articles, events, songs, proverb-based internet slogans and pseudonyms, and the like. Although this does not seem to be as popular in Lithuania as it is in English-language communities,53 we have several illustrative examples: the agricultural fair “Ką pasėsi . . .” (What you sow . . .); 2019, kapasesi.info; the event “Savam krašte ir tvoros žydi” (In your own land even the fences bloom); 2015, daugeliskio.ignalina.lm.lt; the quiz event “Moki žodį—žinai kelią” (If you know the word, you’ll know the path); 2018, jtotoraitis.lt; and others. Nevertheless, proverbs usually appear as article titles or are incorporated into journalistic texts. In addition to its 53 Konstantinova writes about the already well-established tradition of using proverbs in news headlines, and, in her view, it is popular to use proverbs in film and song titles as well (Konstantinova, “Proverbs in Mass Media,” 286–287). But there are only a few examples of such film or song titles in Lithuanian (for example, the songs “Tyla—gera byla” [Silence is a good case], “Nepagautas—ne vagis” [If you’re not caught, you’re not a thief] (2016); and a 2015 Lithuanian film was given the same title as a 1903 short story by the Lithuanian classic author Žemaitė: “Kunigo naudą velniai gaudo” [The devil chases the priest’s riches]).

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

formal nominative function, a proverb in an article title can fulfil several other functions, depending on its own and the entire article’s content: it can reflect a theme, values, or ideology, as well as express doubt or irony. When a proverb used by an interviewee is moved to the article headline, it comes to represent both the theme of the text and that individual. The goal of a headline is to attract attention and interest the reader; with its unique figurative elements and form it is much more appealing than a regular sentence. In journalistic texts proverbs serve as supplementary tools for expressing ideas, that is, to produce an effect.54 Authors choose to include proverbs because they are “universally familiar;” in that way, they make use of the genre’s general functions—to produce a feeling of universality and reliability—and in this way hope to garner the reader’s trust.55 Although researchers note that the didactic function of proverbs is waning, it has not disappeared; even anti-proverbs, and especially those that reflect social realities, can become if not didactic, then at least moralizing statements.56 In our days, too, the warnings contained in traditional proverbs can be emphatic and full of irony and satire, as in the following expressions: “Nespjauk į šulinį, nes teks iš jo gerti” (Don’t spit in the well because you’ll have to drink from it)—“this can be said about all of us, because in Lithuania we are more likely to notice and publicize that which is bad, than notice what is good” (2003, kauno.diena.lt). “Talka: kas nedirba, mielas vaike, tam ir valgyt duot nereikia” (Helping out: those who don’t work, dear child, won’t get anything to eat)—title of a short article about helping out (2009, gatve.delfi.lt).

More than in other areas, in articles published on news portals, thematic websites, and social networks we can see a tendency to apply proverbs creatively, that is, through modification, paraphrasing, interpretation, imitation, suggestion, or allusion: “.  .  . whoever criticises a government official (that is, the State), ‘goes mushroom-picking with the State’s enemies’”; orig. “Neik su velniu obuoliauti/grybauti—paliksi be obuolių / grybų ir be terbos” (Don’t go 54 Audronė Bitinienė, Publicistinis stilius (Vilnius: Vilniaus pedagoginio universiteto leidykla, 2007), 24. 55 Liveson Tatira, “Proverbs in Zimbabwean Advertisements,” Journal of Folklore Research 38, no. 3 (2001): 231; Järv, “Is Providing Proverbs a Tough Job?,” 79. 56 Mieder and Litovkina, Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs, 3.

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apple/mushroom-picking with the devil—you’ll end up with neither apples/ mushrooms nor a sack); 2019, facebook.com).

In comparison with authors in other public communications areas, social and political journalists use anti-proverbs more frequently, adapting a traditional proverb text to illustrate a situation. Paremiologists have noticed that in different linguistic situations (as in different extralinguistic contexts) these reworkings can acquire specific functions that are not characteristic of traditional usage.57 Journalists usually use anti-proverbs to highlight the current relevance of a certain idea and thus express serious political satire:58 “Bankininkų balsas į dangų neina” (Bankers’ voices aren’t heard in heaven); orig. “Šuns balsas į dangų neina” (A dog’s voice isn’t heard in heaven [context: An American pastor working in Germany, who suggested to bankers that they appeal to heaven, reported that he received many appeals for help]); October 15, 2008, LŽ, 24. “Pinigai nekvepia. Jie užuodžia” (Money doesn’t stink. It can smell things); orig. “Pinigai nekvepia” (Money doesn’t stink); 2003, delfi.lt.

A reworked expression is a perfect way of attracting attention to political and economic questions and painful social issues. When a journalist uses not a traditional proverb but a reworking of one, the field of possible associations narrows because the reworked proverbial text usually contains a word that hints at a certain theme, problem, or situation: “Atleisk kunigą nuo mokesčio, tai jis ir ant altoriaus biznį varys” (Excuse a priest from taxes and he’ll even start doing business at the altar); orig. “Įleisk kiaulę į bažnyčią, užlips ir ant altoriaus” (Let a pig into church and it will even climb onto the altar); February 5, 2006, TV3, “Savaitės panorama.”

In comparison to other areas, the content of anti-proverbs is especially important in journalism, as in thematic internet comments. In these contexts, a reworked saying can illustrate a situation more concretely and precisely—it allows the author to more explicitly express their view and position. Even expressions that are used light-heartedly in colloquial language can be tools of social criticism: 57 Zhigarina, Sovremennoe bytovanie poslovits. 58 Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs: A Handbook (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2004), 150.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

“During a recession, the ironic joke that ‘there is nothing so bad that a student won’t eat it’ acquires quite a new meaning. . . . Margarita receives about 50–60 litas from her parents for weekly expenses: ‘I try to buy the cheapest food I can find . . .’ (2010, studijos.lt).

Another specific realm of proverb use that we would like to identify is internet comments, which, like social networks, chat rooms, forums, and so forth, belong to “colloquial” electronic discourse. On the internet, like in written journalism, news media, and literature, there is no direct interaction between sender and receiver. Nevertheless, the use of proverbs in this electronic discourse most closely approaches dialogue: by writing a comment the internet user is reacting to something—often a journalistic article, report, or other comment. The main aspects connecting internet interaction and spoken language are dialogism, spontaneity, informal style, short phrases, and unofficial vocabulary. Differently from anywhere else in the public realm, the internet is a tribune from which you can say whatever you want. Anonymous internet comments about journalistic articles are a unique phenomenon in post-Soviet Central European society and one that has attracted the attention of cultural studies scholars, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists. Active anonymous commenting is a trait of a society exhausted by reforms and crises: “it is a type of semiotic partisan activity—flexible and swift attacks against the system and the government bloc.  .  . .”59 Commenting provides people with something of a feeling of commonality and belonging to their environment and community, as well as the satisfaction of disrupting and destroying official discourse.60 Researchers notice that commenters, especially anonymous ones, often spill out negative emotions and pent up internal aggression, and tend to mock and offend.61 From a genre point of view, internet commenters are distinct because they belong to a multifaceted context: the linguistic context of the article they are commenting on, the linguistic context of the other comments on the text, and the non-linguistic context of the situation. 59 Rasa Baločkaitė, “Interneto komentarai Lietuvoje: semiotinis partizanavimas diskurso paraštėse,” in Kalbėjimas paraštėse: alternatyviosios viešosios erdvės Lietuvoje, ed. Inga Vinogradnaitė et al. (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2009), 72. 60 Ibid., 78. 61 On the negativity of comments cf.: Rūta Marcinkevičienė, “Apie komentatorius ir komentarus,” Akiračiai 7 (2005): 4; Leonidas Donskis, Be pykčio: vienerių metų minčių žemėlapis (Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2006), 87.

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Further, these comments are characterized by varied purposes (to assess, express emotions, condemn or praise, describe, advertise, and so on) and varied content that is more or less related to the theme of the article, as well as the multivocality and the intonations of spoken language.62 Compared with other internet communications genres, the language used in comments in the major Lithuanian news portals, although informal and using non-standard vocabulary, is nevertheless coherent and contains few swear words or vulgarities.63 Internet comments contain few proverbs.64 These might include traditional proverbs, new expressions, and proverb reworkings. Here so-called anti-proverbs are used considerably less than modified sayings; this is somewhat surprising, because, as mentioned above, researchers of contemporary proverb stress that journalists like to use proverbs creatively.65 Finnish paremiologist Outi Lauhakangas has sought to explain the causes of an analogous preponderance of unmodified proverbs in the electronic media: It was a surprise to me that the proportion of traditional proverbs . . . was clearly higher than that of proverb modifications. Could the secondary role of playing with language be perhaps explained by the subject or desire to influence the opinions of others?66

62 Rūta Marcinkevičienė, “Internetinių straipsnių komentarai žanriniu aspektu,” Filologija 11 (2006): 59. 63 We must note that certain restrictions exist on some internet sites; for example, the news portal delfi.lt “checks comments and removes inappropriate material—vulgarity, the promotion of violence, threats, insults, advertising, and so on (www.delfi.lt/help/ about.php; also cf.: DELFI’s code of ethics at www.delfi.lt/help/kodeksas.php). In 2015 the news portal 15min.lt introduced an “internet hygiene” movement and completely rejected anonymous comments; after this the number of comments fell by six times and their microclimate changed (in Estonia, which has banned all anonymous comments, only isolated comments remain) (June 29, 2016, 15min.lt, based on lrt.lt material). 64 In a study of comments on articles about four different themes, out of 4009 only 219, or 5.5%, included proverbs (Dalia Zaikauskienė, “Gyvoji paremijų vartosena elektroniniame diskurse: interneto komentarai,” Tautosakos darbai 47 [2014]: 72). 65 Kwesi Yankah, “Proverb Speaking as a Creative process: The Akan of Ghana,” Proverbium 3 (1986): 197; Anna Konstantinova, “Individual Authorial Expressions on the Basis of Traditional Paremias in the Modern Anglo-American Press,” Proverbium 26 (2009): 171–186. 66 Outi Lauhakangas, “Discussion Forums on the Internet as a Substratum of Proverbs,” in The 4th Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs: Actas ICP10 Proceedings (Tavira: AIP-IAP, 2011), 406.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

In addition to the conjecture that, in some contexts, a proverb in its traditional form is more effective that a modified saying, we also propose that the qualitative relationship between traditional proverbs and their modifications could be related to functional genres: could it be that while proverbs are more actively modified in internet media, in “colloquial” internet genres it is more common to apply traditional unmodified or paraphrased sayings? Because a comment text is more spontaneous, is written while trying to save time and space, does its author naturally chooses a familiar folkloric saying that is easily drawn from memory? On the other hand, because a journalistic article is crafted with care, an author uses a proverb both to convey an idea and to attract the reader’s attention; in short, the proverb text can be deliberately and carefully modified. Electronic discourse possesses attributes of both written and spoken language. The inclusion of a proverb into the flow of electronic “talking” to summarize the thoughts being expressed or to compactly express one’s position with a laconic saying is characteristic of oral tradition. The choice of a proverb for a comment heading or as the point of departure in the development of a theme are signs of contemporary proverb usage. The latter proverb usage strategies are most likely to have been instilled in comment writers by journalistic texts. The fact that a comment writer places a proverb in the title of their comment or begins their text with one is a reflection of the proverb’s distinct significatory and stylistic weight. It is clear that, with its laconic form and economic, precise content, the proverb is well suited to the internet comment (or electronic letter) format, where various strategies are used to save space: words are shortened, abbreviations are used, and so forth.67 The proverb is also useful to internet commenters because it allows them to achieve several goals: to convey their message, but also to express different kinds of evaluation, including irony, belittling, outrage, and so on. In addition, a commenter who uses proverbs distinguishes themselves and appears more interesting and appealing than the rest. Proverbs most frequently appear in comments expressing disagreement. This is not surprising, because in traditional usage situations proverbs are more frequently used to criticize another’s flaw, emphasize an injustice, or mock an unusual trait. Neutral or even positive behaviour is considered the norm, so it naturally draws less attention. Sometimes, however, negative 67 Asta Ryklienė, “Lietuvių kalba internete: automatiškai kartojami elektroninio laiško elementai,” Lituanistica 2/46 (2001): 83.

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comments containing proverbs are not openly aggressive.68 Here we see a gentler, more peaceful speaking strategy. The most hurtful comments are those that criticize appearance, abilities, and mental capacities. Internet commenters who employ proverbs can be considered as more creative than other members of the web community because they succeed in expressing even negative attitudes using relatively subtle methods. We have noted that the values expressed in an article do not have any influence on the positivity or negativity of the comments posted about it. The majority of comments containing proverbs are coherent and contain few grammatical errors. It is possible that commenters who use proverbs are more literate than the rest. It is also possible that such individuals are more cultured and educated: they use vivid, sometimes figurative expressions instead of swear words or obscenities. All comments are of a subjective nature. The appearance of a proverb in a text indicates that the author of a comment is using special means to express their individuality. One more type of proverb use that has attracted the attention of paremiologists is political rhetoric.69 This sphere is unique in that here the proverb user is more important than in other contexts, and the proverb can become a particularly strong and effective tool. The use of a proverb in a well-known person’s speech highlights the importance of the proverb genre itself and consolidates its status in contemporary communication. In official Lithuanian political rhetoric proverbs are relatively rare. For example, Lithuanian presidents have not used proverbs in their inaugural speeches, and most politicians’ official political rhetoric is also very matterof-fact. The fact that the country’s leading politicians do not use proverbs could also be related to their backgrounds, education, and personal traits. But what is more significant is that Lithuanians consider proverbs 68 Cynical, hurtful, and vulgar proverbial comments are more common on chat forums: “Kas nedirba, mielas vaike, tam į snukį duoti reikia” (He who doesn’t work, my dear child, deserves a punch in the face); hipiai.lt, viewed 2008; “Geras žydas—miręs žydas” (A good Jew is a dead Jew); myspace.com, viewed 2011. 69 Wolfgang Mieder’s studies of political rhetoric should be noted: Mieder has described the use of proverbs by many US presidents and politicians (including Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton) in speeches and written texts; he has analyzed the purpose and function of using proverbs in political speeches and has drawn attention to new applications of the captivating power of the proverb. See Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs Are the Best Policy. Folk Wisdom and American Politics (Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005); Mieder, “Yes We Can”: Barack Obama’s Proverbial Rhetoric (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Mieder, “‘Politics is not a Spectator Sport’: Proverbs in the Personal and Political Writings of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Tautosakos darbai 50 (2016): 43–74.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

inappropriate in high-level political rhetoric—that they see proverbs as belonging to a lower stylistic register or the realm of “rural,” simple, or “low-brow” speech. Lithuanian proverbs are not considered to be very compelling—they do not possess the rhetorical or polemical force that is stressed by foreign paremiologists. On the other hand, proverb use is quite common in lower level public communications by official persons: during interviews politicians use proverbs to make jokes (entertainment program hosts improvise in a similar way in order to “show off ”), to evade awkward questions, and so on. Folkloric or non-folkloric expressions used by politicians (sometimes accidentally) can become their calling cards. Even after a decade or more we can still remember sayings let loose by politicians such as “Aplinka kalta” (It’s the surroundings’ fault) and “Šikau ir tapšnojau” (I shat and tapped), quotes by Rolandas Paksas, a former Lithuanian president (2003–2004) who was removed from office; “Nusipelnėme gyventi geriau” (We deserve a better life)—a slogan used by Artūras Paulauskas in the 1997 presidential election. In 2018 a version of this saying (“Esame tik nusipelnę gyventi geriau, o gyvensime vėliau” [We just deserve to live better, but we’ll live later], authored by Vytautas Landsbergis, 2019, lzinios.lt) was a candidate in the vote for best expression, an annual event organised by the Lithuanian Language Society together with the newspaper Lietuvos žinios and the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. In 1997 conservative leader Vytautas Landsbergis campaigned with the slogan “Geriau patyręs!” (Better the experienced one!). This slogan so caught on that, in a twist of fate, it was used two decades later to describe his party’s opponents: “The conservatives are ambitious, but the social democrats’ moderation seems to have earned the descriptions ‘geriau patyręs’ [It is better to have the more experienced one] or ‘senas arklys vagos negadina’ [An old horse doesn’t ruin the furrow]”; 2016, veidas.lt.

The latter saying, which keeps appearing in political contexts, has been popular with Lithuanians for a long time and is sometimes attributed (unfortunately there is only a verbal witness account of this) to the first president of newly independent Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas. As we can see, this saying suggests a moderate political direction, but it is also applied to describe politicians who do not withdraw from political life and are continuously reelected:

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“Lithuania and its politics will never be renewed if only for the reason that this is in principle a Soviet-style ‘respect the old’ country, and because people are sick of social engineering—an old horse doesn’t ruin the furrow”; 2012, komentaras.lt.

We have noticed that controversial politicians increasingly pepper their speeches with proverbs, proverb re-wordings, and other vivid expressions. Examples of this kind of colloquial speech, that can even be heard in official public spaces such as the Parliament, can in some cases be interpreted simply as a politician’s desire to “show off ” or as a purely stylistic device: SPEAKER. Please go ahead. MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT. My vote has not been registered either, however, the honoured members’ . . . statement is not a sparrow—it has already flown off and won’t return here [orig. “pareiškimas ne žvirblis, jis jau išskrido ir čia jau negrįš”]. Should we be wasting time with all of these discussions about how you and I voted?70

Sometimes Lithuanian politicians’ tendency to speak emptily is evident: they play around with the text of a saying and avoid saying anything concrete, in this way contradicting the proverb’s basic quality of expressing a thought economically and pointedly: SPEAKER. But maybe we won’t ruin the porridge by adding butter [orig. “Bet gal sviestu košės nepagadinsim”]? MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT. But we so often . . . It turns out that it’s not butter in the porridge, but porridge in the butter [orig. “ne košė svieste, bet sviestas košėje”]. SPEAKER. In other words, we have enough butter [orig. “turime pakankamai sviesto”].71

As in other areas of proverb use, the use of proverbs by politicians reveals a paradox in individual–universal expression: on the one hand, using more varied language allows a person to demonstrate their originality; on the other hand, by using proverbs they hide behind universal, general opinion. * * *

70 Laura Butkutė, “Frazeologinių junginių stilistinė raiška seimo stenogramose,” Parlamento studijos 8 (2009), http://www.parlamentostudijos.lt/Nr8/8_kalba_1.htm, accessed January 23, 2019. 71 Ibid.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

An analysis of public communication in the Lithuanian-speaking community during recent decades reveals something of a revival in proverb usage, more attention to proverbs, and even a trend in using and manipulating them. On the one hand, the existence, use, and application of proverbs in contemporary communication is clearly a continuation of an ancient oral tradition—it indicates both a surviving and habitual model of conversation, the continued use of traditional proverbs, in part the same usage intentions, the contemporary person’s ability to use proverbs, as well as deep proverbial principles to which new “non-folkloric” sayings must submit. Without knowledge of the old phraseological layer it is impossible to successfully actualize a modern proverbial unit such as the anti-proverb. Expressive, metaphorical speaking is still vitally important to us as a convenient and appealing manner of communication—it can offer more freedom, or be diplomatic or safer. On the other hand, we see and recognize changes: in terms of the proverb fund, expression, functions, and usage intentions, and notice how broadly, inventively, and creatively proverbs are applied for concrete pragmatic and artistic purposes in many areas in which they were not traditionally used. In contemporary Lithuanian proverb usage the relationship between tradition and modernity unfurls in complex and varied ways: traditionally used traditional sayings help one to feel like a part of a certain community, while the breaking of tradition allows for the expression of individuality. In fact, however, in modern communications contexts the use of something traditional can in fact be a sign of originality and individuality. Although, in the public sphere, the proverb’s pedagogical, educational, tradition-preserving and other functions are ever more frequently superseded by entertainment, stylistic, or pragmatic usage intentions, the “ancient” functions of the proverb have certainly not disappeared. Sensing a clear continuation of tradition and observing its renewal we can probably not worry about the extinction of this genre, as was feared at the end of the twentieth century. As Mieder writes in Introduction to Paremiology, One thing is for certain, the age of proverb creation is not over! People will always feel the need to encapsulate their observations and experiences into easily remembered and repeated generalizations, and those that are of general interest and well formulated will, with a bit of luck, be accepted by other people.72 72 Mieder, “Origin of Proverbs,” 44.

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It is clear that our national proverb fund is becoming ever more cosmopolitan and is being supplemented not only by new local proverbs, but those of other nations. Sayings are adapted according to internal language and genre principle. Some, following unsuccessful translation efforts, do not catch on, while others easily adapt to the local tradition— this is often the case when metaphors are easily understandable, the realities described by the artistic imagery are familiar and sometimes even remind us of ancient rural traditions. We also adopt modern, urban, and economic proverbs, which can be useful in specific contemporary life situations. Although Lithuanian proverbs, which have spread to many public communication areas, have crossed the boundaries of colloquial language function, they have yet to reach the highest registers of official communication; in most cases they remain characteristic of the “voice of the people,” the “middle class,” and “simple speech”—a way of talking to “the people.”

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

Internet Sources: 2003, delfi.lt—https://www.delfi.lt/archive/pinigai-nekvepia-jieuzuodzia.d?id=3236494, posted November 25, 2003, accessed January 27, 2019. 2003, kauno.diena.lt—http://kauno.diena.lt/dienrastis/kita/svarbiausiusatsakymus-galima-rasti-liaudies-patarlese-15302, posted December 27, 2003, last accessed 27 January 2019. 2004, balsas.lt—2004.03.01, http://cl1.balsas.lt/naujiena/263543/internetofolkloras-variacijos-liaudies-kuryba-nr-3, posted March 1, 2004, accessed January 12, 2010. 2004, balsas.lt—https://www.tv3.lt/naujiena/263543/interneto-folklorasvariacijos-liaudies-kuryba-nr-3, accessed January 24, 2019. 2004, omni.lt—http://www.omni.lt/?i$9359_102463$z_151855, posted March 4, 2004. 2007, alfa.lt—https://www.alfa.lt/straipsnis/132699/neissizadek-nei-tiurmos -nei-ligos-nei-ubago-lazdos, posted April 4, 2007, accessed January 21, 2019. 2007, cha.lt—http://www.cha.lt/, posted November 15, 2007, accessed September 16, 2009. 2007, cha.lt—http://www.cha.lt/2007/05/29/patarles_posakiai_priezodziai. htm, accessed September 16, 2009. 2008, lietuvosdiena.lrytas.lt—https://lietuvosdiena.lrytas.lt/aktualijos/2008/ 02/22/news/zemgrobyste-ta-pati-panele-tik-kita-suknele-5916784/, posted February 22, 2008, accessed January 22, 2019. 2008, pajurionaujienos.com—http://www.pajurionaujienos.com/?act=show& sid=2359, accessed January 19, 2019. 2009, gatve.delfi.lt—https://www.delfi.lt/keliones/naujienos/sestadieniorganizuojama-vilneles-valymo-talka.d?id=24092110, posted September 17, 2009, accessed January 27, 2019. 2009, lzinios.lt—https://www.lzinios.lt/lietuva/vyriausybes-balsas-i-danguneina/132529, posted July 31, 2009, accessed January 22, 2019. 2009, spiningavimas.lt— https://www.spiningavimas.lt/dienorasciai/ pikehunter/savaitgalis-ant-vandens-su-spiningu-rankose-sekmadienis/, posted October 19, 2009, accessed March 3, 2017. 2010, bernardinai.lt—http://www.bernardinai.lt/straipsnis/2010-02-23ausra-simoniukstyte-ar-geras-romas-yra-mires-romas/40876, accessed January 19, 2019.

