Context N°21
A culture is no better than its woods
—W. H. Auden
For a language that came late to literacy, and that is used by a people whose nation has historically experienced only sporadic independence, Lithuanian—closely related to just one other living tongue and famous as the carrier of salient traces of an ancient Indo-European lexicon—is making up for lost time with a profusion of great prose.
From several centuries after the publication of the first volume in Lithuanian only tens of books were published in the language, most of them abroad and many for religious purposes. The Lithuanian poet and scholar, Tomas Venclova, writes that as late as the mid-nineteenth century, his was “a language virtually devoid of any literary tradition—a language considered close to extinction, or, in any case, bound to remain an obscure local dialect. Lithuanian literature, for all practical purposes, was limited to a small number of devotional and linguistic books.” Prose works up to the twentieth century were commonly, if not folklore, stories based on fables and tales of rural life.
Lithuania shared much of its history with Poland and consequently the region has produced an auxiliary body of Polish literature. Indeed the opening line of the Polish national poem, which every Polish schoolchild learns by heart, reads: “Lithuania! My homeland! Thou art like health to me!” The world of the author of that proud incantation, Adam Mickewicz, was defined by the winding streets of Wilno, and so, generations later, by Czeslaw Milosz; both regretted knowing little about the Lithuanian language and literature. (Two novels by a fine Polish writer from Vilnius, Tadeusz Konwicki, are available from Dalkey Archive).
Today about four million people speak the language of this thickly wooded Baltic country which, though roundly Catholic, is proud of being among the last Europeans to convert from paganism. A strong connection to, and knowledge of, the traditionally subsistence-level way of life pervades a national consciousness marked by half a century of Soviet rule. Lithuanian authors emerged from the years of Soviet censorship eager to employ the modernist styles and themes they had only read in samizdat. It was common to publish fiction in the “Aesopian” mode of hidden meanings popular all over the Soviet Union. The writer and poet Herkus Kunčius once claimed he could not write prose under the Soviet regime; his first novel was published in 1996.
Lithuanian writers living in exile, with the full spectrum of literary freedoms at their fingertips, took a different path. Circulated clandestinely during the Soviet occupation, the works of these writers once had a strong influence on Lithuanian fiction produced in situ. Today their importance has been eclipsed by foreign classics now widely available in translation.
In a relatively new country with a small but attentive reading public, young writers benefit from early exposure and a highly localized system grant distribution. This infrastructure of support for writers is an inextricable part of today’s Lithuanian publishing. The Lithuanian Republic’s Fund for Sport and Culture regularly subsidizes the cost of publishing independent writers’ books (which, in Lithuania, are handsomely made). The Ministry of Culture also helps cover expenditures of the translation of local works into other languages. Literary journals can be found at any news kiosk and last year a major newspaper, Lietuvos Rytas, offered a series of books of Lithuanian and world literature classics in translation. Most impressive of all is the headquarters of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. Situated in a beautiful building in downtown Vilnius, members meet daily in their own well-lit café whose bar boasts five beers on tap and a min-fridge full of pre-chilled vodka.
Posthumous Pantheon
Three authors widely regarded as Lithuania’s best and most influential prose writers passed away in first years of this century. The most recent tragedy, which is still regarded as a great loss to the literary community, was Jurga Ivanauskaitė’s death in February, 2007 after a long