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2010, lietuvosdiena.lrytas.lt – https://lietuvosdiena.lrytas.lt/aktualijos/ 2010/06/15/news/tikejimas-tai-kliedesys-ar-suolis-i-ateiti--4233594/, last modified April 4, 2018, accessed January 19, 2019. 2010, lzinios.lt—https://www.lzinios.lt/pasaulis/arklys-paskui-vezima-arbagresme-eurui/138094, posted February 26, 2010, accessed January 19, 2019. 2010, studijos.lt—http://www.studijos.lt/studentams/straipsnis/1107/0/ studento-islaidos-triskart-virsija-pajamas-kaip-isgyventi, posted October 18, 2010, accessed January 27, 2019. 2010, zizirskiene.lt—http://www.zizirskiene.lt/2160-tukstantmecio-patarlesir-priezodziai-3.html, accessed January 14, 2010. 2011, pramogos.delfi.lt—http://pramogos.delfi.lt/celebrities/article.php?id= 52068267&com=1&s=1, posted November 30, 2011. 2012, eFoto.lt—https://www.efoto.lt/node/881745#comment-514918, posted November 5, 2012, accessed November 6, 2018. 2012, komentaras.lt—https://komentaras.lt/lietuvos-politikai-varo-jaunimalauk/, posted September 19, 2012, accessed January 27, 2019. 2012, zebra.lt – http://www.zebra.lt/lt/naujienos/kriminalai/del-sunkiusuzalojimu-mirusio-kauniecio-uzpuolikai-liks-nenubausti-255767. html/comments, posted February 5, 2012. 2013, biciulis.net—http://www.biciulis.net/?p=1546, posted December 17, 2013, accessed January 19, 2019. 2013, Gargždų “Banga,” facebook.com—https://www.facebook.com/ fkbanga, 2013, accessed March 12, 2017. 2013, silelis.info—http://www.silelis.info/index.php?lang=lt&mID=1&id=209, posted November 8, 2013, accessed January 21, 2019. 2015, daugeliskio.ignalina.lm.lt—https://www.daugeliskio.ignalina.lm.lt/ index.php/naujienos/179-kodel-savam-kraste-ir-tvoros-zydi, posted on April 21, 2015, accessed January 23, 2019. 2015, manokrastas.lt—http://manokrastas.lt/straipsnis/yla-islindo-is-maisoarba-kodel-politikai-bijo-paziureti-i-veidrodi, posted October 26, 2015, last accessed January 23, 2019. 2016, silutesetazinios.lt—https://www.silutesetazinios.lt/70243/se-tau-bobadevintines-eligijus-masiulis-itariamas-paemes-kysi/, posted May 12, 2016, accessed January 21, 2019. 2016, ve.lt—http://www.ve.lt/naujienos/klaipeda1/klaipeda/obuoli-po-viena— daktaro-ne-vieno-1506954/, posted November 8, 2016, accessed March 8, 2017.

The Contemporary Consumer and Creator of Proverbs

2016, veidas.lt—http://www.veidas.lt/grozines-literaturos-barai-ts-lkd-irlsdp-rinkimu-programos, accessed January 16, 2018. 2016, veidas.lt—http://www.veidas.lt/tag/lsdp, posted October 4, 2016, accessed January 19, 2019. 2018, etaplius.lt—https://www.etaplius.lt/vincentas-vobolevicius-neturetumesu-geldos-vandeniu-ispilti-ir-kudikio, accessed January 19, 2019. 2018, jtotoraitis.lt—http://jtotoraitis.lt/lietuviu-kalbos-viktorina-mokizodi-zinai-kelia/ posted March 27, 2018, last accessed January 23, 2019. 2018, ksjmc.lt—www.ksjmc.lt/mokslas/vezimas-pries-arkli-naujas-priezastiesir-pasekmes-modelis, posted October 5, 2018, accessed December 15, 2018. 2018, lrytas.lt—https://www.lrytas.lt/verslas/rinkos-pulsas/2018/11/14/ news/ranka-plauna-ranka---ligoniniu-remejus-lydi-sekme-8228998/, posted November 14, 2018, accessed January 22, 2019. 2018, zmones.lt—https://www.zmones.lt/naujiena/ka-menininkai-veikiavisa-diena.332fc2b9-9ae0-11e8-9f90-aa000054c883, posted March 21, 2018, accessed January 19, 2019. 2019, 15min.lt—https://www.15min.lt/naujiena/aktualu/lietuva/ivertinos-skvernelio-galimybes-uzsipuldamas-ziniasklaida-gali-uzlipti-antgreblio-56-1089580?copied, posted January 17, 2019, accessed January 27, 2019. 2019, facebook.com—https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonas-valatkevicius/ kas-svarbiau-valstyb%C4%97-ar-pilietis-apie-tapin%C4%85-ir-skvernel% C4%AF/10161234398395612/, accessed January 21, 2019. 2019, kapasesi.info—https://www.kapasesi.info/, accessed January 27, 2019. 2019, lzinios.lt—https://www.lzinios.lt/Konkursai/isrinkite-metuposaki-/ 279659?fbclid=IwAR3oU_GsTPfcRUWMUE_0P1bn2LKjPH3 Uiaqw2Ac7ieApz7GRW_8Wz2krWZ4, posted January 10, 2019, accessed January 23, 2019. 2019, sveikinimai.com—https://www.sveikinimai.com/sms-tekstai/liaudiesismintis/8/, accessed March 8, 2019. humoras.mikasbinkis.lt— http://humoras.mikasbinkis.lt/jokes.php?cat=Istorija &lang=LT&tema=ivairus&nr=338, last accessed 2012.

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Chapter 7

Homo ridens: The Joking Human in Lithuania from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Centuries Salomėja Bandoriūtė

Introduction Judging from the vast numbers of traditional jokes that are researched and the ubiquity of the genre today (both in print media and on the internet), this branch of folklore was, is, and will continue to be popular. After all, the joke “both has a long history of creation and preservation in collective memory and is still much alive today.”1 As David Crystal puts it, “the funny story or joke is the archetypal instance of humour.”2 The genre can be referred to as “archetypal” because of its longstanding traditions and its popularity in contemporary society. The Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian defines the joke (Lith. anektodas—Trans.) as “a short, playful, funny story.”3 As Silvija Papaurėlytė-Klovienė notes, jokes to some degree draw

1 Bronislava Kerbelytė, Lietuvių tautosakos kūrinių prasmės (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas, 2011), 352. 2 David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 404. 3 Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos žodynas, ed. S. Keinys (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1993), 13.

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on stereotypes.4 Ieva Lukošiūtė also stresses the importance of stereotypes in the creation of jokes: “The joke is one of the most dynamic, popular, and appealing narrative folklore genres; jokes are therefore a source for the expression, but also development and support, of cultural stereotypes.”5 Jokes can therefore be seen as “compact and comical small prose pieces, which are influenced by entrenched stereotypes within a society, fashions in humor, epoch, and culture in a given society.”6 When we are speaking about joke traditions, we should remember that “a portion of the jokes that have long functioned within different ethnic traditions are usually grouped and published together with joke tales” (Lith. buitinė pasaka—Trans.).7 This classification is determined by these genres’ similarities in terms of plot: both jokes and tales generally tell about or make fun of everyday realities. Summarizing the above-quoted authors’ ideas, one can argue that the joke is a popular and vibrant folklore genre whose content is shaped by entrenched stereotypes, and the realities and culture of the time. Academic books and articles about joke research have certainly been published in Lithuania. Branislava Kerbelytė is the scholar who has written the most on this topic. Her book Lietuvių liaudies anekdotai (Lithuanian Folk Jokes), edited together with Povilas Krikščiūnas, offer a semantic classification of these small folklore pieces and includes an introductory article offering a broader analysis of joke structures and semantics.8 The relationship between more recent and older jokes is discussed in Kerbelytė’s article “Contemporary Jokes: Their Relationship with a Longstanding Tradition.”9 Gražina Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė has examined the character of Petriukas the trickster in various jokes.10 In her book Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore (Images of Foreigners in Lithuanian Folklore), Laima 4 Silvija Papaurėlytė-Klovienė, “Kaimyninių tautų atstovai ir jų nacionalinio charakterio specifika lietuvių kalbos pasaulėvaizdyje,” Lietuvių kalba 4 (2010): 4. 5 Ieva Lukošiūtė, “Kultūriniai stereotipai lietuvių pasakojamuose anekdotuose: žydas, čigonas, vokietis,” Humanitariniai mokslai: jaunųjų mokslininkų darbai 1/34 (2012): 165. 6 Salomėja Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų tyrimas: pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška” (MA thesis, Vilniaus universitetas, 2011), 4. 7 Kerbelytė, Lietuvių tautosakos kūrinių prasmės, 352. 8 Bronislava Kerbelytė, “Anekdotų struktūros ir semantikos ypatumai,” in Lietuvių liaudies anekdotai, ed. Bronislava Kerbelytė and Povilas Krikščiūnas (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1994), 9–25. 9 Bronislava Kerbelytė, “Naujoviški anekdotai: santykiai su ilgaamže tradicija,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 107–116. 10 Gražina Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, “Petriukas—šiuolaikinių anekdotų triksteris,” Tautosakos darbai 36 (2008): 143–135.

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Anglickienė offers a thorough discussion of mocking representations of foreigners in jokes as well as other folklore genres11. Ieva Lukošiūtė has written about cultural stereotypes in Lithuanian narrative jokes12. In my dissertation “Homo ridens: The phenomenon of the joking person in contemporary Lithuania,” I analysed the humor tradition in Lithuania, and its primary characteristics and development;13 while my master’s thesis examined mockery and verbal expression in contemporary jokes.14 I have also published about contemporary jokes and gender15 and expressions of aggression in humor.16 This article examines 7,842 jokes from the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth centuries, the Soviet period, and contemporary times that are preserved in the Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Institute’s Folklore Archives’ manuscript collections (LTR), collected from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries,17 in the Vytautas Magnus University archives (VDU ER), and which appear on joke websites. Focusing on the target of mockery, the goal of this study is to determine how the joking person (homo ridens) is similar and different in the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.

Lithuanian jokes from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries According to Alison Ross,18 humorous expression is similar to shooting: the joking person is like a rifleman who aims at a specific target and shoots, that 11 Laima Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo universiteto leidykla, 2006). 12 Lukošiūtė, “Kultūriniai stereotipai lietuvių pasakojamuose anekdotuose,” 160–166. 13 Salomėja Bandoriūtė, “Homo ridens: juokaujančio žmogaus fenomenas šiuolaikinėje Lietuvoje” (PhD diss., Lietuvos muzikos ir teatro akademija, 2017). 14 Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų tyrimas.” 15 Salomėja Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų apie lytis pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška,” Lietuvių kalba 5 (2011), http://www.lietuviukalba.lt/index.php/lietuviu-kalba/ article/viewFile/35/84, accessed February 6, 2019. 16 Salomėja Bandoriūtė, “Juokas pro ašaras: humoras ir agresija,” Inter-studia humanitatis: tarpdisciplininiai juoko kultūros tyrimai 16 (2014): 163–177. 17 Taking into consideration the age of folklore respondents, as recorded by folklore collectors (for example, “M. Untulis, b. 1937, joke recorded 1968”— LTR 1258/582), it is important to stress that jokes can reflect the realities of earlier times as well as the periods in which they are recorded. 18 Alison Ross, The Language of Humor (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

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is, mocks or jeers at someone. This comparison of humor—especially of the black, aggressive kind—with shooting successfully captures the “rifleman’s” freedom of choice (in terms of who to mock) and the emotional pain that the target experiences when they are mocked. It is important to add that targets are usually chosen according to themes and stereotypes that exist in a certain joking society. The majority of the jokes recorded in Lithuania in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries poke fun at women (741 instances) and foreigners—approximately half of the jokes studied talk about these two groups. Women are generally referred to using derogatory epithets such as boba19 or davatka,20 and are sometimes referred to with names such as Ona, Magdė, or Gendrutė. Female characters in jokes are generally wives or davatkos (religious fanatics) and are presented as uneducated, foolish, and governed by primitive instincts. As Ramunė Bleizgienė notes, “[if] we look at the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is clear that the public sphere is dominated by men—active figures in society, members of cultural movements, writers, and so on. There is no question that men comprise the most educated group in society at that time.”21 In other words, the women’s lower social status suggests why the stereotype of the foolish woman, which had such a great influence on the appearance of jokes about women, developed. Jurga Miknytė argues that attitudes of members of the educated class in early twentieth-century Lithuania were generally derogatory: Women’s self-censorship plays an important role in social criticism of this decade, which identifies women’s failings as lack of education, vainglory, hedonism, and lack of social engagement. Angered by women’s lack of awareness of their slave-like status in society, social critics of the first decade of the twentieth century see woman as lacking awareness and consciousness, insufficiently patriotic, and hedonistic.22

According to the writings of leading Lithuanian late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural figures, it can be said that woman’s social 19 Boba—Lith. old woman, crone, wife, woman; derived from bobutė—granny (Trans.). 20 Davatka, pl. davatkos—Lith. religious fanatic, prude, fussy or sanctimonious woman, usually middle-aged or older (Trans.). 21 Ramunė Bleizgienė, Privati tyla, vieši balsai: moterų tapatybės kaita XIX a. pabaigoje –XX a. pradžioje (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2012), 48. 22 Jurga Miknytė, “Moterų kritika Lietuvoje XIX pab.–XX a. pr.,” Klėja: studentų darbai 8 (2003), http://www.lsc.vu.lt/assets/leidiniai/indexf327.html?show_content_id=639, accessed January 12, 2019.

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status at that time was very poor, and that the cause of this was women’s own ignorance. According to the Lithuanian writer and politician Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, woman’s primary function was childbearing; women could give life to children, but were incapable of inculcating national consciousness in them: “There was an era when a mother gave birth to and raised Lithuanians. Today’s Lithuanian women only give birth to children; they have lost that patriotic instinct and any interest in Lithuania’s affairs.”23 This negative view of women among Lithuania’s leading figures indicates that the latter considered national awareness and education as the greatest human virtues; women could not inculcate these virtues in their children because they did not possess them themselves. It is interesting that some of the categories of women identified by Krėvė-Mickevičius also appear in the jokes from that period that are studied here and include: šlebė (half-Polish woman living in Lithuania),24 davatka,25 pereklė,26 emancipated woman,27 and wife. He posits that the most dangerous type of all is the davatka. These women are a true “indicator of female degradation,” the source of which is laziness, rumour-mongering, application of religious fanaticism to amoral purposes, and so on. It was usually for these vices that the davatka was mocked. A davatka says to her boyfriend, when no one’s looking: “Tickle me, tickle me, you’ll get some cheese . . .” But then, because someone could see: “Get off of me! You’ll break my rosary!”28

The davatka is presented as an unmarried woman whose feigned piety is far greater than that of regular devout women. The davatka’s religious fanaticism frequently becomes the main object of ridicule: as the above example shows, her feigned piety is only revealed in public (“because 23 Cited in Jurga Miknytė, Moters socialinio vaidmens konstravimas viešajame diskurse XIX a. vidurio –XX a. pradžios Lietuvoje (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas, 2009), 130. 24 “She knocks a guy down at every step he takes: ‘You’re a nitwit! I did you a favor in marrying you!’” Cited in Bleizgienė, Privati tyla, vieši balsai, 23. 25 “I wouldn’t want to group them with lower creatures, but even less with humans.” Ibid., 67. 26 Pereklė—brood-hen (Lith.). “They live off their wealth and sacrifices”—women living in groups. Ibid., 68. 27 “Their fantasies are spoiled by idling and reading maddening novels.” Ibid., 69. 28 LTR 2704/68, recorded in 1948.

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someone can see”). The jokes studied also include some very short raillery against davatkos, for example: A davatka’s complaints “Oh, my dear God! When I think of death, I don’t give a damn about men; but when I think about men, I don’t give a damn about death!”29

This joke, recorded in 1892, parodies a davatka’s prayer to God. As often occurs in the material studied here, the prayer parody uses local slang vocabulary. We can see that the joke collectors recorded the texts as they heard them. In this joke the davatka is a disappointed and unsatisfied woman (she doesn’t have a husband and cannot wait for death), whose prayer in no way resembles pious language. It is worth noting that another group should be included in discussions about religious fanatics—priests’ housekeepers, who are often parodied for amoral behaviour (tempting and leading priests astray). That epoch’s and society’s view of woman in her role as a family member is perfectly reflected in Mykolas Kavolis’s brochure on women’s legal rights, which claims that “the most important purpose of womanhood is family, which can only be strong with a single, monogamous, indivisible, and indestructible ideal womanhood.”30 In jokes about current and future wives the mockery is usually based on an opposition between man and woman (girl) as revealed in everyday situations. One of the most common of these is female infidelity. There were this husband and wife. They made a deal that each one would have a little bag, and that every time either would sin they would throw a pea in their bag. So they lived a long life and reached old age, and decided to untie their bags. They untied the wife’s bag and found only a few peas tucked in a corner. Then they untied the old man’s bag and found that there were all of eight peas in his. The old man became upset and said: “My dear wife, what kind of a husband was I to you, how unfaithful I was. You were so much more true to me.”

29 LMD I 902/9. 30 Mykolas Kavolis, Bažnytinės tikybiniai mišriosios ir civilinės moterystės juridinė padėtis Lietuvoje (Kaunas: Vytis, 1930), 2.

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But the wife reassured him: “Don’t take it so hard. I had so many peas in my bag that I made two pots of porridge from them.”31

We could argue that the joke is mocking a taboo subject—the husband’s and the wife’s adultery. The degree of mockery increases in the text gradually: first we see that the husband was unfaithful and feels very sorry about that, but then we learn that the wife’s infidelity was even greater—that her acts of adultery were countless (she collected so many peas that she was able to make two pots of porridge from them). This is also evident from the joke’s language: the peas representing sins are first referred to in the diminutive form žirneliai (little peas), a larger quantity are referred to as žirniai (peas), and eventually they turn into porridge. This example can be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand the husband can be seen as the object of the joke, because he was more frequently misled by his wife; but if we look at the text in social terms, the true target of mockery can be seen to be the wife, represented as a loose woman who broke her marriage vows.32 In this kind of joke the woman is represented not only as amoral, but also stupid: the husband is usually represented as superior, and he almost always wins because he is able to outwit the wife. Analysing both older and contemporary jokes about men and woman it is clear that they usually draw on well-established social stereotypes; these in turn reflect an opposition between the sexes33 that is revealed in a range of everyday situations and conflicts. A survey of archived collections produced an interesting contrasting example—the following joke pokes fun at female nature, but here the target of the mockery is the husband:

31 LTR 4043/8, recorded in 1967. 32 In his motif-index of Lithuanian folk narratives, Jonas Balys identifies a group of joke tales that he calls “The stupid woman and her husband” (Mt. 1380–1404), which includes jokes that similarly make fun of a wife’s infidelity, as in the following excerpt: “An unfaithful wife asks God how she could get rid of her husband; the husband, who is hiding behind the altar or the tree, takes God’s place and offers her the following lesson: feed your husband porridge with milk so that he would become blind and deaf; the wife does this; the husband pretends to be blind and deaf and when the wife’s lover comes to visit, he kills the man” (Jonas Balys, Raštai, vol. 3: Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos motyvų katalogas. Lietuvių liaudies sakmės, ed. Rita Repšienė [Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2002], 124–125). 33 See Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų apie lytis pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška.”

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There was this guy who kept making fun of his woman because her stomach hurt—she had a bun in the oven. All the women who had buns in their ovens said to him: “God should give you the kind of illness we have.” Then this little grey grandpa [God] came and said: “God will give you the kind of illness they have.” And the guy grew a big stomach. His mother said that he was filling out, that he was eating well. But the guy was rolling around under a fence from the pain. The women laughed at him: now he was feeling the same pain they were. The little grey man came and said to him: “When God gives it to the women, women’s bones are flexible and spread out, while yours do not, that’s why you’re so ill.” And God went off, without having helped him. A crow flew down and perched on the fence, shrieking “Caw! Caw!” The guy tried to shoo it away, but the crow pecked open his stomach and a child came out. Then the women said to him: “Now that God gave you a chance to see how it feels, maybe you’ll stop laughing at pregnant women?!”34

The theme of this joke is the physiological difference between men and women. The target of the narrative is the man who has been cursed by the women—he experiences a pain sent to him by a supernatural power and that is physiologically impossible, that is, male pregnancy. This joke, which was recorded in 1934, can be interpreted as women’s response to entrenched derogatory attitudes that inspire hurtful, bullying jokes about them. Here the pain that women experience in childbirth seems to exonerate their supposed foolishness, which is made up for by their capacity to bear children. One quarter of the traditional jokes examined here consist of stories about foreigners (733 jokes). These most frequently target Jews, Roma, and Germans. Although other nationalities (Russians, Poles, and Hungarians) are also targeted in such jokes, we will focus on the most commonly recurring categories. Jokes about foreigners are based on stereotypes and the opposition we—they. As Laima Anglickienė argues, within this opposition “we represent the majority and they the minority, that is, these relationships generate a lower hierarchical value.”35 In that author’s view, ethnocentrism, the opposition between familiar / self and foreign is typical of many nationalities, and “folklore scholars have noticed that national

34 LTR 1713/26. 35 Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore, 64.

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peculiarities are perhaps not expressed anywhere better and more precisely than in satire and humor.”36 The majority of jokes about foreigners contain either a male or female Jew (Lith. žydas—Trans.), who are referred to with the terms žydelis (“little Jew”), žydpalakis (“good-for-nothing Jew”), žydaukė (“Jewish woman”), žydė (“Jewess”), Sara (“Sarah”), Joškė (“Yoshke”), and so on. People of the Jewish faith and nationality have lived in Lithuania since the Middle Ages and perhaps earlier.37 Driven from other European countries, they considered Lithuania a friendly country and were happy to live here. During the interwar period Jews were the largest group of foreigners in the country, with most of them living in cities.38 Anglickienė notes that “The Jew was the most popular foreigner in our folklore. . . . Jews differed from Lithuanians in almost all respects: in terms of religion, ethnicity, customs, class, anthropology, and language.”39 For this reason the we— they opposition is especially strong in jokes about Jews. The jokes often draw a comparison between a positive and a negative character, that is, between a Lithuanian (usually a rural person, farmer), who is referred to as žmogus (“person,” “human”), and a Jew (usually a tradesman). This opposition, which is primarily based on religious differences, presupposes content of a racist nature that erases people of Jewish nationality from the ranks of humans. Virginijus Savukynas confirms this: “The Jew was strictly viewed as a ‘non-person,’ and even not-christened Catholic children were called žydukai [little Jews].”40 We can assume that this belittling of Jews had its source in their social status and business practices: the jokes poke fun at Jews for their ability to lure clients, their alleged greed, and their shrewdness, though there are also jokes in which a Jew is represented as a victim of deception. The jokes reveal a very distinct trait of Lithuanians during the period under discussion—intolerance of anyone wealthier or more clever. In the jokes, Jews are often beaten—as the jokes put it, “given a lesson”—by local inhabitants for their “talent” at calculating and deceiving. During the years of serfdom there was a landowner who fancied a Jew’s daughter. In exchange for a chance to spend the night with her, the young 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 30–40. Ibid., 130. Virginijus Savukynas, Istorija ir mitologijos: tapatybės raiškos XVII–XIX amžiaus Lietuvoje (Vilnius: Idėjos ir komunikacija, 2012), 211.

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master offered the Jew ten sacks of rye. The Jew let him lie with his daughter, but forbade him to touch her. Annoyed, the gentleman returned home and told the story to his overseer, asking how he could get out of giving the Jew the promised grain. The overseer said he would take care of it. He took the Jew to the granary and showed him bins full of grain. The Jew took a handful of grain and smelled it to see if it was good. Then the overseer told him that he was allowed to take the grain, but not smell it. Because the Jew had smelled it, the overseer threw him out of the granary. So in the end the Jew lost.41

By making impossible, extreme demands, the characters in this joke—the landowner, the overseer, and the Jew—put each other in equally absurd situations: the gentleman is allowed to lie with the young Jewish woman but not touch her, and the Jew is not allowed to smell the grain before taking it. The cunning Jew is outwitted by the gentleman’s overseer, who uses the Jew’s alleged avarice against him and does not warn him about the conditions of the deal (he is not allowed to smell the grain). This comic situation emphasises the Lithuanian’s superiority over the Jew— the gentleman and the overseer are the winners and the Jew becomes a victim (the target of mockery). Thus, in this type of joke a stereotypical trait accorded to Jews—cunningness—becomes a tool for bringing them down. Of course, in analysing this short narrative we must also pay some attention to the character of the landowner: from other jokes about the upper class that will be examined, we will see that in the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth centuries Lithuanians liked to make fun of wealthy people. We can therefore identify a type of gradation in this joke: the Jew is worse than the gentleman. People of Roma ethnicity—the so-called gypsies—have lived in Lithuania for more than five decades. They probably migrated here in the fifteenth century, through the territory of Belarus; in the second half of the nineteenth century they began to arrive from Romania and Hungary.42 Roma men generally made a living by buying, selling, and trading, while their women told fortunes and begged for alms. This group of foreigners was often associated with supernatural powers. Roma “were accused of casting spells, were seen as servants of the devil, and were said to interact 41 LTR 1508/122, recorded in 1957. 42 Vytautas Žilevičius, “Keletas pastabų apie Lietuvos čigonų praeitį ir kultūrą,” in Lietuvos čigonai: tarp praeities ir dabarties, ed. Vytautas Toleikis (Vilnius: Garnelis, 2001), 9.

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with evil spirits, witches, and demons.”43 Because of their nomadic lifestyle and the ways they made a living, they were often considered liars who connived to cheat people of their money (for example, by predicting the future, engaging in petty thievery, begging for alms). The following excerpt is from the May 29, 1936 issue of the newspaper Lietuvos Aidas (Lithuania’s Echo): Gypsies have long been known as horse traders. Although they usually swindle farmers, sometimes a farmer is tempted into duping a gypsy. Not long ago, in the village of Terpeikiai in the Subačius parish, sixty-year-old farmer Juozas Palčiūnas traded horses with a gypsy and was sure he had swindled the gypsy. But when he brought the horse home, he realised it was he who had been tricked. Terribly upset by the incident, he wandered around depressed for a few days and then hung himself.44

From this short newspaper item we can see that, in Lithuania of that time, Roma people’s own actions shaped the negative attitudes that people had about them. As Anglickienė notes, “the gypsy has almost all of the characteristics of the trickster. Seeking to satisfy his unbridled needs and desires (usually simple hunger), the trickster resorts to deception, in this way breaking the most basic and strictest legal and social codes (‘Do not lie!’ and ‘Do not steal!’).”45 Jokes mocking gypsies’ stereotypically negative traits are a way of “getting back at” them for their villainous acts: the gypsy is punished physically or morally, that is, his thievery and lying are met with physical punishments or deception. These jokes can be interpreted as a reflection of the desire to settle scores with an offender. Gypsies don’t know how to keep bees. A gypsy sees a bee hive and asks: “What is this?” The farmer let him take some honey, but the gypsy was attacked by the bees.46

Another joke with similar content: A farmer found a wasp nest in his oak tree. A gypsy had come to help with the haying. The man said to the gypsy: “I found some bees in my oak tree. Could you draw them off?” The gypsy replied: “Oh—my father was a 43 Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore, 45. 44 Banginis prarijo lietuvį: nepaprasti lietuvių nuotykiai 1900–1940 metais, ed. Aleksandras Ikamas (Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2012), 190. 45 Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore, 169. 46 LTR 2795/69, recorded in 1949.

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beekeeper and so am I, so I’ll draw them off!” The farmer brought a ladder and leaned it against the oak tree, and the gypsy climbed up. When he upset the wasps, how they began to sting him! “Master, put back the ladder—I’ll fall down!” The farmer had pulled the ladder away and had put some cow manure under the oak tree. The gypsy fell through the branches and landed in the manure. Groping around to taste the honey, he found that it didn’t taste good. “Damned bees,” he said. “This is the devil’s honey!”47

We could say that both of these cases suggest that the gypsy’s lying becomes the target of mockery—though he pretends to know how to take care of bees, in reality he didn’t know the difference between bees and wasps. The joke suggests that the gypsy was punished for his lies though physical punishment and humiliation. One of the main purposes of humor, especially that of the aggressive kind, is to create a feeling of commonality; in other words, jokes function as a connecting link between the groups of people who hold the position of the joking / amused person. This kind of behaviour is explained by Thomas Hobbes, who claims that, “laughter arises from a sense of superiority of the laugher toward some object.”48 We can therefore draw the conclusion that in using aggressive humor people seem not only to humiliate the target of their mockery, but also feel good about themselves. In these jokes about gypsies, the narrators seem to want to reveal their superiority in comparison to foreigners; in them the mechanism generating comic effect is the infliction of pain of the target (in this case, the gypsy who has been stung and tasted manure). Another target of mockery in jokes is Germans. According to Ingrida Jakubavičienė, “the first Germans who arrived in Lithuania may have been prisoners, tradesmen, and missionaries who came in the thirteenth– fifteenth centuries, during the war against the crusaders.49 According to the 1923 census, Germans made up 1.4 percent of the Lithuanian population; they lived primarily in the western and southwestern parts of Lithuania, and in Kaunas.50 Although most of them engaged in trade in Lithuania, in jokes up to the mid-twentieth century German characters usually appear in military contexts; they are called Fritz, Hans, “a soldier,” or “a German.” 47 LTR 4724/209, recorded in 1975. 48 Cited in Salvatore Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 49. 49 Ingrida Jakubavičienė, “Vokiečiai Lietuvos ūkyje XX a. 3–4 dešimtmečiais,” Lituanistica 57, no. 4/86 (2011): 405. 50 Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore, 45.

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This could be related to the especially distinct context of the two world wars and the effects of later Soviet propaganda, which demonized and belittled Nazi Germany. Germans are represented in two ways in Lithuanian jokes: as arrogant and seeing themselves as superior to Lithuanians, or, in contrast, as stupid, filthy, and messy, wearing torn shoes and clothes. “If we review the folklore that refers to Germans, we can see that they are most often referred to as stupid and easily fooled. This representation of the foreigner as the ‘stupidest one’ is an international tradition.”51 Though these representations of the German in Lithuanian jokes are contradictory, in both cases he is an object of mockery in the eyes of local (Lithuanian) inhabitants. When a German soldier is portrayed as a beggar, the comic effect comes from putting down a character whose uniform, in reality, was very neat and carefully designed52 —creating an opposition to reality. When the German puffs himself up in front of the Lithuanian, the man shows him who is in charge: There was a German soldier who spent the night in a Samogitian’s [Western Lithuanian’s] home. The German expected to be honoured and served a special dinner. But the Samogitian sat him down with everyone else. To scare them a little, the German placed his sword on the table. Then the Samogitian placed a pitchfork on the table next to the sword and said: “That kind of knife calls for a big fork.”53

This situation is fairly common in the anecdotes under study here: the German sees himself as superior to the Lithuanian (the Samogitian) and expects special reverence and refreshments from him. The German’s attempt to intimidate his host is unsuccessful—the Samogitian uses the German’s behaviour against him. By putting a pitchfork next to the sword, he is ironically deflating the threat supposedly posed by the German. This joke is similar to the above-mentioned texts about Jews and gypsies: the Lithuanian is the victor after turning the situation against his victim (in this case the German soldier). Virginijus Savukynas offers insight into why the character of the German was popular in Lithuania: “In [Lithuanian] folklore Germans (who were mostly of the Lutheran faith) generally become synonymous with the devil”; this is determined by different confessions 51 Ibid., 198. 52 Cf.: http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Soldat/Bekleidung_Ausrustung.htm, accessed January 16, 2019. 53 LTR 3077/84, recorded in 1958.

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which, “including the Evangelical Reformers (who do not concern us here), were all considered ‘pagans’ and casters of spells.”54 Once again, therefore, we see the we—they opposition which has generated various myths and stereotypes about foreigners in Lithuania. Because Lithuanians even believed that schools of witchcraft existed in Germany, they were inclined to attach an air of mystery to Germans living in Lithuania.55 If we look at jokes targeting foreigners (Jews, Roma, Germans, etc.) as a whole, it is possible to conclude that the Lithuanian almost always wins— because he is on his own land, he succeeds in outwitting the foreigner. It is also significant that, in these jokes, the foreigners’ main traits are determined by stereotypes. According to Anglickienė, “most of the stereotypes applied are used to describe a character’s personality. Usually the character is belittled and reflects their nation’s main characteristics, without providing more thorough characterisation.”56 This is why the jokes generally mock such perceived stereotypical traits as Jewish avarice and cleverness, German arrogance and stupidity, and the gypsy’s cunning. As a study by Christie Davies illustrates, ethnic jokes are “relatively unchanged phenomena, based on immutable ethnic scripts.”57 Indeed, the stereotypes that have developed in a society— the “immutable ethnic scripts” that Davies identifies—are the foundation of jokes and other humorous texts about foreigners. One can therefore draw the conclusion that the jokes about foreigners that are told by the joking person always stay the same, even when contexts change and through all epochs. As the texts collected in the Lithuanian folklore archives indicate, Lithuanian jokes from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century also target representatives of the higher classes (landowners, kings, priests, and wealthy craftsmen); 606 such jokes were identified. Humor that mocks members of the higher social classes is called the victim’s counterattack: “Much humour is an attack on people in superior positions of power and influence; in a sense it is the fight-back of the victim, who has only words to use against money, might, and status.”58 The main subtext of such jokes is the victim’s attempt to raise their worth by belittling a person who is deemed superior to them, and who now becomes the target. Davies sees 54 Savukynas, Istorija ir mitologijos, 94–95. 55 Ibid., 94. 56 Anglickienė, Kitataučių įvaizdis lietuvių folklore, 66. 57 Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 131. 58 Ross, The Language of Humor, 59.

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this type of humor as a way of competing with and resisting against the dominating social and political order.59 The landowner or nobleman is usually mocked because he is a bad person. It was this peasant’s funeral. Someone noticed that a hundred of devils were walking behind the coffin. He went up to one of the devils and said: “Wow, there are a lot of you here!” “What do you mean?” said the devil. “You should have seen when we buried one wealthy landowner—then there were a lot of us! Our procession went on for six miles; we were six abreast, man by man, shoulder to shoulder.”60

This joke reveals an intolerance for people of a higher social status: to be rich (a dvarponis—gentleman-landowner) suggests association with evil supernatural forces (devils).61 The joke cited above touches on the theme of death, which is usually treated respectfully in folk culture. But here little respect is expressed: the landowner is accompanied to his final resting place by the symbol of evil and sin (devils). This reflects attitudes that were typical of the post-serfdom era, beginning in the 1860s: in the peasant’s eyes, the gentleman-landowner is seen as the oppressor of the weak, so after death he is punished for all of his offences (the gentleman-landowner is not welcomed into Heaven and is doomed to travel with the devils to Hell). Folklore expressing contempt for the upper classes emerged as a result of social changes that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “Peasants loathed their masters—they threatened that they would become landowners or gentlemen themselves and would collect taxes for their own benefit. They tried to determine land taxes themselves and demanded that municipal governments be taken out of the hands of administrators.”62 Folkloric texts like the above joke reflect that society’s fragmentation into different social groups and the stereotypical thinking of the times: “the desire to become gentlemen themselves indicates a profound 59 Christie Davies, Jokes and Their Relation to Society (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), 93. 60 LTR 2136/172, recorded in 1939. 61 It is noteworthy that in such jokes gentleman (ponas) is often a foreigner (compare: “‘Pole’ is a frequent synonym for ‘gentleman.’” [Savukynas, Istorija ir mitologijos, 213]), revealing Lithuanians’ typical ethnocentrism. 62 Leonas Mulevičius, Kaimas ir dvaras Lietuvoje XIX amžiuje (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos institutas, 2003), 297.

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longing to eliminate class differences.”63 Because of their lack of education, peasants did not possess the awareness or capacity to think other than stereotypically: [There] were many obstacles to peasants obtaining an education, especially in Lithuanian. These obstacles existed as long as ruling Russian authorities persecuted the Lithuanian language. The nobility opposed peasant education in the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond.64

Jokes that made fun of the higher class were therefore shaped by radical class distinctions that inspired widespread hatred on the part of the oppressed. These large class differences were heavily influenced by the inaccessibility of education to the average person; that, in turn, promoted stereotypical thinking across a broad sector of society. It is impossible not to notice that the jokes under examination include plenty of obscene short texts that cruelly mock different characters: women, men, priests, religious fanatics (davatkos), landowners, and so on. These are jokes containing sexual connotations, mocking of body parts, and dealing with other generally offensive topics.65 Obscene or scatological jokes usually make fun of “shameful” human physical activities being conducted in the most inappropriate places and times. Human bodily fluids are associated with shame, which in turn is associated with humiliation and damage to a person’s reputation. More precisely: . . . the digestive tract—and in particular its two ends, the mouth and the anus—is responsible for producing the most shameful situations. Because the fluids emitted by the body’s orifices make people nervous, most of them (sneezing, burping, hiccupping, loud chewing, bowel movements, lactation, menstruation, and so forth) are the objects of cultural taboos.66

The targets of jokes involving bodily fluids are therefore mocked for their inability to control their bodily functions or sexual behaviour. In one Prussian church, next to the altar there was a statue of Saint Paul, and as it happened that statue looked a lot like the church’s sacristan. But the sacristan broke that statue. What was he to do? He took off all his clothes, got 63 64 65 66

Ibid., 298. Ibid., 300. Bandoriūtė, “Juokas pro ašaras: humoras ir agresija,” 171. Monika Balikienė et al., “Gėdingos kūno funkcijos: tema ir tyrimų perspektyvos,” Liaudies kultūra 2 (2013): 50.

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into the position where the statue had been, and stood there. Naturally, after standing there for a long time he needed to shit, so what could he do—he did it right there. He stood there for a few days but then decided he wanted to run away. So that’s what he did—he jumped off the altar and ran out the door. Right at that time the pastor was giving the homily and he thought that a miracle had happened. So he got down from the pulpit and went to the spot. But there was nothing there except the sacristan’s shit. But the pastor still thought it was a miracle, so he put the shit in a special plate, as though it was something holy, and walked through the church shouting: “Whoever tastes muck will be promised a place in Heaven!”67

This joke, which is an example of the grotesque, combines two taboo themes: human physiological functions (in this case defecation) and the mocking of religion. Interestingly, it embodies the very meaning of the word “taboo”: “The meaning of the word ‘taboo’ extends in two opposing directions. This word means ‘holy, consecrated’ but also ‘horrible, threatening, forbidden, unclean.  .  . . [I]n effect it expresses itself in prohibitions and restrictions.”68 In the above narrative we see socially accepted boundaries transgressed: sacred church objects (the cross, the communion wafer) are bitingly mocked. This can be explained by the relief theory of humor: “joking and talking about taboo topics helps people to liberate themselves from social norms.”69 Obscene and scatological humor is especially popular with children, who feel great satisfaction from telling dirty jokes.70 But judging from the ages of the informants who provided the jokes examined here (the informant quoted here was seventy-five years old), it is clear that scatological humor was not only popular with children (of course, the informant of the above joke may have remembered it from childhood). This joke targets the Evangelical Lutheran Church and its believers, who are demeaned with the introduction of the “dirty” topic of human physiological functions (supposedly holy excrement becomes the object of worship). It appears that obscene jokes frequently involve a religious context (122 examples among the jokes analysed in this study). According to Savukynas, this arises from a religious opposition 67 LTR 1829, recorded in 1976. 68 Sigmund Freud, Totemas ir tabu: kai kurie sutapimai laukinių ir neurotikų psichikos gyvenime (Vilnius: Vaga, 2010), 70. 69 Bandoriūtė, “Juokas pro ašaras: humoras ir agresija,” 170. 70 Laima Anglickienė et al., Šiuolaikinis moksleivių folkloras (Vilnius: Gimtasis žodis, 2013), 90–91.

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(Catholic vs. Protestant), in which the “real” religion is contrasted with the “pagan” and “demonic” Protestant faith.71 The need to joke about such topics can be explained by the above discussed generation of the we—they opposition within society (anything that is unfamiliar is bad) and as a kind of psychological hygiene. This opposition allows joking and laughing individuals to liberate themselves from socially prescribed norms, that is, speak about things that can’t be spoken about (for example, make crass jokes about sacred topics) and in this way purge themselves of negative emotions. This joke can therefore be compared to those about foreigners and the we—they opposition they contain. In this case, however, it is not different nationalities that are presented as opposed, but different faiths (Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Lutheranism). Examination of a large selection of jokes in the Lithuanian folklore archives makes it possible to form a picture of the joking person of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: they are generally of a lower or the lowest social class (given the tendency to mock representatives of the higher classes); male (this is reflected in the large quantity of jokes about women); unafraid of using taboo language and topics; and of fairly nationalistic views (based on the large number of jokes about foreigners). However, it would be wrong to draw any categorical conclusions, because most of the analysed jokes were generated in rural areas of Lithuania (only a small portion were recorded in cities, where Lithuanians were a minority). Moreover, jokes in principle draw on stereotypes, which can hardly be a source of accurate information.

Soviet-era jokes Based on an analysis of Soviet-era jokes in the Lithuanian folklore manuscript archive, the Vytautas Magnus University archives, and material that continues to emerge on the internet, we can see that the most popular jokes of that period fall into two groups: jokes mocking the Soviet system and jokes supporting it. To understand why contemporary Lithuanians no longer find such jokes amusing, we can cite the following comments by internet blogger Rokiškis Rabinovičius: What has changed? Of course, the context. But older people remember that context and they still don’t find these jokes funny. We still more or less 71 Savukynas, Istorija ir mitologijos, 144.

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understand all of it, but jokes that used to crack people up now only get a blank smile. The change happened somewhere else—not only our attitude shifted, but the very system through which we interpret the world. And that system is the paradigm. We don’t usually notice when it changes because we ourselves are changing.72

Whether something is funny is therefore determined not only by the changing contexts, but the individual who changes with it. Individual and context are inseparable, interdependent, and powerfully impact each other. Here is an example of that: A collective farm agronomist is scolding a tractor driver: “It’s time to do the ploughing, but you’re drunk and your nose has been bashed up.” Then Kindziulis comes up and says: “He’s done the ploughing, but the land hasn’t quite thawed yet.”73

This joke illustrates one of humor’s main properties—its ability to convey realistic situations. Contemporary Lithuanians no longer find jokes about agronomists and tractor drivers funny because the socialpolitical order that dictated that choice of characters is a thing of the past. Similarly, the character of Kindziulis has disappeared from contemporary folklore. Created by theatre director Vytautas Mikalauskas about fifty years ago, Kindziulis frequently appeared in jokes as a special observer and commentator who liked to tease other characters and often explained the climax of the story; writer Teofilis Tilvytis comically referred to him as a “doctor of philosophy.” A product of collective creative efforts, Kindziulis first appeared in the satirical magazine Šluota (The Broom), which ran from 1934 to 2004. The Kindziulis character was created in and was most popular during the Soviet period, so the comic themes involving him reflected the realities of that period, and anything related to that political order was mocked (e.g., drunks, laggards). Of particular interest are jokes that mocked countries whose systems contradicted the Soviet order: “Why are the Bundestag’s headquarters round?” asked a tourist. Kindziulis approached her and said:

72 http://rokiskis.popo.lt/2011/12/21/septyni-komunizmo-stebuklai-paradigmospokytis-ir-prasme-is-konteksto/, accessed January 16, 2019. 73 Čia priėjo Kindziulis: humoreskos, ed. Juozas Bulota (Vilnius: Mintis, 1982), 8.

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“Have you ever seen a circus of different shape?”74 “In Japan, drunken American soldiers are causing a commotion, raping women, harassing people on the street . . .” Kindziulis comes up and says: “What do you expect? They’ve been told to behave like they do at home.”75

These jokes illustrate how humor can function indirectly to convey political propaganda, shape attitudes to opposing political regimes, and promote prejudice within different social groups. As we can see from the above examples, political jokes are usually hostile to opposing regimes: by drawing a parallel between the shape of the Bundestag (the German Parliament) and a circus, the first joke demeans Western politics; by sarcastically claiming that Americans are amoral (their soldiers are thieving and violent), that nation is bitingly mocked. In both cases a clear propaganda message is being conveyed to the receiver of the joke—that the Soviet Union is the best place to live and that opposing states and political systems are worthy targets of mockery. Another group of Soviet propagandist jokes were atheistic jokes. During the Soviet era religious morality was mocked as antihumanist. This was usually accomplished through jokes: parodies of priests or didactic stories showing that devout people are fools. “Priests were often referred to as spreaders of old wives’ tales. A common metaphor was that a young man subserviently kneeling before an altar and a people who have conquered outer space were completely incompatible.”76 The humor and satire magazine Šluota liked to make fun of both the believers and religion itself. There were jokes and satirical poems about a fool addressing God, among other topics. But there were also other jokes that countered these, such as the following one: The Soviet authorities issued a revised Bible in which the first sentence went like this: “In the beginning there was nothing—except Comrade God walking alone in the streets of Moscow . . .”77

74 Ibid., 160. 75 Ibid. 76 Ramūnas Labanauskas, “Ateistinė propaganda sovietinės Lietuvos spaudoje,” XXI amžius, November 17, 2004, http://www.xxiamzius.lt/numeriai/2004/11/17/kryz_01. html, accessed February 5, 2019. 77 http://www.brigin.lt/forumas/viewtopic.php?t=2867, accessed January 16, 2019.

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This joke mocks the Soviet system’s attempt to regulate everything, including religion. The joke works by drawing a parallel between God and Lenin, who in the Soviet Union was everywhere and everything. Other jokes from the Lithuanian folklore archives that mock the Soviet order include some that mock the working people (the proletariat), goods shortages, and Soviet political “heroes” such as Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Lenin, the Red Army soldiers Pet′ka and Chapaev, and the legendary Soviet spy Shtirlits. Jokes in this category also mock members of the higher social classes; but here priests, wealthy craftsmen, and landowners are replaced by another joke target—political leaders: Brezhnev comes up to the mausoleum and tells his grandson that this is where he’ll live after he dies. Lenin sits up and says: “What do you think this is, a dormitory?”78 Chapaev orders a retreat from the Whites. Pet′ka is furious: “All we ever do is run.” Chapaev reminds him: “The earth is round—we’ll go all the way around and will attack them from the rear!”79 Chapaev and Pet′ka are swimming across a wide river. When there are only five metres left, Pet′ka says: “I’m tired. I’m swimming back.”80

These kinds of jokes can be seen as a kind of revenge against Kindziulis’s foreign policy jokes: the first one mocks the Soviet political leader’s stupidity and pokes fun at the crumbling state’s leader’s political ignorance and even powerlessness, while the second and third jokes ironically mock the Russian Bolshevik heroes Vasily Chapaev and Pyotr Isaev (Pet′ka and Chapaev): The character featured in these jokes was inspired by a feature film in which Chapaev’s intelligence and courage were combined with comic scenes. In most of the jokes Chapaev is, in fact, cleverly concealing loss. For example, 78 Bronislava Kerbelytė, Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, vol. 4: Pasakojimai. Anekdotai. Oracijos (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo universiteto leidykla, 2009), 223. 79 Ibid., 206. 80 Ibid., 488.

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he is fleeing an advancing White Army division and explaining that the earth is round—that he will go around it and attack from the rear.81

Chapaev and Pet′ka’s hyperbolized courage and fantastic powers can be compared to those of contemporary joke hero Chuck Norris, who walks on water, flies, and easily overcomes various obstacles. In Chapaev and Pet′ka jokes the comic effect is often based on their illogical behaviour, which generates absurd situations (as when, with barely five meters left to swim, a tired Pet′ka turns around and goes back). These examples differ from the above-discussed political propaganda jokes—here it is the Soviet order that is mocked. This is likely because the informants, or the creators, of these two types of jokes were different: during the period being discussed, the jokes lauding the Soviet political order appeared in censored publications (such as the magazine Šluota), while jokes that made fun of that order came directly from informants’ lips, in the so-called voice of the people. Of course, it is also possible that archival material was also reviewed and censored, but it must be noted that the material examined for this study included a good number of anti-Soviet jokes. Obscene jokes that mocked human bodily functions were also popular during the Soviet era, as the following example illustrates: It’s the Soviet era, and there’s a long line for something or other. This guy is standing in line and realizes he needs to piss. He says to guy standing next to him: “I’ll go and piss; hold my spot, ok?” The other guy replies: “No way, man. You leave the line and that’s it.” “But what am I supposed to do if I need to piss?” “Piss in the pocket of the guy standing in front of you.” “But what if he feels it?” “He won’t. You didn’t . . .”82

This joke pokes fun at Soviet everyday life, in this case a long line-up outside a store. The ironic reference to “a long line for something or other” illustrates a typically comic Soviet-era situation: the people waiting in a line are not even sure what they will have a chance to buy, but are standing 81 Bronislava Kerbelytė, “Komunistiniai vadai ir žmonių būsena Lietuvoje užrašytuose anekdotuose,” Tautosakos darbai 38 (2009): 267. 82 https://lol.tv3.lt/lol/juokingi-anekdotai-id45099, accessed February 6, 2019.

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there anyway because there are shortages of everything, all the time. The comic effect results from exaggeration regarding the long lines that formed outside of stores—they were so long that people waiting in them would eventually need to go to the bathroom, but if they left the line to do so they risked losing their spots. This kind of situation lays bare and mocks the reality of life in the Soviet Union—people were not only unfriendly toward each other (“No way, man. You leave the line and that’s it”), but liked to do each other harm (“Piss in the pocket of the guy standing in front of you”). During the Soviet period it was also popular to mock foreigners. There were many jokes about the character čiukčis (a member of the Chukchi people—Trans.), who was seen as “living harmoniously with nature but unfamiliar with civilization.”83 In this category of joke the comic effect arose from hyperbolizing the alleged stupidity of these Arctic people, which presumably derived from their isolated living conditions, civilization, and nomadic lifestyle, as in the following examples: A čiukčis walks into a store and says: “Do you have colour televisions?” “Yes.” “I’ll take a green one . . .”84 Two čiukčiai are walking through some cotton wool. But wait .  .  . they thought it was snow and they froze.85

This exaggeration of Chukchi people’s ignorance about modern life and how this results in absurd situations is the basis of the comic effect in most of such jokes. Absurdist jokes work by highlighting ambiguities (in the first joke this occurs around the ambiguity of the phrase “colour television”; the second joke plays with the visual similarity between snow and cotton wool); this suggests that most čiukčis jokes were based on the incongruity theory of humor. The depiction, in such jokes, of the čiukčis character as stupid can be explained historically. According to anthropologist Donatas Brandišauskas, “those jokes tell us a lot about what the dominating Russian order’s attitudes were toward the small nations of the Arctic. These peoples naturally had 83 Kerbelytė, “Komunistiniai vadai ir žmonių būsena Lietuvoje užrašytuose anekdotuose,” 267. 84 VDU ER 1872/25. 85 VDU ER 1922/127.

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different cultures and ways of seeing things, but belittling stories about them were created because they heavily opposed the Soviet Union’s colonialist policies. The Chukchi partisan war was indeed fierce—they were probably the Northern nation that resisted the Russians most intensely.”86 During the Soviet period there was also a popular series of “Armenian Radio” jokes. These were in a question and answer format, with comic effect intensified by the teller parodying an Armenian accent: Armenian radio is asked: “What can we do to stop pedestrians from trampling the grass?” “Walk your dogs on it more often.” “Why has Germany produced so many important philosophers?” “Have you seen what German women look like?” “Tell me, what is diplomacy?” “Diplomacy is the ability to say ‘Good little doggy!’ until you find an appropriate brickbat.” “Tell us, what is the secret to a happy marriage?” “Well, first of all there has to be a man. That’s the first thing . . .” “And the second thing?” “Well, the second thing is also required . . . There has to be another half . . .” “What are Brezhnev’s eyebrows?” “Stalin’s moustache, but at a higher level.”87

All sorts of general questions are asked of Armenian Radio about everyday life, male-female relations, about science, politics, and so on. It should be noted that the questions are not generally silly—rather, Armenian Radio’s answers mock the people asking the questions, and this is what produces an ambiguous or absurd comic effect. Such jokes were the result of the make-up of the Soviet Union, which at that time included the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. In answer to the question of why Armenians were chosen as characters in these kinds of jokes, it must be noted that there was a general tendency for jokes of that era to make fun of representatives of different Caucasus nations—Georgians (modern-day 86 Cf.: http://www.tv3.lt/m/naujiena/225909/evenkai-vel-sugrizta-i-taiga/3, February 16, 2019. 87 VDU ER 2147/3-28.

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Sakartvelans) and Armenians—who were most frequently mocked in the context of nationalism or perversion. For example: Two Georgians meet and one says: “I’m in a bad mood today. My wife got drafted into the army.” “What do you mean, is your wife a man?” “Definitely not a man—still a boy.”88

It could be said that these kinds of jokes, which draw on taboo themes (in this case pedophilia) to promote racial hatred of other nations, reinforce the we—they opposition in order to advance the idea of one’s own nation’s superiority in relation to others. Looking at this from the context of the Soviet era, such jokes could be seen as masked propaganda that demeaned foreigners in order to demonstrate one’s own superiority. All jokes about foreigners are based on negative national or ethnic stereotypes: Armenians are dark-skinned perverts; Chukchi are stupid; Jews are greedy, and so on. Another group of popular Soviet-era jokes about foreigners included a kind of strange competition between representatives of different national and ethnic groups. In these situations, the Lithuanian character always turns out to be both the cleverest and the most able to react to an absurd situation in a simple way, as in the following: Some cannibals catch an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Lithuanian. The cannibal chief comes up to them and says: “The bad news is that we’ve caught you, and after we eat you we’re going to make a canoe out of your skin. The good news is that you can choose how you’re going to die.” The Frenchman says: “I choose the sword.” The chief gives a sword to the man, who shouts: “I will always love you, my native France!,” and stabs himself in the heart. Then it’s the Englishman’s turn. He says: “I’d like a pistol, please.” The chief gives the man a pistol. The Englishman screams “God save the Queen” and shoots himself. Finally, it’s the turn of the Lithuanian, who says firmly: “Give me a fork.”

88 http://www.juokeliai.lt/Tautiniai/ilgiausi/130, accessed February 6, 2019.

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The chief shrugs his shoulders and offers him a fork. The Lithuanian grabs the fork and starts piercing himself all over. The chief is stunned. “Good Lord, what are you doing?” The Lithuanian keeps piercing himself and replies: “Now we’ll see what kind of canoe you’ll be able to make!”89

In this joke the Frenchman and the Englishman, when faced with certain death, heroically sacrifice themselves for their homelands, but the Lithuanian doesn’t—he quickly figures out a way to undermine the cannibals (they won’t be able to make a canoe from his skin because it is full of holes). On the one hand, the Lithuanian’s decision to pierce himself and ruin the yet-unmade canoe is clever (perhaps he will in this way avoid death, because he is no longer suitable to the cannibals); on the other hand, it also reveals a hesitation about sacrificing himself for his homeland, as the French and English characters do. Here, therefore, is a joke that targets the Frenchman and Englishman (who give up without a battle) as well as the Lithuanian (who doesn’t have anything to die for). Lithuanian cleverness is also revealed in jokes in which the action takes place on an airplane, as in the following example: A Russian, a Brit, and a Lithuanian are in an airplane. As they fly over England, the Brit throws a refrigerator out of the plane. “Why did you throw out a fridge?” asks the Lithuanian. “Ah, we have plenty of fridges . . .” When they are flying over Russia, the Russian throws a hat out of the plane. “Why did you do that?” asks the Lithuanian. “We have plenty of hats . . .” Then they fly over Lithuania. The Lithuanian throws the Russian out of the plane. “Why did you throw the Russian out???” asks the Brit. “Ah, we have plenty of them in Lithuania . . .”90

There are many variations on this joke: in all of them the characters are flying in a airplane, and for some reason either jump or throw something out of it (objects or people). Often they throw things out that were deficit items in Soviet-era Lithuania and that were easily available in the West (like the refrigerator in the above joke), as though they have so many of them that 89 http://www.anekdotai.lt/apie-tautybes/14, accessed February 6, 2019. 90 http://www.anekdotai.lt/a/7466355, accessed February 6, 2019.

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they can toss them. The Lithuanian also hurls out something they have a lot of and don’t need—not an object, but a Russian. By targeting Russians, the joke expresses Lithuanian resentment regarding Soviet political oppression and the contrast with living conditions in the West. Such jokes are also an informal counterbalance to official Soviet propaganda, which actively glorified the alleged “friendship among the nations” within the Soviet Union and denied the existence of any tensions between “brotherly peoples.” Jokes about women were also popular during the Soviet era. It is noteworthy that the industrialisation that took place during that period expanded women’s roles beyond the traditional notion of “servant of the family” to include industrial and collective farm workers, bookkeepers, wives (not just bobos), teachers, and so on. According to Solveiga Daugirdaitė, “Soviet everyday life only seemed grey at first glance: it contained people with characters and choices (not just robots), and this ‘classless’ society always contained ‘classes.’”91 In other words, the increase in women’s rights was reflected in changes to the kinds of female characters that appeared in jokes, as the following example illustrates: The postwar years. A village, a collective farm. The village contains only women, old people, and children. One day the director of the collective farm announces: “They’ve sent us a man, though, to be honest, he doesn’t have legs . . . But maybe someone can take him in?” “No problem, I’ll take him—I can put him to work!” says one woman. A few weeks later the director makes another announcement: “They’ve sent us a man, though, to be honest, he doesn’t have any hands . . . But maybe someone can take him in?” A woman immediately replies: “For sure—I can put him to work!” A few weeks later the director once again calls all the women together and says: “They’ve sent us another man. This one has arms and legs, but he’s impotent. Does anyone want him?” This angers the women: “Who needs an invalid like that?”92

91 Solveiga Daugirdaitė, “Tarybinė moteris kalba,” Colloquia 20 (2008): 187. 92 http://www.juokeliai.lt/%C5%A0eimyniniai/ilgiausi/9, accessed February 6, 2019.

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Unlike in older jokes, in which women are often the target, this joke has two objects of mockery: the women pretending they are only interested in help around the house, and the disabled men, whom they see purely as sex objects. At the collective farm, injured war veterans are offered as write-offs—as though they were sick homeless dogs. On the other hand, the women, who have managed to take care of their homes on their own, are interested in the men only as sex objects (a man without legs will be “useful,” but an impotent one is a useless invalid). These Soviet-era jokes reveal some similarities with older ones about sex (though, of course in official Soviet discourse, sex was a taboo subject; as a sarcastic expression put it, “there was no sex in the Soviet Union”), for example the jokes about God-fearing davatkos. Male-female relations were another popular subject of mockery during the Soviet period. Jokes from that period most frequently depict a woman waiting for her drunk husband, or who is sleeping around herself: A man finds his wife with a lover. He shouts: “If I wasn’t a Party member, I’d break all your ribs! If I wasn’t a Party member, I’d throw you out the window!” “Praise be to the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union— Trans.]! Praise be to the CPSU!” shouts the woman, raising her hands up into the air.93

The situation described in this joke is a classic one: a man returns home to find his wife with a lover, but because he is constrained by his political status, he is unable to take adequate revenge. The comic effect results from mocking of the Soviet political system and how loyalty to it was expected to supersede the husband-wife bond. The exaggerated honouring of the Party, which saves the woman and her lover from the husband’s aggression, creates an absurd and funny situation. The target of the joke is ambiguous: on the one hand, the joke mocks the cheated husband; on the other hand, it takes aim at the political system and how deeply entrenched it was in people’s lives. As Kerbelytė argues, “these kinds of jokes gave people who were heavily constrained by censorship the opportunity to express their true opinions.”94 93 https://www.airijaonline.lt/anekdotai/pic/292/puslapis/1505, accessed February 6, 2019. 94 Kerbelytė, “Komunistiniai vadai ir žmonių būsena Lietuvoje užrašytuose anekdotuose,” 269.

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Valius Venckūnas, who wrote a study about Lithuanian humor during the Soviet period, argues that there was no Lithuanian humor during that era: “After the Soviet regime was established, it became virtually impossible to cut through the censorship, so the phenomenon of Lithuanian humor in effect disappeared.”95 But this opinion begs the question of what kind of humor are we talking about—official (that is, censored) or unofficial humor (which was widespread among Lithuanians as a form of resistance to the occupying regime). If we are speaking about officially published humor that was “swept clean by the censors’ brooms,” then the claim that there was no Lithuanian humor during that period could be considered to be correct. As we can see from the above-cited examples, there were official jokes that negated Lithuanian identity: such jokes extolled atheism, praised the occupying regime, and promoted hatred of the West. If we consider the context of official Soviet humor in Lithuania at that time, it would be wrong to argue that such official humor expressed the joking person’s worldview. If we review the main features of Soviet-era humor, it is possible to come to the conclusion that two contexts existed during this ambiguous period: the official (censored) and the unofficial (underground). While official Soviet-era humor spread political propaganda (praised the Soviet regime, order, and living conditions at the time), underground jokes, in contrast, mocked Soviet realities: they made fun of political figures (Lenin, Stalin, or Soviet-era heroes), the Soviet system (for example, collective farms), and the poor living conditions (such as the shortages in the stores). In effect, the most important function of underground Soviet-era humor was to reduce tension by expressing the truth indirectly (an act of opposition to the political order). If we consider the targets chosen by the joking person—homo ridens—of Soviet-era jokes, it is clear that they barely differ from the targets chosen during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: they primarily consist of women, representatives of the upper classes, and foreigners. The only significant difference noted is how these targets are adapted to each context: female collective farm workers are mocked instead of davatkos; political leaders and Communist party members instead of priests or landowners; and Chukchi instead of Roma.

95 Valius Venckūnas, “Lietuviškas humoras: kas buvo prieš pradedant juoktis iš politerotikos,” Universiteto žurnalistas, September 30, 2010, http://www. universitetozurnalistas.kf.vu.lt/2010/09/lietuviskas-humoras-kas-buvo-priespradedant-juoktis-is-politerotikos/, accessed February 6, 2019.

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Contemporary jokes Contemporary jokes are not only exchanged between friends—they also spread through the internet. The content of popular internet humor sites (www.cha.lt, www.anekdotai.us, www.linksmas.net, www.anekdotai.biz, www.anedotai.org, www.anekdotai.net, www.che.lt, www.demotyvacija.lt, www.monstras.lt, www.juokeliai.lr, www.lol.lt) is not only supplemented by site administrators; users can also contribute content in the form of jokes and memes. Examination of this material reveals that some jokes repeat themselves (for examples, jokes about the Soviet period), while others have their origins in comedy nights and performances. Examination of approximately 2,000 jokes from internet humor sites determined that the jokes published on them primarily target women (blondes, mothers-inlaw, and wives); people with higher social status (politicians, doctors); and foreigners (Chukchi, Jews, Latvians, Russians, Americans, Estonians), and include obscene jokes around various themes. It is evident that the tradition of joke targets endures and is supplemented, according to context, by children’s jokes (with juvenile themes) or jokes in which a character becomes the target because of their childishness. For example, a series of jokes that developed during the Soviet era, about a little boy named Petriukas, are still popular today. The hero of these jokes is a naïve and disobedient little boy whom Gražina Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė suggests treating as a trickster: “Jokes about Petriukas are told by young and old alike. And although the repertoire varies according to the teller’s age, Petriukas’s identity remains constant because it borrows characteristics from the mythical trickster.”96 Petriukas bears some similarities to Kindziulis, the character who has an answer to every question. In Petriukas jokes, the character is ambiguous—he appears to be both naïve and clever; childish but savvy about adult affairs; and finally, while in some situations he is the target of the joke, in others he turns other characters into targets (often adults such as teachers). Petriukas and Onutė are building a snowman. Petriukas says: “I’m going home to get a carrot.” Then Onutė says: “Bring two—then I can also make a nose.”97 96 Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, “Petriukas—šiuolaikinių anekdotų triksteris,” 144. 97 VDU ER 1923/276.

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The teacher asks Petriukas: “How much is five plus five?” Petriukas replies: “Well, do you know the answer?” “Yes.” “Then what are you asking me for?”98

In the jokes studied here, as in the first of the above examples, Petriukas is often doing things with friends—Jonukas, Antanukas, Onutė. The diminutive forms of the names underline the childish nature of the discourse. It was noted that jokes where Petriukas is interacting with a girl usually have sexual connotations, and the girl (who can be sexually harassed) becomes the target of the humor. In these short texts Petriukas manifests himself as more closely connected to the adult world and can therefore be seen as a trickster. Petriukas also frequently encounters a female teacher (male teachers appear rarely). In these jokes the female teacher is the target: the child lies to her, prevaricates, or teases her. These kinds of jokes have a distinctly sexist overtone—the teacher’s role is usually played by a woman who becomes the victim of a little boy’s mockery. Petriukas’s confrontations with school staff (teachers, principals, and so on) can be interpreted as rebellion against socially defined norms, as breaking of rules, and as a reflection of the tension between the adult and child worlds: The repertoire of children’s jokes is made up of two groups: 1) jokes that are only told by children, and 2) adult jokes that have been appropriated. The latter can be presented exactly as they would have been told by adults, but can also be reworked from a child’s perspective, so that an adult would see them as “ruined.” Because it takes time to master the conventions of the genre, the period during which children are learning to tell jokes reveals inaccuracies that are typical of children’s joke-telling in terms of narration as performance and joke creation.99

If we wish, therefore, to interpret Petriukas jokes precisely, we must first clarify which discourse—adult or juvenile—a concrete text belongs to. One way or another, the ambiguity of the Petriukas character can be interpreted as echoing the contrast between the naïve juvenile and cynical adult worlds. 98 VDU ER 1930/118. 99 Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, “Petriukas—šiuolaikinių anekdotų triksteris,” 134.

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Jokes about women, which were popular in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, continue to be so in contemporary Lithuania. The most popular female characters in contemporary jokes are blondes, wives, and mothers-in-law. Invariably, such jokes spread sexist attitudes towards women.100 Of course, in comparison to older (late nineteenthcentury) jokes, the portrait of the female joke target has shifted: today they include consumers (so-called barracudas and blondes); working women (the “female” professions that were popular during the Soviet period— shop workers and teachers—are supplemented by women in “masculine” professions such as police officers); and wives, who play a completely different role that they did in jokes of the past: In the family the husband and wife have equal rights. Especially the wife.101 A blonde is complaining to her friend: “I’m so unlucky . . . so unlucky. As soon as I meet an interesting, sexy guy it turns out that either he’s married . . . or I am.”102

These two examples reflect two versions of contemporary jokes about women. Compared to older jokes, the first one reveals the changing social context. It is no longer men who rule over women but the opposite (the woman’s rights are “more equal,” that is, more important, than the man’s). The second joke contains a very popular joke target—the character of the blonde. “The character of the blonde is associated with stupidity, sexuality, and beauty and is a reflection of the sexist ideas that dominate in society. The blonde of contemporary jokes deals with all sorts of everyday problems, but her decisions are absurd and illogical.”103 The jokes mock the blonde, especially her stupidity (she even forgets that she is married). Like jokes about foreigners, such jokes are based on a stereotype (“if a woman is beautiful, she must be stupid”). Drawing on sexist humor research, it can be argued that jokes about blondes are directly related to aggression. This connection can be explained through the above-mentioned relief and superiority theories. Kathryn M. Ryan and Jeanne Kanjorski argue that “sexist humour was positively correlated with rape-related attitudes and beliefs, the self-reported likehood 100 Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų apie lytis pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška.” 101 https://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/seimoje-vyras-ir-zmona-turi-lygias-teises.-1346521.html, accessed February 6, 2019. 102 http://tostai.tv3.lt/anekdotai/getText/9364, accessed February 6, 2019. 103 Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų tyrimas: pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška,” 4.

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of forcing sex, and psychological, physical, and sexual aggression in men.”104 The popularity of such jokes can be explained by the existence of thinly veiled male aggression toward women in the real world.105 We can therefore say that contemporary jokes targeting women present a dualistic portrait of woman—as ruler of men and fool. They reveal the dominating stereotypical thinking that exists in society: for example, the media popularizes the image of the foolish woman and the notion that a woman’s physical appearance is her primary form of expression. However, instead of portraying the woman under the male yoke, the jokes center on the independent and overbearing woman. Among the overbearing women that face men in such jokes is another popular target: the hated mother-in-law: A child comes out to the balcony and asks his father: “Daddy, why is Granny running around the yard screaming?” Aiming his machine gun, the father replies: “For some people she’s a granny, for others—a mother-in-law.”106

The core of this kind of joke is almost always the same: the son-inlaw and mother-in-law’s mutual hatred. Here the man so loathes his wife’s mother that he either dreams of a time when she no longer exists or makes plans to finish her off himself. As the above example illustrates, jokes on this theme exaggerate men’s hatred for their mothers-in-law, who become joke targets because of their excessive interference in the lives of their daughters’ families and their general desire to manage and control everything. The jokes can therefore be interpreted as the son-in-law’s resistance against the mother-in-law’s domination. Such topics may also have evolved during the Soviet period with its housing shortages, when young adults with families were often forced to live with their parents. As in the previously discussed periods, contemporary jokes also target members of the upper classes, most frequently politicians and doctors. Political jokes mock political figures, parliamentary deputies, the government and political parties, the political order, and the common people. “Jokes target both historical figures and contemporary political players, including Brezhnev, Lenin, Reagan, Arafat, Bin Laden, 104 Kathryn M. Ryan and Joanne Kanjorski, “The Enjoyment of Sexist Humor, Rape Attitudes, and Relationship Aggression in College Students,” Sex Roles 38 (1998): 743. 105 Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų apie lytis pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška,” 10. 106 https://lol.tv3.lt/lol/seimyniniai-anekdotai-id22207, accessed February 6, 2019.

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Chrushchev, Gorbachev, Hitler, Hussein, Stalin, Schroeder, Juknevičienė, Clinton, Luzhkov, Borisov, Uspaskichas, Paulauskas, Prunskienė, Razma, Brazauskas, Linkevičius, Putinas, Adamkus, Kubilius, Landsbergis, and Šustauskas.”107 For example: Paksas looks at a portrait of himself hanging in the Presidential Palace. After a while he addresses the portrait and says: “I think they’ll soon take you down.” The painting unexpectedly speaks: “Yes. They’ll take me down, but they’ll hang you!”108

This joke targeting the removed Lithuanian president Rolandas Paksas mocks him in the context of his impeachment process. This once again illustrates a basic feature of jokes—their ability to adjust to current conditions and present them comically. Because political jokes are characterised by ambiguity and sarcasm, incongruity and superiority theories are useful in analysing them. Jokes about people of higher social status also include jokes about health issues that target doctors and their patients. In this type of joke the comic effect is based on the doctor–patient hierarchy: the jokes either mock doctors’ feelings of superiority or patients’ obedience toward their doctors. The patient says to the doctor: “Be honest with me, doctor. Is my condition very bad?” The doctor says: “What do you mean by bad? Let me put it this way: if I succeed in curing you, I’ll be world-famous.”109

Health-related jokes are usually examples of black humor. They talk about untreatable illnesses and death; in other words, they joke about taboo topics. The above joke makes fun of the patient’s helplessness—his untreatable illness. When the doctor says, “if I succeed in curing you, I’ll be world-famous,” he is sarcastically informing the patient that he has an untreatable illness. This is the most common situation in doctor–patient jokes, and one that is based on the hierarchical relationship between doctors and patients: the doctor, who has a higher status, allows himself to say whatever he wants, any way he wants. Health jokes usually deal with 107 Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų tyrimas: pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška,” 24. 108 Eadem, “Homo ridens: juokaujančio žmogaus fenomenas šiuolaikinėje Lietuvoje,” 72. 109 http://www.anekdotai.lt/apie-ligonius/7, accessed February 9, 2019.

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taboo subjects; they can be analysed using the relief theory of humor, which explains appeal of joking about such sensitive topics as death and illness. If we look at contemporary jokes targeting people of higher social status, it must be noted that these kinds of jokes reflect society’s dissatisfaction with government (politicians) and other individuals with authority (including doctors); in other words, they express a kind of intolerance for hierarchical systems. Jokes mocking individuals of higher status usually refer to real situations (for example, President Paksas’s impeachment process), which are thus rendered comical. Political jokes often achieve comic effect through ambiguity, absurdity, and sarcasm; these strategies can be analysed using incongruity and superiority theories. On the other hand, jokes about health generally employ obscenity and sarcasm, which can best be understood through the relief theory of humor. In both cases, comic effect is achieved by demeaning someone of higher social status. It is this process of demeaning that stimulates a satisfaction effect, which in turn is expressed in the joke. Contemporary Lithuanians also readily tell jokes about foreigners. “Research on jokes about nationalities revealed that they were all marked by stereotypical thinking. Stereotypes in jokes are understood as unconsciously followed patterns. These stereotypes are usually related to common, erroneous attitudes about the worst traits of certain ethnic groups.”110 Here, then, we also see comic effect that draws on the we—they opposition. Interestingly, in terms of targets, contemporary jokes do not significantly differ from older or Soviet-era jokes: while the most frequently mocked groups are Jews, Chukchi, Georgians, Americans, and Russians, there are also jokes about Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians themselves. It should be noted, however, that Lithuanians are not very good at laughing at themselves—there are very few jokes of that nature, and those that do exist generate comic effect through contrast and opposition (for example, when members of different regional groups mock each other). This continuity in terms of joke targets can be explained in two ways: on the one hand, it reveals the existence of a certain joking tradition; on the other hand, it indicates the slow rate at which stereotypical thinking changes. Seeking to explain why the proliferation of stereotypes appears to be a national trait, Saulius Pivoras suggests that “liberal nationalist ideology is typical of most of the national movements of the small nations that experienced Russian, 110 Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų tyrimas: pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška,” 37.

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Austrian, and Prussian imperial rule.”111 In other words, oppression can lead opposition to foreigners to become encoded in the consciousnesses of nations that have experienced oppression, and this causes the unconscious promotion of stereotypical thinking. This kind of unconscious opposition to people of other cultures can be seen in both the content of contemporary Lithuanian jokes and society, where attitudes towards asylum seekers from Eastern and Southern countries are generally negative.112 Such attitude toward foreigners can be explained by large cultural and religious differences, and Lithuanians’ insularity and fear of letting in people who are different, all of which are deeply rooted in the country’s painful memories of occupation. A discussion of the most popular contemporary joke themes and subjects therefore reveals that the most frequently targeted groups are always women, foreigners, and people of higher social standing. The only thing that changes is how the targets are adapted to the current context: for example, the collective farm worker becomes a blonde, a Chukchi is replaced by an Estonian, and Soviet political figures by Lithuanian parliamentary deputies and doctors. With the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, we can freely express our opinions and laugh at whomever we want. * * * Having discussed Lithuanian jokes dating from the late nineteenth to midtwentieth century, the Soviet era, and our contemporary context, it should be noted that the jokes that become popular are the ones that reflect each period’s life and realities. What we joked about yesterday may not be funny to us today. Because humor is constantly evolving, it is the best example of the social phenomenon of folklore; it adapts to everyday life, helps name the stereotypes that dominate in a given society, and expresses opinions about different events and people. Humor is here and now, and it evolves along with its users: from oral transmission to internet joke sites, from 111 Saulius Pivoras, Vinco Kudirkos liberalus nacionalizmas mažų vidurio Europos tautų tautinių sąjūdžių kontekste (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2009), 54. 112 A 2015 Spinter poll revealed that 61.3% of Lithuanians were in principle opposed to Lithuania accepting refugees; even 72.7% believed that accepting refugees will not benefit the country, and 67.6% have a negative view of European Union refugee policies (http://psichika.eu/blog/tyrimas-lietuviu-nuomone-apie-pabegelius-radikali/, accessed February 9, 2019).

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radio programs to television, from leaflets handed out on the street to social networks on the web. To return to the question posed at the beginning of this article—whether the traditional (earlier) and contemporary homo ridens has common characteristics—it is possible to answer in the affirmative. Analysis of the material reviewed here indicates that joke consumers of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, the Soviet period, and today mock the same three social groups: women, foreigners, and people of higher social status (we are referring not only to the wealthy, but also professionals and highly educated people such as doctors). During each period these targets are adapted to the existing context: women characters steadily become more independent (davatkos and foolish wives are replaced by women with professions and controlling wives); the landowners that used to be targets of mockery are replaced by politicians and doctors (that is, people who have higher social status not because they inherited it, but because they consciously sought it). Targets of mockery help to generate a feeling of connection: jokes become a connecting thread between people who joke and laugh in the same way. This consistency in terms of joke targets can be seen as an aspect of the joking tradition that is revealed through the spectrum of emotions that a person experiences when enjoying jokes: joy, anger, disgust, and curiosity. The function of humor, in particular sarcasm, is to satisfy forbidden desires; an expression of private thoughts, it allows us to experience both power and pleasure. Based on the analysis of jokes from different periods that has been presented here, joking can be seen as both play and a form of psychological hygiene. A joke can free us from socially established norms and allow us to express a taboo opinion that would not normally be socially accepted. Offensive humor may make some people angry, but it is deeply rooted in us: some people let it out, and others do not. Although, as previously mentioned, it would be incorrect to draw the categorical conclusion that the joking and laughing Lithuanian has a stereotypical mindset, it can be said that stereotypical thinking reflects the existence of class divisions and is a form of mockery that can be seen from the late nineteenth century to this day. The persistence of certain themes for over a century reveals a tendency to laugh at jokes that are based on stereotypical views about certain social groups. It can also be argued that joking is a certain form of bullying that arises when people see things from the perspective of the we—they opposition.

Chapter 8

Between Culture and Subculture: The Case of Lithuania’s Basketball Fans Povilas Krikščiūnas

Introduction Basketball was introduced in Lithuania in 1921 and the first match was played the following year. Since then, this sport has gained tremendous popularity. Although Lithuania is a small country, there are currently 72 officially registered teams, 400 coaches, 201 judges (11 at the international categories), and 7 NBA commissioners1. Lithuania’s men’s teams have achieved excellent results on the international tournament stage. Lithuania’s national team has won bronze medals at three Olympic games (1992, 1996, and 2000) and one world championship. The national team has also won the European Basketball Championship three times—in 1937, 1939, and 2003. Kaunas’s Žalgiris team won the European championship in 1999. Lithuania’s youth (boys’) team were European champions in 2005 and won a silver medal in 2016. Some members of the national team have played or are currently playing in other countries, including on American NBA teams. Arvydas Sabonis was named best European basketball player in 1984 and 1985, and played several successful seasons in the NBA. Our women’s teams have not, to date, achieved such impressive results; perhaps 1 http://www.krepsinis.net/komandos/lietuvos-komandos, and https://lt.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Krepšinis, both accessed November 22, 2016.

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this is why Lithuanians are generally more interested in men’s basketball. Any interesting men’s games, even at the regional level, attract tremendous attention from fans both in stadiums and the media, and returning winners of international competitions are met by their admirers like heroes. However, the basketball community is by no means homogeneous. The attitudes of club managers, marketing specialists, players, coaches, and judges about specific phenomena and situations can differ markedly. Basketball fans are just as diverse. The behavior and values of the most active, loyal fans can differ significantly from those of occasional viewers. These people vary in terms of age, education, interests, and team loyalty. It is not accidental that marketing specialists and sociologists divide fans into different groups—for example, fans and viewers—depending on whether they support their teams in person, in the stadiums, or simply watch matches on television or other media sources.2 These groups are united when watching international games, when there is a common enemy, but when it comes to national tournaments (for example, in the Lithuanian Basketball League), they break up to support different teams. These different groups’ self-awareness, patterns of assessing events and situations, and forms of emotional expression are undoubtedly of interest to researchers of contemporary cultures and subcultures. How fans communicate on the internet is of no less interest to researchers. According to Darius Liutikas, up to ninety-nine percent of his interviewees—sports fans—said they use the internet daily or at least weekly.3 This is not surprising, since the majority of his respondents were university and high-school students and educated individuals under forty. These people communicate on different platforms: in open and closed groups, on specialized sports websites, chat rooms, blogs, imageboards, and so on. When writing online they are not constrained by researchers’ prepared questions, so they can remember and post what most matters to and interests them. Here they can expand their audience, discuss, react to texts by others and receive feedback. These kinds of communication are inseparable from direct interaction—they are corresponding aspects of Cf.: Bob Stewart et al., “Sport Consumer Typologies: A Critical Review,” Sport Marketing Quarterly 12, no. 4 (2003): 206–216; Dominik Antonowicz and Łukasz Wrzesiński, “Kibice jako wspólnota niewidzialnej religii,” Studia socjologiczne 192, no. 1 (2009): 115–149. 3 Darius Liutikas, “Tapatumo raiška sporto aistruolių kelionėse,” Filosofija. Sociologija 22, no. 2 (2011): 218–219. 2

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the same process. Observing both would therefore enrich understanding of the process as a whole. Unfortunately, though, the words of Ingvaras Butautas and Rasa Čepaitienė, though written twelve years ago, still apply: “[The] academic studies completed to date in Lithuania are surprisingly fragmented and limited to factual analysis, while sports experts themselves are notable for their specialized and professional knowledge.”4 Lithuanian researchers are oriented to sociocultural aspects of their research objects, notably questions of Lithuanian national identity and values.5 Most authors have based their conclusions on answers to questionnaires. Although some questionnaires did not contain direct questions about basketball, quite a few informants mentioned it in their answers and described their relationship to the game and its players. More consistent material about Lithuanian basketball contexts has been collected by Darius Liutikas, who surveyed 100 fans of the Žalgiris and Lietuvos Rytas clubs as the fans followed their teams to different cities. Liutikas explored aspects of these people’s personal and social identities in a 2011 article.6 Eglė Žibinskaitė has also touched on the relationships between basketball players and their fans in an analysis of a specific team’s identity and social environment.7 Questions related to cultural anthropology have primarily been addressed by linguists.8 There are not that many folklorists working in Lithuania. Until recently, they have devoted considerable attention to traditional rural culture, which has survived and been observed in Lithuania much longer than in Western Europe. It is therefore not surprising that sports subcultures, which are generally considered urban phenomena, have only been examined in a few isolated studies.9 4 Ingvaras Butautas and Rasa Čepaitienė, “‘Mus vienija alus ir pergalės?’ arba sportas ir lietuviškoji tapatybė,” Lietuvos istorijos studijos 17 (2006): 97. 5 Ieva Akstinavičiūtė and Daiva Petraitytė, “Lietuvių tautinės tapatybės simbolinių komponentų konfigūracijos,” Filosofija, Sociologija 18, no. 2 (2007): 14–31; and studies by Darius Daukšas and Vytis Čiubrinskas, Leonidas Donskis, and Jolanta Kuznecovienė published in the anthology Lietuviškojo identiteto trajektorijos, ed. Vytis Čiubrinskas and Jolanta Kuznecovienė (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas, 2008). 6 Cf.: Liutikas, “Tapatumo raiška sporto aistruolių kelionėse.” 7 Eglė Žibinskaitė, “VDU merginų krepšinio komanda: tapatumas ir socialinė aplinka,” Grupės ir aplinkos 1 (2009): 261–274. 8 Cf.: Reda Toleikienė and Aina Būdvytytė-Gudienė, “Konceptualiosios metaforos krepšinio diskurse,” Respectus philologicus 23/28 (2013): 131–140; Jurga Cibulskienė, “The Conflictual Nature of Metaphors in Live Basketball Commentaries: A CorpusDriven Approach,” Žmogus ir žodis 16, no. 3 (2014): 36–60. 9 Povilas Krikščiūnas, “Folkloriniai ir folklorėjantys motyvai internetiniame profesionalaus krepšininko įvaizdyje,” Tautosakos darbai 54 (2017): 49–69.

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Contemporary folklore researchers acknowledge that many elements of virtual culture have come to the community of internet users from oral or written traditions. The first academic studies in this area appeared at the end of the last century; and there has also been rapid change not only in how information is transferred, but in the ways that it is presented and disseminated. During the last decade, questions around internet folklore have been written about by American10 and European, especially Eastern European, researchers.11 Therefore, this article will not delve into debates about the connections between and scale of real and virtual folklore. Rather, we will be exploring concrete examples of these connections—their sources, forms of expression, and goals—that have been noticed during the research process.

Sources and principles for the selection of material For this study, we have chosen thematically appropriate folkloric and related material—textual, visual, and co-layered posts that have appeared in Lithuanian sports and entertainment portals. We also looked for material in the ethnology and folklore manuscript collection of the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University (VDU ER), which also collects material from the internet. We chose posts that were especially diverse and groups of texts that were thematically popular and typologically related. The main keywords we used were sports, basketball, fans, memes, internet folklore, and combinations thereof. Where appropriate, we also 10 Trevor J. Blank, Folklore and the Internet—Vernacular Expression in a Digital World (Utah: All USU Press Publications, 2009). 11 Anatolii Kargin and Anna Kostina, “Nauchnoe osmyslenie internet-fol′klora: aktual′nye problemy i opyt issledovania,” in Internet i fol′klor (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi respublikanskii tsentr russkogo fol′klora, 2009), 5–18; Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, “E-folklor jako zjawisko kultury digitalnej,” in Folklor w dobie Internetu: Szkice i studia z przedmową Andy’ego Rossa (Toruń: Wydawnictwo universytetu Łódzkiego, 2009), 15–22; Mikhail Alekseevskii, “Internet v fol′klore ili fol′klor v Internete? Sovremennaja fol′kloristika i virtual′naia real′nost ′,” in Ot kongressa k kongressu. Navstrechu Vtoromu Vserosiiskomu kongressu fol′kloristov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi respublikanskii tsentr russkogo fol′klora, 2010), 151–166; Piotr Grochowski, “Dlaczego śmiejemy się z informatyków? Przyczynek do kulturowej analizy współczesnych przekazów humorystycznych,” Literatura Ludowa 3 (2012), https://repozytorium. umk.pl/bitstream/handle/item/2090/Piotr Grochowski, Dlaczego śmiejemy się z informatyków.pdf?sequence=1, accessed February 11, 2019; Mariann Domokos, “Toward Methodological Issues in Electronic Folklore,” Slovak Ethnology 62, no. 2 (2014): 283–295.

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drew on website users’ comments, examples of traditional folklore, and, occasionally, contemporary posts from portals in other languages. The latter will help us to understand certain contextual details related to the objects of our analysis. We decided not to use animated or video files in order to avoid an excess of material and additional methodological approaches. Anecdotes, or jokes, have been one of the most popular folkloric genres in all eras, and the mediascape is unimaginable without them. Anecdotes enter the internet from two sources. In some cases they are part of website administrators’ collections; in other cases forum participants create thematic groups and transfer texts to them. We found the most relevant texts in the collections of the websites basketnews.lt, krepsininkas.net, and basketzone. lt. We also looked at the websites baikos.lt, cha.lt, krepsinio-karas.blogspot. lt, ltbet.com, šluota.lt, and zizirskiene.lt. Our searches in these and some other websites were to some degree slowed down by possible cases of “copy– paste”: it emerged that some texts were not only identical, but arranged in exactly the same order. Our field of potential texts for examination also had to be adjusted when we came across concrete references to potentially relevant material that exists not only on the internet, such as, slogans. Looking for visual material, we looked at phenomena such as demotivational posters, photobombing, photoshopping memes, Photoshop trolls, and so on. We found the largest collection of these posters in galleries of the website demotivacijos.tv3.lt. We reviewed approximately 400 examples related to basketball. We also looked for useful links in other sources, using the keywords demotivatoriai (“demotivational posters”), sportas (“sport”), and krepšinis (“basketball”). The moderators of demotivacija.lt point out that they review and approve or disapprove of new material within seventy-two hours. Their decision is based not only on whether material is inappropriate (for example, propaganda of an illegal nature, non-standard language, vulgar or disturbing images). They also take into account clarity of concept and the level of symbiosis between image and text. Naturally, subjective assessment can take place; this can result in an undeveloped work being rejected but remaining in the content of the website. Examination of the rejected texts revealed that their authors had not grasped the essence of the demotivator genre and had selected an inappropriate and often uninformative text. Although such cases often defy typological comparison and do not attract folklorists’ attention, there can be exceptions. For this reason, any such examples cited below will be identified.

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Is basketball a men’s game? Discussion of any community must, naturally, take into account its demographic makeup. Liutikas claims that seventy percent of his respondents were men under the age of thirty, and that none were over fifty years of age.12 This researcher was interacting with active fans who travel to other cities to support their teams at matches. There were a hundred such respondents. Although it is doubtful whether we can make broad demographic generalizations about the entire fan community from this sample, audiences for basketball matches in Lithuania are of a very similar makeup. This can be easily confirmed by attending any more interesting match. The situation could be different with people watching matches in sports bars or at home, and we will never know how many people listen to match broadcasts on the radio. One way or another, our study is exclusively concerned with basketball audiences that are active on the internet. In this regard, website users’ login data is especially valuable. Internet users of this sort generally register using their first names or pseudonyms. Although pseudonyms do not always indicate a user’s true gender, the kind observed here are predominantly male or non-gendered. This became clear through examination of the twenty most popular basketball demotivational posters, which had received 50–100 comments.13 We can therefore safely assume that audiences for basketball events are predominantly male. In these posters, images of attractive women are accompanied by texts saying the basketball and women are two reasons for loving Lithuania.14 But the stereotypical notion that following sports matches (especially football)15 is a men’s activity and that women are generally less interested in and informed about rules, has become very widespread. For example, the text posted in 2010 and containing an image of James LeBron reads: “If God were a woman, the first commandment 12 Liutikas, “Tapatumo raiška sporto aistruolių kelionėse,” 218. 13 See, for example, http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/geriausi/sportas/filter_all/mes-privertempasauli...-1254858.html?offset=1; http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/geriausi/sportas/filter_ all/tiek-zmoniu-tikinciu-stebuklais-1251872.html?offset=13; http://demotyvacijos. tv3.lt/geriausi/sportas/filter_all/kam-mes-pykstames-1289346.html?offset=52, all the above accessed November 22, 2016. 14 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/krepsinis-ir-moterys-1621582.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 15 In our examples, internet users are referring to European football; for this reason we are using that term instead of soccer.

Between Culture and Subculture

would be to not watch basketball.”16 Although this text elicited plenty of opposing voices, it does not negate the existence of the attitude it expressed. Another example is a photograph of a woman watching a basketball match, accompanied by the text: “Why the hell do they throw the ball into the basket if it still falls out?”17 The woman shown is the blond-haired wife of a player in Vilnius Lietuvos Rytas team, so it is easy to imagine that the joke was the work of a fan of the opposing team (Kaunas Žalgiris). Nevertheless, in looking at this example, we would be incorrect in seeing only reflections of the sports world. The above-cited post texts are clearly connected to the more widespread stereotype of the “dumb blonde” that has been generated by anecdote cycles in numerous countries. The fact that this stereotype is by no means only popular with basketball fans has been registered by Lithuanian researchers.18 Stanoy Stanoev believes that informants who maliciously spread sexist anecdotes do so in order to reduce women’s status in public life. In his view, such anecdotes are the manifestation of men’s attempts to oppose growing feminist movements.19 In our search we easily found versions of the first type of example discussed. Here the first (permanent) textual element is a sentence about a secondary cause, circumstance, or condition. The creators of these texts change the second component (the main sentence); this is what allows them to develop a comical ending. For example, posts created later claim that, if God were a woman, “you wouldn’t make it into heaven and wouldn’t even understand why,”20 or that “She wouldn’t allow food to make people fat.”21 Thus, in contemporary folklore, several words become the connecting link between a wide range of sets of humorous thoughts and images (for example, “What gender is a computer?”22, or “40+ reasons why men live fewer years than women”23). It is appropriate to assume that there are many 16 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/zymes/lebron/jei-dievas-butu-moteris-1243813. html?offset=2, accessed November 22, 2016. 17 http://demotyvacijos.net/page/379/, accessed November 22, 2016. 18 Cf.: Bandoriūtė, “Šiuolaikinių anekdotų apie lytis pašaipos taikiniai ir kalbinė raiška.” 19 Stanoy Stanoev, “Dumb Blondes and Democracy,” Folklore 46 (2010): 45–46. 20 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/jei-dievas-butu-moteris-tu-ne-tik-nepatektum-1654525. html, accessed November 22, 2016. 21 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/jei-dievas-butu-moteris-1528765.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 22 http://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=18475, accessed November 22, 2016. 23 http://www.neblondine.lt/40-priezasciu-kodel-vyrai-gyvena-trumpiau-nei-moterys, accessed November 22, 2016.

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versions of these and the earlier mentioned anecdotes. They are interesting to us to the degree that they illustrate stereotypical divisions of activities according to gender. After all, for many centuries the principle goal of sports—the uncompromising battle for domination and victory—was the exclusive realm of men, as this satirical representation of a fan illustrates: The world basketball championship is on TV. The man is nicely settled in to watch it. Suddenly, a loud bang is heard in the next room. His wife has fallen off of a ladder. Almost paralyzed, she drags herself to the door and in a quiet, trembling voice says to her husband: “When the intermission comes, could you please call an ambulance?”24

Basketball everywhere and all the time In speaking about themselves, basketball fans express the view that the game is an all-encompassing thing and the most important driving force in their lives. We can see this in both textual and multimedia works. One of their most popular ideas is that basketball is so popular that it should be proclaimed Lithuania’s second religion. In demotivational posters, we often see this minimally varying text accompanying a basketball, drawings of basketball net stands, or photographs of players or fans. Naturally, people’s reactions to such texts vary according to their value systems. We will now examine a demotivator in which the train of thought materializes through multiple levels of commentary on one image. Here a photograph of fans of the Lithuanian national team is complemented by the text “You’d never find as many people who believe in miracles in a church.” The identity of the fans is revealed through their accessories—Lithuanian flags spread over several rows of spectators and fans dressed in its colors (yellow, green, and red). The rest of the discussion takes place in text divided by several white frames:

24 http://www.basketnews.lt/diskusijos/temos/808-anekdotai-apie-krepsini.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

Between Culture and Subculture

SOVIETMEČIO PASEKMĖ (CONSEQUENCE OF THE SOVIET PERIOD). The author of this stupid demotivator has never been to [the towns of] Šiluva or Žemaičių Kalvarija. / Basketball is a sport, not a religion, you idiot. / Unfortunately, in Lithuania it’s gradually becoming a religion.25

The reactions that this poster elicited are understandable—Catholicism still has deep roots in Lithuania, so such statements can be very insulting to believers. Pilgrims travel to Šiluva annually for the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Žemaičių Kalvarija is famous for its church feast, which has been held since the first half of the seventeenth century. Each event lasts an entire week and attracts enormous crowds. It is possible that intermediate or more developed versions of this example exist, but

25 https://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/deja-lietuvoje-tai-po-truputi-tampa-religija.-1252803. html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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that does not change the essence of the message—each group has its own celebrations. This kind of exaggerated elevation of basketball as a value occasionally elicits ironic reactions. If we return to the question of anecdotes, we will notice that their characters and semantically related initial situations freely migrate from text to text, in this way contributing to the sequence of a specific action. Here it is worth remembering the character Petriukas, who figures in anecdotes in Lithuanian and other languages.26 Petriukas is a school-aged child with a difficult character who annoys adults with his original thinking and strange behavior. He understands both adults and street life, and uses his knowledge to masterfully manipulate the former: The music teacher asks Petriukas: “Petriukas, do you know Haydn, Mozart, and Bach?” “Well, teacher, do you know Vitska, Kiesha, and Vladzka?” “No . . .” “So why are you trying to use your chebra [gang] to scare me???”27

In this way, Petriukas sets himself up as a strong opponent of official culture who is capable of effectively defending his values. His answer mentions three shortened versions of Slavic first names. The word chebra is an example of jargon and non-standard language; though it is a slang term that has come to Lithuanian from Hebrew via Yiddish, it is popular with and used by teenagers and young people. The text cited above differs only slightly from a basketball version of the same anecdote: Teacher: “Tell me three names of famous people that begin with the letter S.” Student: “Sabonis, Stojakovic, Slanina.” Teacher: “But have you heard the names Saint-Exupery, Solzhenitsyn, or Sartre?” Student: “Nope. I’m not interested in the minor leagues.”28 26 Cf.: Gražina Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, “Petriukas—šiuolaikinių anekdotų triksteris,” Tautosakos darbai 36 (2008): 143–135. 27 VDU ER 1407/896. 28 http://www.cha.lt/anekdotai/228-rinkinukas-sporto-tema.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

Between Culture and Subculture

It would be safe to say that a similar model is applied in another story about Petriukas: Geography lesson. The teacher asks: “Where is Macedonia?” Petriukas answers: “In the semifinals.”29

In another version, Petriukas is beaten by Lithuanian national team player Šarūnas Jasikevičius playing the role of one of the boy’s classmates.30 Another text begins with the question “Where are you from?” which is answered “From Macedonia.”31 Macedonia is not mentioned accidentally. The 2011 European Basketball Championship was held in Lithuania. In the quarterfinals, the Lithuanian host team unexpectedly lost to the Macedonian team, which then made it to the semifinals. No one had expected such an outcome. The news quickly spread through international media, stimulated a great surge of excitement among fans, and the phrase “Macedonia is in the semifinals” became a meme in that country. We can assume that the above-mentioned anecdotes do not so much reference Petriukas’s particular frame of mind but, rather, echo specific events. In that case they would confirm the claim that polysemous memes have a greater chance of becoming popular and enduring over time.32 Good observation skills and the ability to see and compare things from unexpected angles are useful to seekers and creators of both texts and images. For example, a basketball net will only look like it is standing on a hay field if photographed from a certain angle. It is also possible to juxtapose completely unrelated objects in a realistic setting. Here it does not at all matter what sport they are related to or whether an official event is being represented:

29 http://basketzone.lt/krepinis-kitu-kampu/19084-anekdotai-apie-krepin-1.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 30 http://pazintys.draugas.lt/srautas.cfm?title=Geografijos-mokytoja-klausia-mokiniukur-yra-Makedonija-Jasike&irasas=401642, accessed November 22, 2016. 31 http://pazintys.draugas.lt/srautas.cfm?title=Is-kur-tu-esi-Is-Makedonijos-O-kur-yraMakedonija-Pusfinal&irasas=401113, accessed November 22, 2016. 32 Cf.: Liisi Laineste and Piret Voolaid, “Laughing Across Borders: Intertextuality of Internet Memes,” International Journal of Humor Research 4, no. 4 (2016): 26–49.

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Lithuania is a basketball country.33

Better to lose your shorts but have a net.34

33 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/lietuva-1287055.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 34 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/geriau-be-sortu-1637632.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

Between Culture and Subculture

It doesn’t matter where, as long as it is basketball.35

The best way to force Lithuanians to throw trash into a garbage can.36

35 http://m.demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/zymes/krepsinis/525/po_15.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 36 http://m.demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/geriausias-budas-priversti-lietuvius-1614686.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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It is not clear whether the two above photographs were made in Lithuania, or what they are—effective collages or real images. One way or another, the garbage can prototype in the last image certainly had analogues in Lithuania. The user geraz published this image in June 2014. The author of this article noticed and photographed such boxes in Panevėžys as early as summer 2011. They were newly covered in preparation for the 2011 European Men’s Basketball Championship—some of the tournament’s games took place in that city’s Cido Arena:

Lithuanian text: Dėk iš viršaus! (English to the right and left—Alley oop!)37

In reviewing internet website material, we looked for expressions of the posting individual’s community-related goals. One such feature could be identified as loyalty to their chosen sport. Here football—which is also popular in Lithuania but not nearly as much as basketball—emerges as an antipode to basketball. Fans of both sports have created a good number of mocking demotivators in which text is frequently the dominant element. In these compositions the image becomes a background element that complements text in the form of dialogue:

37 LTRFt 21902.

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“What makes basketball better than football?” “Basketball teams always score points.”38

“Basketball is for those who don’t know what football is!!!” “And football is for those who didn’t get into basketball.”39

Talking to football fans, basketball enthusiasts also highlight the clearly inferior achievements of Lithuanian football teams in international 38 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/kuo-krepsinis-geresnis-uz-futbola-1358239.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 39 https://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/o-futbolas-tiems-1608104.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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tournaments,40 as well as the shortage and poor condition of football fields in the country.41 Unfortunately, these kinds of discussions are not generally very inventive and do not generate varied groups, so they are not of great interest to folklorists.

Basketball, beer, and victories? In public spaces we often encounter the phrase “We’re united by beer and victories.” Indeed, beer has been popular in Lithuania throughout the ages. Ancient written sources mention it as a ritual beverage, and home-brewing traditions waned only in the last decades of the twentieth century.42 It is therefore not surprising that to this date beer is produced in Lithuania not only by large factories, but also by numerous medium and small businesses. Residents of Lithuania’s northern-central and eastern regions are especially well known for this, and for having plentiful repertoires of traditional party and drinking songs.43 To this day local people in these areas can still sing songs about barley and hops, barrels, and good company gathered around a table. Viewers who gather in bars for public broadcasts of matches also choose beer. In basketball demotivational posters, some fans compare it to the game itself, recalling Gillette razor ads and paraphrasing the abovediscussed comparison with religion:

40 https://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/o-man-nesvarbu-kad-1425792.html; https:// demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/lietuvos-futbolas.-1249435.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 41 https://demoty vacijos.tv3.lt/tik-lietuvoje-pasaulio-futb olo-cempionaigrozisi-1374614.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 42 For more details cf.: Nijolė Laurinkienė, “Sambariai arba Trejos devynerios,” Liaudies kultūra 2 (2009): 9–15; Nijolė Laurinkienė, “Alus—apeiginis baltų gėrimas,” Tautosakos darbai 43 (2012): 15–32; Daiva Vaitkevičienė, “‘Ką kalba mielė, bačkoj būdama?’ Apie meilę ir karą alaus mitologijoje,” Liaudies kultūra 6 (2015): 45–61. 43 Lietuvių liaudies dainų katalogas, vol. 7: Vaišių dainos, ed. Vita Ivanauskaitė-Šeibutienė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2010); Vita IvanauskaitėŠeibutienė, “Skambanti užstalė: vaišių dainos tradiciniuose bendruomenės sambūriuose,” Tautosakos darbai 50 (2015):113–134.

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Basketball without beer is like a birthday without a cake.44

The best a man can get. Basketball and beer—do we need anything else?45

44 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/krepsinis-be-alaus-1253708.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 45 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/nepatikrinti/visi/geriau-vyrai-nesuras-1419679. html?offset=111229, accessed November 22, 2016.

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Basketball and beer: For a real Lithuanian they’re inseparable.46

Basketball—Lithuania’s second religion. Right after beer.47

46 http://m.demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/krepsinis-ir-alus.-1607787.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 47 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/krepsinis-lietuvoje-tarsi-antra-religija-1380423.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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By supporting specific basketball clubs, the big Lithuanian breweries also contribute to the promotion of beer among fans, while at the same time generating publicity for their products. The company Švyturys-Utenos Alus Ltd., formerly called simply Švyturys, is especially noteworthy in this regard. It was this brewery that came up with the famous slogan “We’re united by beer and victories,” which garnered the company considerable advertising traction. A considerable proportion of fans choose this brand’s stronger beers, and many of them see the attachment to beer and basketball as characteristic of real men and real Lithuanians. Such discussions of real men often reveal exaggerated, distinctly un-gentlemanly attitudes. These kinds of people view heavy drinking and drunken adventures as proof of their manly valor. In this kind of company women are seen as incapable of understanding or being uninterested in the game, making them “not one of us”—less valuable individuals who get in the way of men’s regular pursuits. This is evident both in demotivational posters48 and jokes appearing in various forms:

“There’s no more beer. Go out and buy some!” “But it’s cold and slippery outside.” “So buy cans—they won’t break.”49

48 See, for example, http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/alus-ir-krepsinis-pirmoje-vietoje-1485464 .html, accessed November 22, 2016. 49 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/krepsinis-1255528.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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“The team’s playing at 15:30 today, so I’m going head straight to the bar after work and meet the gang. If they win, I’ll be home late.” “So is basketball more important to you than me?!” “What do you mean? There’s football too . . .”50

Here we once again encounter well-known themes. After reading the above example, those in the know would immediately remember the story of the alcoholic holding a bottle in his hand: when his wife sees him, she asks if the bottle of vodka is his only consolation, to which the man replies that no—he has another bottle in his bag.51 Bronislava Kerbelytė, a researcher of Lithuanian anecdotes, describes that kind of text as a variant of a very popular type.52 And this kind of story does not only occur in mixed company: Kazlauskas53 comes into the changing room in the morning and asks: “Who was out drinking yesterday?” Silence. “I asked who drank yesterday.” Several hands are timidly raised.

50 http://demotyvacijos.net/zyma/krepsinis, accessed November 22, 2016. 51 Lietuvių liaudies anekdotai, ed. Bronislava Kerbelytė and Povilas Krikščiūnas (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1994), 462. 52 Kerbelytė, Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, vol. 4, 372. 53 Jonas Kazlauskas—head coach of the Lithuanian national men’s team in 1997–2001 and 2012–2016.

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“Good—you’ll come with me for a hair-of-the-dog. The rest of you start working out.”54

This textual schema was and continues to be popular in jokes about various state employees, including soldiers, officers, and policemen. And this is not surprising—we have seen the same kind of variation of characters in anecdotes about Petriukas, basketball, football, vodka, and wives. It is one of the ways that different versions of a folklore text are generated.

Us and them The idea of sport as an all-out battle for victory clearly defines the categories of self and other. The opponent—beginning with the opposing team, their fans and coaches, and sometimes the judges—must be identified, fought, and defeated. During Lithuanian Basketball League championship games, sympathies and antipathies are not uniformly defined. The most distinct opposition is between the Kaunas Žalgiris and Vilnius Lietuvos Rytas teams. These are Lithuania’s strongest clubs, with the biggest and most active groups of supporters. People often joke that the true battle—like a third world war—takes place between them and not the teams themselves. One way or another, Žalgiris fans are the most active on the internet, where they undoubtedly post more material and comments. When searching for images we can identify their contributions at a glance because of the teams’ different colors: Kaunas’s players wear green and white, while the Vilnius team’s uniforms are red and black. This detail, as well as other facts (for example, the multinational nature of Vilnius’s Lietuvos Rytas team) can be deployed in a battle between irreconcilable foes:

54 http://www.greitas.eu/nuomone/ateina-kazlauskas-ryte-i-persirenfimo-kambari-irklausia----kas-vakar-geret-tyla---klausiu-kas-vakar-geret-nedrasiai-pakyla-keliosrankos---gerai-jus---su-manim-pachmielo-daryt-like---einat, accessed November 22, 2016.

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Lithuania’s fields are green— Not black or red.55

Poland’s Rytas vs. Lithuania’s Žalgiris: Which side are you on?56 55 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/lietuvos-pievos-zalios-1401074.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 56 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/lenkijos-rytas-vs-lietuvos-zalgiris-1432796.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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The Žalgiris fans’ mocking allusion to Poland is not accidental. The 2011 Lithuanian census showed the vast majority of Kaunas residents are of Lithuanian descent. During the same period, 128 nationalities lived in Vilnius, a good number of them Poles, with ethnic Lithuanians making up only 73.8 percent of the city’s residents.57 As Butautas and Čepaitienė have repeatedly noted, sports fan activity is motivated by national, sometimes even nationalistic, ideas.58 Unfortunately, comments posted about demotivational posters supporting or demeaning a concrete team are not always creative. Only a small proportion of internet users argue that such discussions are worthless. More often than not, we encounter inappropriate language, offensive prison jargon, threats and even coarse references to homosexual rape. This is nothing new—sporting events also frequently end in jostling and fights. Such comments once again remind us that passion for the same hobby within the same group does not necessarily entail cohesion in terms of other values. In addition, both form and content are important. On the website demotyvacijos.tv3.lt we can find more than one poster containing the phrase “Rasi plytą—mesk į Rytą” (If you find a brick, throw it at Rytas). We can assume that the first version of it was created in 2011; a Google search failed to identify earlier posts containing the phrase. This rhythmic, rhyming phrase was soon complemented not only by different images, but also different textual endings and extensions. At least one version recalls our earlier discussion about basketball as a religion:

57 Data posted by the Lithuanian Department of Statistics on March 15, 2013: https://osp. stat.gov.lt/documents/10180/217110/Gyv_kalba_tikyba.pdf/1d9dac9a-3d45-479893f5-941fed00503f, accessed January 1, 2019. 58 Butautas and Čepaitienė, “Mus vienija alus ir pergalės?,” 109–110.

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If you find a brick, throw it at Rytas. If you find two—throw them both.59

If you find a brick, throw it at Rytas. If you throw one at Rytas, you’ll get hit with a byta.60

59 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/paieska/visi/rasi-plyta-mesk-i-r yta-1635773. html?offset=4, accessed November 22, 2016. 60 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/rasi-plyta-mesk-i-ryta-1354848.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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Byta is a slang term for a baseball bat used by criminals in fights. At one time this was a favorite weapon of gangs in the Kaunas neighborhood of Šančiai, so it is difficult to say whether this variation of the text originated in Vilnius or Kaunas. Similar variations appear not only on demotivational poster sites but also on specialized basketball website forums. Some authors add one element to their rhymes, for example: “Rasi trečią, negailėk, Žalgirin tu pamėtėk.  .  . . Kad neliktum su skola, žalgiriečiam ketvirta” (If you find a third one, don’t be stingy—send it in Žalgiris’ direction. . . . And so you wouldn’t end up with a debt, send the Žalgiris guys a fourth one).61 In some cases up to thirteen couplets are added, mentioning additional teams such as Kėdainiai’ Nevėžis and Prienai’ Rūdupis. Indeed, a Google search offers up one more, but not as productive, version of this demotivator, containing a photograph of a young woman walking by, with the text “Rasi plytą, mesk į fyfą” (If you find a brick, throw it at a chick).62 This one was also posted in 2011. We can assume that Žalgiris fans used this text, and not their own creative talents, to annoy supporters of Lietuvos Rytas. Characters in anecdotes are equally antagonistic: A man who just died arrives at the gates of Heaven. An angel says: “So what’s the brave thing you did to deserve entry into Heaven?” “I was at a match in Kaunas between Kaunas’s Žalgiris and Vilnius’s Lietuvos Rytas. I sat down next to some Žalgiris fans. I was wearing Lietuvos Rytas colors; when they got a ball in the basket I whistled, when they missed, I clapped.” “That really is brave. When did it happen?” “Thirty seconds ago.”63 Two boys were playing in the yard. Suddenly they were attacked by a huge dog, which dug into one of the boys and started biting him. But his friend didn’t get scared. He grabbed a stick, stuck it under the dog’s collar and strangled it. The next day a newspaper correspondent arrived and wanted to write a story about the boy’s courageous actions. He talked to the boy and then thought about what kind of headline his article should have: 61 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/rasi-plyta-mesk-i-ryta-1354848.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 62 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/paieska/visi/rasi-plyta-mes-i-fyfa-1423255.html?offset=6, accessed November 22, 2016. 63 https://www.basketnews.lt/diskusijos/temos/808-anekdotai-apie-krepsini.20.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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“The headline’s going to be: ‘Brave Lietuvos Rytas fan rescues his friend from a mad dog!’” Then the boy says: “But I’m a Žalgiris fan!” The article ended up with the headline: “Crazed Žalgiris fanatic kills poor little dog.”64

These and additional, not cited, examples indicate that, despite noticeable changes of characters, most of the stories are about Lietuvos Rytas. The question of how many anecdotes there are about the Lietuvos Rytas and Žalgiris teams is often raised. It turns out that any number would be incorrect—there is not a single anecdote, because it is all true. There are also variations on the provocative question “Which team is the best / the stupidest.” The answer is always the same—“But we have nice jerseys / pretty dancers”—though different players, usually from Lietuvos Rytas, answer each time. These kinds of texts recall well-known anecdotes in which the protagonist urges an opponent to act in an inappropriately described or altered situation.65 Mockery can be based on things other than topics or details related to an anecdote. In 2010 several visually different demotivational posters appeared, each using the phrase “Don’t drink from the toilet—you’ll turn into Lietuvos Rytas.” After conducting an internet image search and reading their descriptions, it emerged that they may have had a single original source: someone in Kaunas created stickers with this text and stuck them in public places, including even garbage cans and toilets. These accidentally seen and photographed images then ended up in a poster66 and on a programmer’s blog:67

64 http://k repsinin kas.net/for um/v ie wt hre ad.php?for um_id=38&t hre ad_ id=371&rowstart=20, accessed November 22, 2016. 65 For more examples, see Kerbelytė, Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, vol. 4, 231–233. 66 http://m.demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/media/demotivators/demotyvacija.lt_Net-ir-tuoletuosevyksta-amzina-kova...-Tarp-Vilniaus-ir-Kauno.-DD.jpg, accessed November 22, 2016. 67 http://psyko.lt/2010/11/negerk-is-unitazo/, accessed November 22, 2016.

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The eternal battle between Vilnius and Kaunas happens even in the bathroom.

Garbage can near the Kaunas Diena offices. Photo by blogger Andrius Psykas.

A reader familiar with folktales will immediately recognize the prohibition from the folktale “Little Brother and Little Sister.”68 In the episode relevant here, the sister tells her little brother not to drink from an animal’s footprint, because he would turn into a lamb. This tale has been 68 ATU 450.

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recorded in Lithuania 152 times and versions of it have more than once been republished in different publications.69 We can therefore conclude that the sticker-maker did not create anything new, but rather drew on an already well-known prohibition. The new context does not change its essence: a character who encounters a dangerous (in this case also unclean) object and acts incautiously risks becoming powerless and an object of pity. This is how the author of the text imagined the opposing team. But when the best players from each club join forces in the Lithuanian national team, these enemies are forced to unite. Sports sociology researchers argue that such activity is a perfect means of expression of local, national, or religious consciousness within mixed communities.70 Then sympathies for Žalgiris or Lietuvos Rytas become, if with some self-mockery, support for Lithuania and antipathy for the common enemy. Since the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, these emotions are expressed most strongly during matches against Lithuania’s historic foes, the Russians, and especially the Moscow team CSKA (Tsentralnyi Sportivnyi Klub Armii / Central Army Sports Club). This is not surprising—during the Soviet period Lithuania’s best young players were recruited to either this team or the Soviet national one; it was only following independence and playing in the Lithuanian national team that they could show their countrymen and the world their true strength and promote their country’s name. The following two images illustrate local forms of expression—a typical example of car decoration and an image of a crowd greeting the returning national basketball champions:

69 Bronislava Kerbelytė, Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, vol. 1: Pasakos apie gyvūnus. Pasakėčios. Stebuklinės pasakos (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1999), 211–212. 70 Cf.: Butautas and Čepaitienė, “Mus vienija alus ir pergalės?”; Ignas Vaičaitis, “Tikra ar sukonstruota? Konkurencija ir priešprieša tarp Vilniaus ir Kauno krepšinio komandų” (MA thesis, Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas, 2009); Piotr Malczyński, “Euro na kwejku. Nacjonalizm w piłkarskim wydaniu w folklorze internetowym,” in Folklor—tradycja i współczesność, ed. Roksana Sytniewska et al. (Toruń: Wydawnictwo naukowe uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2016), 221–240.

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Lithuanians are patriots as long as the basketball championship is taking place.71

It doesn’t take much For Lithuania to become Lithuania, and for a stranger in the street—your brother.72

Authors of posts find inspiration in different sources. For example, in commenting on their national team’s matches with the United States for the silver and bronze medals, Lithuanians added the following kinds of 71 https://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/nesvarbu-kur-1607745.html, accessed January 16, 2020. 72 http://m.demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/Toffee/megstamiausi-demotyvatoriai/6, accessed November 22, 2016.

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texts to photos of the games: “If the US doesn’t want the bronze, neither do we”73 and “The Americans can play as well as they can, but they’ll never win the European Championship!”74 Allusions to competitors’ national monuments are also fair game, as in the slogan “We’ll eat France like a Napoleon torte”75 and the comment about a lost game, “The Greeks felt at home during the game, because the arena is right next to the Acropolis.”76 This internet author compared the well-known Greek ruins with an entertainment and shopping center of the same name in Vilnius. Objects that are practically national symbols can be transformed using Photoshop. In the following example, which was posted just before Lithuania’s game with Italy, the Lithuanian coach Jonas Kazlauskas is pictured next to the famous Italian tower. In the next example, an internet

The Tower of Pisa will fall today!77

author comments on the results of a game between Lithuania and Turkey by referring to these countries’ national cuisines:

73 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/jei-jav-nenori-bronzos..-1255120.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 74 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/media/demotivators/thumb/demotyvacija.lt_ Amerikieciai-gali-zaisti-gerai-kaip-tik-nori-Bet-Europos-cempionato-jie-niekadanelaimes_141051963357.jpg, accessed November 22, 2016. 75 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/-suvalgysime-prancuzija-1589200.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 76 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/media/demotivators/thumb/demotyvacija.lt_Graikaizaide-kaip-namie-nes-arena-pastatyta-salia-Akropolio_131629202096.jpg, accessed November 22, 2016. 77 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/pizos-bokstas-siandien-grius-1590163.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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The kebabs couldn’t withstand the zeppelins.78

The story behind yet another example is more complicated. On September 15, 2015 the Italian automobile manufacturer Fiat staged an innovative presentation of the Fiat 500 in Vilnius: a water bicycle was installed under the vehicle, allowing it to travel down the Neris River like an amphibian. The bicycle caught on some river grasses, causing the car to tip and begin to sink. The equipment was eventually pulled out of the river by divers. The European Men’s Basketball Championship was taking place at the same time and Lithuania was scheduled to play Italy the next day. A photograph that appeared in the press quickly ended up in a poster that announced, “The new Fiat 500 ‘sunk’ in the Neris—a very good sign!”79 Two days later the photograph looked like this:

78 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/kebabai-neatsilaike-1621678.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 79 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/neryje-paskendo-naujasis-fiat-500-1641662.html, accessed November 22, 2016.

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The Italians drowned in the Neris. Tonight the Serbians will too!80

These are not isolated examples of such transformations. In the finals of the same championship, the Lithuanians were preparing to battle the Spaniards. Before the game, the following demotivational poster with an image of the Grim Reaper appeared:

The Spaniards are still locked up hiding. Jonas Kazlauskas had better bring the keys soon.81

80 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/-neryje-nuskendo-italai-1641750.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 81 http://demotyvacijos.tv3.lt/zymes/krepsinis/vis-dar-ispanai-uzsirakine-1641852. html?offset=215, accessed November 22, 2016.

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The Grim Reaper, wearing a Lithuanian flag, is knocking on the next opponents’ locker room door. The background features the doors of the Italian and Serbian teams, which Lithuania beat in the quarterfinals and semi-finals respectively. A similar image with a more laconic text—“Next”— appeared at the same time.82 An internet search revealed that the image did not originate in Lithuania. The original referred not to basketball, but football events: it was inspired by a Real Madrid game against Munich’s Baern club during the 2014 UEFA championship league semifinals. Someone later adapted the image to Manchester United, London’s Chelsea, and other clubs, and Chelsea fans eventually created an opposing version:83

This meme turned out to be very productive—it is easy to locate at least ten other versions of it. We can only speculate about who the authors are, and where and when they posted it. After all, a drawing is a graphic work, 82 http://admin.demotyvacija.lt/from-Jagu/not-approved/sekantis...-1641847.html, accessed November 22, 2016. 83 http://kopforum.liverpool.no/t/liverpool-manchester-united-17-10-16kamptrad/1099/5; http://www.nairaland.com/920248/official-chelsea-fan-threadpride/888, accessed November 22, 2016.

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so it could easily have appeared in the periodical media. Ten years ago, this author observed a similar migration of anecdotes and other humoristic texts from periodical media to websites.84 It is possible that images migrate in the same manner. One way or another, the works discussed here all serve a single purpose—to raise confidence in the supported team and to diminish the opponent’s power. * * * When speaking about basketball fans as a subcultural phenomenon, we must admit that they are still not as closed a group as, for example, clergy, IT specialists, or criminal gangs, which are closed first of all because aspects of their members’ language, customs, and lifestyles are incomprehensible to the general public. According to Piotr Grochowski, who has analyzed jokes about computer specialists, the more distinctive such groups are, the more attention they attract. People either fear or want to denigrate them.85 Basketball fans, on the other hand, only stand out during major events in the sport. They are not as physically aggressive as football fans. Most contemporary people have played some basketball during physical education classes and therefore have at least a rudimentary understanding of the game. All of this reduces the differences between the most loyal basketball fans, occasional viewers of matches, and members of the general public who are indifferent to sports. It is, however, possible to classify fans to some degree. Polish sociologists Dominik Antonowicz and Łukasz Wrzesiński compare sports fans to believers and separate them into five groups: fundamentalists, orthodox, non-practicing believers, self-aggrandizing believers (seekers of good fortune), and atheists. The latter view any kind of attachment to a club as strange and are interested in sport only for the sake of positive emotions.86 Despite the differences between these groups, they all belong to a general cultural field determined by a common passion and the attributes related to it. Researchers who have analyzed sociocultural aspects of the fan community conclude that it is primarily men that post internet comments about basketball. This is determined not only by certain values and 84 Cf.: Povilas Krikščiūnas, “Interneto folkloras: rūšis ar sklaidos būdas?,” Tautosakos darbai 20/27 (2004): 21–31; Povilas Krikščiūnas, “Ar varijuoja grandininiai laiškai?,” Tautosakos darbai 35 (2008): 94–106. 85 Grochowski, “Dlaczego śmiejemy się z informatyków?” 86 Antonowicz and Wrzesiński, “Kibice jako wspólnota niewidzialnej religii,” 132.

Between Culture and Subculture

tendencies related to creation, following and content communication. It explains why the content and style of both the texts and images possess certain traits that are determined by certain enduring stereotypes about masculinity that exist both beyond Lithuania and the sports world. The material collected also showed that basketball is a very important vehicle for promoting patriotic sentiment. It is clear that this is primarily the result of the achievements and international recognition of Lithuania’s players, with whom fans identify to some degree. The public media spaces in which the phenomena studied here are disseminated are also important, and reveal a confusing blend of processes and phenomena that were once traditional. This situation can be described by drawing on French researcher Emmanuel Taïeb’s idea that stimulus, object, and narrative migrate between these processes and phenomena.87 Here we see ancient folklore interweaving with pieces belonging to modern genres. The anecdote becomes a one-frame cartoon; the question-and-answer riddle becomes a demotivator slogan or comment, and so on. Groups of images connected by a single heading, or several comments about the same image, acquire narrative form. This recalls Russian folklorist Iurii Sokolov’s idea, dating from 1932, that drawings do not belong only to visual art; when a drawing illustrates a literary work, it generates a new literary text in order to allow itself to be explained. That is how Sokolov wrote about literature based on the Russian lubok drawing tradition.88 This kind of description can also be perfectly applied to contemporary co-layered internet works. Basketball fans also find creative inspiration in contemporary technologies such as the possibilities offered by graphic editing programs. Humor is a natural form of expression and self-expression in the sports world. It can successfully supplant forms of aggression that exist in real life, help to psychologically belittle opponents’ feelings of power and self-worth, and allow for demonstrations of superiority. This is not a new tactic— almost all ancient folk narratives and most ritual songs are based on the self–other opposition. As an example, we can refer to Lithuanian wedding songs, some shepherd songs, and couplets. In such songs, the opposition between those who are being sung about and those who are singing is as expressive as that between opponents on sports. They are simply the results of the activities of different but contiguous social groups. 87 Emmanuel Taïeb, “Persistance de la rumeur. Sociologie de rumeurs électroniques,” Réseaux 106 (2002): 267. 88 Iurii Sokolov, “Lubochnaia literatura (russkaia),” in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol. 6 (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1932), 595.

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Abbreviations

AT  Aarne, Antti. The Types of Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography [original title Verzeichnis der Märchentypen], translated and enlarged by Stith Thompson. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1964. ATU  Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography; part I: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious tales and Realistic Tales, with an Introduction; part II: Tales of the Stupid Ogre, Anecdotes and Jokes, and Formula Tales; part III: Appendices. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. BTV  Lithuanian TV Chanel Baltijos televizija coll. colloquial DvŽ  Humorous TV show “Dviračio šou” and “Dviračio žynios.” KbLPTK  Kerbelytė, Bronislava. Lietuvių pasakojamosios tautosakos katalogas, vols. 1–3. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1999–2002. LGGRTC Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania LMD  Collections of the Lithuanian Science Society preserved at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore LNK  Lithuanian TV Chanel Laisvas ir nepriklausomas kanalas LPP  Grigas, Kazys, Lilija Kudirkienė, Rasa Kašėtienė, Gediminas Radvilas, and Dalia Zaikauskienė, eds. Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai, vol. 1: A–D. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2000; vol. 2: E–J. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2008. LRT  Lithuanian National Radio and Television (national public broadcasting company of Lithuania). LTR  Lithuanian Folklore Archives at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (manuscript collections). LTRF  Lithuanian Folklore Archives at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (audio recordings). LTRFt  Lithuanian Folklore Archives at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore (photograph collections). LŽ   Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos žinios orig.  in original; originally

262

Abbreviations

ŠA  Lithuanian culture semimonthly Šiaurės Atėnai TV3  Lithuanian TV Chanel TV3 VDU  Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania) VDU ER  collections of ethnology and folklore materials at the Department of Cultural Studies at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania)

Index

A

advertising, 136, 154, 156, 162n63, 227 aesthetic, xii–xiii, 25, 48, 50, 51, 119, 132, 135, 150 landscape, 34–44 perception, xii–xiii, 35, 42, 47, 51 sensibility, 36 aggression, xvii, 161, 174, 199, 203–204, 243 Alaska, 13, 53 All Souls’ Day, 59, 79 Altai region, 71, 72, 76 Alytus, town, 64 anecdotes, xvi, 121, 127, 128, 132, 184, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 228, 229, 233, 234, 242, 243 Anglickienė, Laima, 173–174, 179, 180, 182, 185 anonymity, 146 anonymous creations, 31, 142 anonymous internet comments, 161, 162n63 anti-proverbs, 135, 136, 139–144, 151n36, 159, 160, 162, 167 content of, 160 contextual synonyms of, 145 creation models of, 143, 144 researchers of, 143 variations, 143 Antonowicz, Dominik, 242 Anykščiai, town, 72 aphorisms, 134n1, 148 Arctic Circle, 55 Arctic people, 194 Arlauskas, Romualdas, 94n16, 98–99 Armenian Radio, jokes, 195 Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, 195 Artyugino, village, 86 Asadowski, Mark, 116 Asin district, 82 Assmann, Jan, x

Augulis, Julius, 75 authorship, 142, 146 autobiographical narratives, xiii, 24, 29, 30, 51, 88, 90, 92, 93, 110 reconstructing mental landscapes in, 28–51 autobiographies, written, analysis of, 90n6

B

baltaraištis, 22n68, 24 Balys, Jonas, 10, 178n32 Bandoriūtė, Salomėja, xvi Basanavičius, Jonas, vii, viin1 Bašinskienė, Monika, 63 basketball, xvii, 209–242 beer and victories, 224–229 community, 210 exaggerated elevation of, 218 basketball fans, 215, 242, 243 Beinoravičienė, Aliona, 70 Belarus, 91, 181 Belarusian, ethnicity, 143 Belarusian, language, 95n18, 152 Ben-Amos, Dan, 126 Bielskis, Petras, 66, 83 Bikavėnai, village, 86 Birbilas, Algis, 75 birthplace, xiii, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 61,63, 64, 65, 68, 85 Biržai, town, 64, 81, 86 Bleizgienė, Ramunė, 175 blog 210, 234 blonde 201, 203, 207, 215 “Bloody Pentecost”, 93, 98–101 boba, 138, 175, 175n19 Bolshaya Rechka, town, 54, 70, 86, 87 borderland lives, 88–111 Bortkūnas, Jurgis, 76, 80, 81 Brajinskienė, Emilija, 64 Brandišauskas, Donatas, 194

264

Index

Brazauskas, Algirdas, 165, 205 Briedienė, Birutė, 72 Brodovskis, Jokūbas (Iacobo Brodowsky), 23, 153 Būgienė, Lina, xiv, xv Buivydžiai, village, 87 burial, xiv, 56, 61–63, 64, 65, 67, 84 ceremonies, 79, 80 site, xiii, 53, 61–63, 66 symbolic, 70–72 burial ritual, xiii, xiv, 61, 70, 85 ritual journey and, 72–83 Butautas, Ingvaras, 211, 231 Butkus, Vigmantas, 28–29 Bykov promontory, 54, 55, 69, 74, 75 byta, 232–233

C

Casey, Edward C., 32 Catholic church, 43 Catholicism, 111, 189, 217 cemetery, 42, 46, 57–59, 61, 63–67, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81–85, 100, 101 near home, 67–70 censorhip, 139, 175, 193, 199, 200 Čepaitienė, Rasa, 211, 231 Čepkeliai marshland, 42n43 Čepukienė, Anelė, 24, 29, 31, 36–41, 48, 49 Chapaev, Vasily, 192, 193 Cheremkhovo, town, 65, 66, 76, 86 Christmas Eve, 68, 69, 98 Činčikas, Julius, 56n12, 58–59, 84, 85 cinema, xii, 21, 22 čiukčis (Chukchi), 194–196, 200, 201, 206, 207 Čižiūnai, village, 97, 98, 100, 101, 107, 109 collective farms, 120, 130, 140n13, 190, 198, 199, 200, 207 collectivization, Soviet, xii, 28, 46, 91 colloquial language, 156, 160, 166, 168 comic effect, 183, 184, 193–195, 199, 205, 206 communication, xi, 119, 124, 127, 136, 152, 162, 167, 210, 243 act of, 139 contemporary, xvi, 135, 147, 153, 156, 164, 167 modern, xv, xvi, 134, 167 oral, 8, 25 public, 157, 160, 165, 167, 168 ritualistic, 19 communications media, 147, 154 consciousness, ix, 30, 32, 33, 36, 38, 48, 94, 94n14, 138, 147, 175, 176, 236

Crystal, David, 12–13, 172 cultural heritage, 131, 153n40 culture, vii, x, xii, xiv, xviii, 9, 6, 20, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 42, 44–46, 58, 68, 94, 94n16, 103, 119, 136, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153–155, 164, 173, 186, 195, 207 and subculture, 209–242 English-language, 147 folk, x, xii, 25, 30, 44, 154, 186 folkloric, xvii Lithuanian, xiv, 26, 58 researchers of, 44 rural, 16, 47, 211 traditional folk, vii, 44 verbal folk, 154 vernacular, vii written, 153

D

Daugirdaitė, Solveiga, 198 Daugirdaitė, Vilma, 24 Daujotytė, Viktorija, 30, 31, 35, 42n45, 45, 47, 48 Daukantas, Simonas, 62 davatka, 175–177, 175n20, 187, 208 Davies, Christie, 185–186 Dégh, Linda, 116, 122, 125, 126, 133 Degsnės, village, 92, 101, 104, 104n32, 105 Jews of, 104 demotivational posters, 213, 214, 216, 224, 227, 231, 233, 234, 240 deportation(s), 12n35, 14n40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 65, 67, 71, 73, 74, 86, 91 to Siberia, 52, 105 Deportee Club, 53, 56, 59 deportees, xiii, xiv, xviii, 14n40, 52–62, 64, 66, 68–76, 79–87 Didelytė, Gražina, 60 Didžiasalis, village, 121 Dirgėla, Petras, 52, 59, 68 Długosz, Jan, 67 Donelaitis, Kristijonas, 156n47 dreams, 10, 37, 63, 69, 73–75, 83 dream narrative, 74 Dzūkija, ethnographic region, 24, 29, 31, 42, 106

E

Eastern Lithuania, 88, 91, 93, 94n16, 118, 121, 122, 224 life stories, historical reflections in, 88–111 workings of history in memories of, 91–93

Index

Eastern Orthodox faith, 111 Eco, Umberto, 26 Eišiškės, town, 107, 108 electronic discourse, 161, 163 electronic media, 154, 162 emotions, 13, 14, 16, 34, 41, 42, 124, 126, 161, 162, 189, 208, 236, 242 environment, vii, xi, xii, 25, 29, 31–34, 36n22, 42, 44, 51, 76, 117, 140, 161 axiology of, xii, 31, 50 cultural, 136, 140 multicultural, 106 natural, xii, 35, 43, 51 rural, 31 social, 211 ethnicity, 93, 100n25, 180, 181 ethnography, 45, 90n7, 117n8 etiological legends, 121, 129 European Basketball Championship, 209, 219 European Men’s Basketball Championship, 222, 239 Evangelical Lutheran Church, 188

F

fieldwork, xi, xv, 3–6, 34, 88, 89, 92, 95, 97, 99, 106, 118, 120–122, 124n20, 126n29, 127, 128n34, 129, 133 folk, 19, 25, 36, 37, 41–43, 47 creativity, x, 44 culture, x, xii, 25, 30, 44, 46, 154, 186 memory, viii poetry, 115 wisdom, 132,150, 152 worldview, 29 folk-belief legends, 121, 128, 129 folk narrative, xviii, 119, 128, 178n32, 243 predominant modes of, 3–27 folk traditions, viii storytellers influences, 115–133 folklore, vii–xiii, xv, xvii, xviii, 3, 4, 9, 23, 25, 27, 36, 44, 45, 51, 74, 105, 117, 118, 120, 124, 136, 140, 142, 172, 180, 184, 186, 207, 213, 243 bearers, 4 classical, 44, 127, 129, 133 collector, 116n6, 122, 131, 174n17 contemporary,135n5, 190, 215 context analysis, 116 genres, 4, 117n6, 127, 140, 146, 173, 174, 243 historiography, 46 informants, xii, 6, 29, 31, 36, 41, 44, 64

Lithuanian, vii, ix, xviii, 103, 149, 184 performance, 116, 117, 117n8 performers, 115–117 research, xn11, 88, 135n5, 156 researcher, viii–xi, 88, 115, 116, 119–121, 129, 132, 156, 179, 212 scholar see researcher scholarship see research studies, vii, viii, ix, x, xviii, 4, 19, 30, 116–118 text, 13, 25, 126, 229 folkloric movement, viii folklorization, of non-paremic expressions, 136–147 (folk)song, ix, 6, 7n15, 9, 13, 14, 19, 25, 26, 37, 50, 115, 146, 224, 243 collection, 26 performer, 8 folktale, xv, 17n52, 115–133, 146, 235 football fans, 223, 242 foreigners, in folklore, xvii, 26, 173–175, 180, 181, 183–185, 186n61, 189, 194, 196, 200, 201, 203, 206–208 funeral, 61, 71, 76, 81, 82, 84, 186 funeral laments, 19, 49

G

Gabrys, Aleksandras, 65 Garda-Rozenberga, Ieva, 90n7 Gasčiūnai, village, 65 Gediminas Hill, 72 Gegužinė, village, 81 Geidžiūnai cemetery, 64, 81, 86 generation, xi, 6, 24, 26, 35, 47, 60, 64, 65, 71, 91, 118, 120, 126, 147 Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 14n40, 60, 106n34 Georges, Robert A., 124 German(s), 5, 11, 21n64, 22, 98–102, 104, 106–108, 115, 179, 183–185, 195 German language, 115, 152, 153 Germany, 9, 23, 91, 160, 184, 185, 195 globalisation, viii, 147, 153 Grigas, Kazys, 150–152 Grigas, Romualdas, 94n14 Grim Reaper, 240, 241 Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia, 60, 62–63 Grochowski, Piotr, 242 gudai, 95n18, 96 Gudavičius, Edvardas, 89n2 Gudonytė, Eglė, 60, 71 gulag, 14n40, 52, 53, 57, 65, 70 gypsy see Roma

265

266

Index

H

Halbwachs, Maurice, x Hobbes, Thomas, 183 Holocaust, 106 homo audiens, xi, 6–14, 25 Homo narrans project, viii, ix homo ridens, 172–208 homo videns, xi, 15–27 humanities, vii, ix, 32, 155 humor, xvi, xvii, 40, 141, 173–175, 180, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 194, 200–208, 215, 243 aggressive, 175, 183 black, 205 Lithuanian, 200 obscene/scatological, 188 sexist, 203 Soviet-era, 200 theories of, 188, 194, 206

I

identity, vii, viii, ix, 16, 30, 81, 92, 94, 96–98, 110, 111, 119, 147–153, 200, 201, 211, 216 ideology, vii, viii, 106, 107, 109, 119, 159, 206 Igarka, town, 53, 55, 80 Ignalina, town, 121 Ignatavičius, Eugenijus, 60 imagebords, 210 images, 16, 17, 21–23, 26, 27, 32, 33, 43, 49, 51, 54, 73, 74, 127, 131, 145, 148, 149, 151, 158, 168, 204, 213–216, 219, 222, 229, 234, 236, 240–243 independence, Lithuania’s, restoration of, viii, 30, 52, 54, 84, 150, 165, 207, 236 industrial agriculture, Soviet, 46 industrialization, xii, 28, 45, 198 Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, xviii, 117, 174 Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 165 Inta, town, 84 internet, ix, xvi, xvii, 27, 142, 143, 154, 158, 161, 163, 172, 189, 210, 213, 214, 229, 238–339, 241, 243 comments, 141, 160–164, 242 databases, 154n42 folklore, 212 humor sites, 201, 207 news sites, 156 users, 161, 212, 214, 231, 234 website material, 212, 222 interview, 17, 26, 88, 89, 92, 95n17, 165 interviewee, 4, 16, 95–97, 100, 104, 109, 159, 210

interviewer, 8n22, 89n5 interwar period, 64, 96, 130, 131, 140n13, 180 Irkutsk region, xiii, 53–55, 57, 58, 63, 65, 70, 76, 77, 79, 84, 86, 87 Iron Curtain, vii irony, 19, 140, 144, 145, 157, 159, 161, 163, 184, 192, 193, 218 Isaev, Pyotr, 192, 193 Ivanauskaitė, Vita, 19 Ivinskis, Laurynas, 3–4, 7–8, 23

J

Jaago, Tiuu, 90n7 Jakubavičienė, Ingrida, 183 Järv, Risto, 157 Jasikevičius, Šarūnas, 219 Jewish tragedy, Valkininkai inhabitants’ memories of, 103–105 Jews, 21, 22, 103–106, 129, 164n68, 179–181, 184, 185, 196, 201, 206 joke tale, 173, 178n32 jokes, xvi, xvii, 13, 121, 128, 145, 146, 161, 165, 172–173, 208, 213, 215, 227, 229, 242 about foreigners, 174, 179–185, 194, 196–198, 206 about Germans, 183–184 about gypsies, 181–183 about Jews, 180–181 about landowners, 181 about Petriukas, 201–202, 218–219 about political leaders, 191, 192–193, 204–206 about women, 175–179, 198–199, 203–204 absurdist, 194 atheistic, 191–192, 200 classification of, 173 contemporary, xvi, 173, 174, 178, 193, 201–207 health-related, 205–206 in Lithuania, 174–189 obscene, 187-188, 193, 206 Soviet-era, 189–200 taboo, 178, 188, 196, 206 traditional, xvi, 172, 174–189 Jokimaitienė, Pranė, 25 Joniškis, town, 65, 86 Jonutytė, Jurga, 16 journalism, 96, 156–163 Juoda dežė (Black Box), 60, 80

K

Kaivola-Bregenhøj, Annikki, 4, 13, 24, 25 Kaliningrad region, 64

Index

Kaltanėnai, town, 123 Kanjorski, Jeanne, 203 Karmėlava Airport, 80 Kaunas, city, 17, 63, 68, 70, 81, 86, 183, 231, 233–235 Kaunas Medical Institute, 15, 17 Kaunietis, Romas, 65, 76, 77, 85 Kavolis, Mykolas, 177 Kazėnas, Stasys, 55 Kazlauskas, Jonas, 228, 238, 240 Kėdainiai, town, 53, 79, 233 Kelmė, town, 23 Kensminienė, Aelita, xi Kerbelytė, Bronislava, 17n52, 173, 199, 228 Khabarovsk region, 84 Khabary district, 76 Kirlys, Jonas, 84 Klaipėda, city, 6, 22, 23n69 Klein, Barbro, xn11 Komi republic, xiii, 57, 65 Komsomol, 12n35, 15, 17, 18, 55 Konstantinova, Anna, 141n14, 158n53 Kõresaar, Ene, 90n7 Krasnoyarsk region, 53, 54n4, 57, 65, 75, 79, 84, 86 Kretinga, town, 69, 86, 87 Krėvė-Mickevičius, Vincas, 176 Krikščiūnas, Povilas, xvii, 173 Kuliai, village, 67 Kuzurov cemetery, 71 Kveciai, village, 86 Kvėdarna, town, 15, 17

L

Landsbergis, Vytautas, 165, 205 landscape, xii, xiii, 28–51 aesthetic perceptions of, 42 axiology, 34–44 idealization of, 44–51 Laptev Sea, 52, 55, 56, 62, 69, 74, 77, 86 Latvia, 64, 90n7 Lauhakangas, Outi, 162 Lena River, 53–56, 74, 80, 86 Leparskienė, Lina, 39–40 Lietuvos Rytas, basketball team, 211, 215, 229–234, 236 lieux de mémoire, x, 33 life stories, ix, xiii, xiv, 4, 15, 51, 88–111 linguistic communities, 136, 155 influence of, 147–153 literacy, xii, 25, 26 literature, x, 30, 60, 146, 150, 161, 243 Lithuanian, 156 oral, 31

Lithuania, vii–xviii, 3, 14n40, 15, 25, 26, 36n22, 45, 52, 54, 56–60, 62–64, 66–72, 75, 76, 79, 83, 86, 88–91, 93, 95, 96, 105, 106, 109–111, 118, 120, 130, 131, 139, 140, 145, 150, 154, 158, 159, 165, 166, 173–176, 180–185, 189, 197, 200, 203, 209, 211, 214, 217, 219, 220, 222, 224, 226, 236–241, 243 Soviet occupation of, 28, 47n65 Lithuania Minor, ethnographic region, 23n69 Lithuanian Basketball League, 210, 229 Lithuanian folklore archives, ix, 117, 139n10, 174, 185, 189, 192 Lithuanian Language Society, 165 Litovkina, Anna Tóthné, 145n24 Liutikas, Darius, 210, 211, 214 local legends see place legends Lokhmatukha, Mount, 72 Lukošiūtė, Ieva, 173, 174

M

Macedonia, 219 Maceina, Algimantas, 60, 80 Mackevičienė, Eugenija, 76, 77 Margininkai cemetery, 63 Martinaitis, Marcelijus, 30, 31, 35, 45–50 Martovka, village, 76 Mažeikiai, town, 118, 127n33, 132 Mažvydas, Martynas, 147 McLuhan, Marshall, 19–20 Medvėgalis Hill, 66 meme, 201, 212, 213, 219, 241 memoir, xii, xiii, xiv, 28–51, 60, 65, 75, 79 memory, ix, x, 12, 13, 17, 21, 29, 33, 34, 48, 51, 74 Mergiūnai, village, 86 Merkys River, 99, 102 metaphors, 137, 152, 153, 168, 191 Mieder, Wolfgang, 148, 164n69, 167 Mieželaitis, Eduardas, 145 Mikalauskas, Vytautas, 190 Miknytė, Jurga, 175 Miliušis, Leonas, 65 Milosz, Czeslaw, 26 Mina, town, 75 mockery, 14, 58, 174, 177, 178, 184, 192, 199, 202, 208, 234, 236 target of, xvii, 174, 178, 181, 183, 191, 208 modern communication, xv, xvi, 134, 167 modernity, xvi, 113–243 tradition and, 153–166 Moscow, 11, 191, 236 Motiekienė, P., 66, 67, 70, 85

267

268

Index

motif, xi, xvii, 17, 19, 23, 25, 61, 74, 105, 140, 158 motif-index of Lithuanian folk narratives, 178n32

N

narration, xi, x, xiii, xiv, xv, 4, 5, 11–13, 19, 23, 24, 34, 89, 90, 108, 109, 116, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 130, 133, 202 narrative, ix, x, xiv, xv, 3–27, 29, 30, 61, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79, 83, 85, 88–90, 92, 93, 97, 99–101, 107, 110, 115, 116–122, 124–130, 132, 133, 173, 174, 179, 181, 188, 243 analysis, methods of, 90n7 autobiographical, 24, 28–51 personal experience, 4, 132 political-historical, 110 research, 24, 25 narrative turn, ix national identity, viii, 96, 136, 153, 211 proverbial weakening of, 147–153 native culture, 30 nature, xii, xiii, xviii, 4, 6, 30, 31, 33–35, 37, 41–44, 46, 94, 99, 115, 122, 150, 153, 164, 178, 180, 194, 202, 206, 213, 229 Naujoji Akmenė, town, 71 Nazi Germany, 91, 184 Nazi occupation, 104n32, 106, 107 Neris River, 239, 240 Nėris, Salomėja, 147 Niles, John D., 9 Nora, Pierre, x, 33

O

opposition, 38, 107, 177, 178, 180, 184, 188, 189, 200, 207, 243 we-they/ us-them, xvii, 98, 179, 180, 185, 189, 196, 206, 208, 229–242, 243 Oral History Association (OHA), 88n1 Ortutay, Gyula, 116

P

Pagiriai, village, 86 Pakalniškiai, village, 86, 87 Paklėštarė, village, 97–99, 101 Paksas, Rolandas, 165, 205, 206 Pakutuvėnai cemetery, 67 Pandėlys, town, 65, 84 Panevėžys, town, 63, 75, 87, 222 Papaurėlytė-Klovienė, Silvija, 172 paronym, 145 partisans, 7, 13, 71, 93, 98, 100, 161, 195

ambivalent assessments of partisan activity, 106–109 Paukštelis, Juozas, 19 Paulauskas, Artūras, 165, 205 peasants, 35, 93, 94, 104, 137, 140n13, 186, 187 perception, xii, 50, aesthetic, 35, 42, 47, 51 predominant modes of, 3–27 personal experience, xiii, 14, 29, 45, 48, 51, 103, 110, 118, 126, 131 personal memories, 13, 30, 84, 110 Petrokas, Antanas, 84 Petrylienė, Prima, 72 phenomenology, 32 Philadelphia, 66 phonetic alphabet, 20 photograph, xiii, 18, 59, 60, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85, 215, 216, 219, 222, 233, 234, 239 photoshop, 213, 238 phraseology, 137, 147, 156 Pirčiupiai, village, 98, 107, 108, Pivoras, Saulius, 206 place legends, 39, 128 Plančiūnienė, Regina, 65, 66, 83, 85 Plėštys, Rimantas, 54 Plungė, town, 67 Poderytė, Vanda, 59 poetry, xiii, 20, 30, 51, 115 Poland, 91, 230, 231 Polish, ethnicity, 16, 67, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 106, 176, 242 Polish, language, 93, 94n16, 95, 96 Polish occupation, 93, 95–97, 100n25 Polish rule, 91, 93, 94 Polish-Lithuanian relations, xv, 93, 97, 98, 102n26, 11 Polonization, 93, 94, 96 Portelli, Alessandro, 102 prayers, 10, 14, 76, 79, 83, 97, 177 parodies of, 19, 177 Prienai, town, 71, 233 Protestant faith, 189 Proust, Marcel, 12 proverb(s), xv, 134–171 application of, 156 borrowings of, 136, 147–150 contextual synonymity of, 143, 145 creator of, 134–168 English, 148, 151, 155 fund, xvi, 137, 146–148, 150, 167, 168 German, 148 in political rhetoric, 164–166

Index

Lithuanian, xvi, 134, 136, 139, 140, 145–147, 150–156, 165–168 pool of, 136, 139 quotes in, 134, 146–148, 165 reworkings of, 135, 140–142, 160, 162 Russian, 147, 151n36 traditional, 136–139, 143–147, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167 type of, 164 usage of, xvi, 134–136, 138, 139, 152–158, 161, 163–165, 167 proverbial expression, xvi, 134, 136, 146n30, 150, 157 proverbial sayings, 134n1, 137, 140, 146, 147, 149, 153n40, 154, 156, 157 Psalm about the Beauty of the Gudas Land, 42–43 Pskov, town, 71 Psykas, Andrius, 235 Pučkornė, village, 104 Puodžiai Lake, 40

R

Rabinovičius, Rokiškis, 189–190 Racėnaitė, Radvilė, xii radio, xvii, 72, 154, 156, 208, 214 Radviliškis, town, 64 Rakštienė, Kazimiera, 63 reburial, of deportee remains, xiii, 53, 60–62, 65, 67, 79, 82, 85 repressions, Soviet, xiii, 58, 91 Repšys, Petras, 89n2 respondent, 89n5, 174n17, 210, 214 Reznikov, Andrey, 140, riddle(s), ix, xi, 3–8, 23, 25, 243 Rietavas, town, xi, 3, 5, 6, 12n35, 15, 25 Ringaudai, village, 80 Röhrich, Lutz, 146n30 Rokiškis, town, 87 Roma ethnicity, people of, 148, 179, 181–183, 185, 200 romansai, 26 Romanticism, vii, viii, 154 Ross, Alison, 174 Russian(s), 11, 12, 21, 107, 108, 179, 195, 197, 198, 201, 206, 236 Russian Empire, 94n16, 103n31, 206 Russian Federation, 54, 55, 57, 77, 82, 86, 87 Russian language, 13, 21, 95n18, 147, 151, 152 Ryan, Kathryn M., 203

S

Sabaliauskienė, Rožė, 24 Sabonis, Arvydas, 209, 218

Sąjūdis, Lithuanian independence movement, 54, 73 Sakalas, Aloyzas, 145n28 Šakiai, town, 64n29, 65 Sartori, Giovanni, 22 satire, 139, 141, 159, 160, 180, 191, 216 Sauka, Donatas, 5 Sauka, Leonardas, 117 Savukynas, Virginijus, 96, 180, 184, 188–189 Second World War, xiv, 11, 14, 47n65, 68, 72, 91 Šeduva, town, 64, 66 semantic(s), 140, 142, 143, 147, 149, 173 Šėta, town, 65, 66 Shushenskaya district, 65 Shuster, Kim, 74–75 Šiauliai, town, 127n33 Siberia, xiii, 52–54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63–65, 67–75, 81–84, 105, 116, 125 deportation to, 52, 104, 105 repatriation of deportee remains from, xiii, xviii, 52–87 Šilalė, town, 18 Šilutė, town, 22, 80, 86 Simėnas, Antanas, 58 Sirutienė, Ona, 75 Sirutis, Jonas, 74–75 Šiulė, 21, 21n65, 22 Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, Gražina, 173, 201 Skuodas, town, 69, 86, 87 Slančiauskas, Matas, 131 Šlekonytė, Jūratė, xv Šluota (The Broom), satirical magazine, 190, 191, 193 social status, of people, xvii, 93, 122, 175, 180, 186, 201, 205, 206, 208 Sokolov, Iurii, 243 Soviet occupation, xiii–xiv, 21, 85, 91, 106 Soviet Union, 28, 45, 56, 58, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 199 sports, xvii, 210, 211, 212, 214–217, 222, 229, 231, 236, 242, 243 sports sociology, 236 Stanoev, Stanoy, 215 stereotypes, ix, xvii, 173–175, 179, 185, 189, 203, 206, 207, 215, 243 cultural, 173, 174 ethnic, 196 social, 178 stereotypical thinking, 109, 186, 187, 204, 206–208, 214 storytelling, 119–122, 124, 127, 131, 133 stribai, 14, 24

269

270

Index

stribokai, 19 Stundžienė, Bronė, 35, 118, 124n20, 126n29, 127n33, 128n34 subjectivity, xiv, 92, 102, 110 Švenčionėliai, town, 123 Švenčionys, town, 96, 124n20, 126n29 Sverdiolas, Arūnas, 38 Svilas, Stasys, 76 swear words, 162, 164 Sydow, Carl Wilhelm von, 4, 9 symbolic burial, 70–72

T

taboo, 178, 187–189, 196, 199, 205, 206, 208 Tadzikistan, 57 Taïeb, Emmanuel, 243 Tal’yany, village, 63, 74, 86, 87 Tautosakos darbai (Folklore Studies), research journal, 117 television, xii, xvii, 22, 26, 142n15, 154, 156, 194, 208, 210 Telšiai, town, 15 textbooks, 154 Tilvytis, Teofilis, 190 Tit-Ary, village, 55, 68, 69, 76, 79, 80, 86 Tolvaiša, Stasys, 75 Tomsk region, 53, 82 Topophilia, 39n28 tradition, vii, viii, x, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii in a changing world, 1–111 and modernity, 153–166 traditional folk culture, vii, 44 traditional folklore and modernity, 113–243 transformation, xii, xv, 26, 50, 51, 238, 240 trauma, xii, 28 traumatic experience, 29, 107 Tremtinys (Deportee), newspaper, 59, 75 trickster, 173, 182, 201, 202 Trofimovsk, island, 54, 86 Tsentral’naia Tochka, locality, 82 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 39n28 Tungut, locality, 65

U

Udrija cemetery, 64 Ukmergė region, 94n16 Uluzhai Gorge, 72 Ungursky, village, 55 United States, 116, 154, 237 urbanization, 28, 45, 64 Urbonienė, Skaidrė, 43 Uspaskich, Viktor, 145n27 Užuperkasis, village, 99, 100, 106

V

Vaitkevičienė, Daiva, xiii, 26 Valkininkai, town and parish, xiv, 91–98, 101, 103–111 Varėna district, 91 Varniai, town, 23 Vėlius, Norbertas, 8, 116 Venckūnas, Valius, 200 verbal expression, 90, 133, 174 verbal form of ritual, x, xiv, 85 Videikienė, Aniceta, 67 Viekšniai, town, 23, 118, 128n34, 132 Viik, Tõnu, 32 Vilnius, capital city, 65, 72, 80, 127, 215, 229, 233, 235, 238, 239 Vilnius region, 91, 93–96, 231, 231, Polish-Lithuanian conflict in, 102n26 Vilnius University, 30 Vinokurova, Natalia, 116 Voigt, Vilmos, 119 Vorkuta, town, 84 Vyčius, village, 86 Vytautas Church in Kaunas, 70 Vytautas Magnus University, 135, 174, 189, 212 Vytautas Magnus War Museum, 64n29, 67n38, 70n46, 83n78, 85n87 Vytautas the Great, 20 Vyžintas, Arūnas, 75

W

Warsaw, 95,96 Wienker-Piepho, Sabine, 5 writing, xii, 19, 20, 22, 30, 31, 41, 42, 48, 49, 153 written culture, 153 Wrzesiński, Łukasz, 242

Y

Yakutia republic, xiii, 54, 55, 57, 62, 86 Yiddish, language, 21n65, 218 Yun-Yuga gulag cemetery, 65

Z

Zaikauskienė, Dalia, xv, xvi Zalanskas, Petras, 29, 31, 36, 41–44 Žalgiris, basketball team, 209, 211, 215, 229–231, 233, 234, 236 Zauerveinas, Jurgis, 147 Žeimena River, 123 Žemaitija, ethnographic region, 3, 7n13, 15, 16, 30, 31 Žibinskaitė, Eglė, 211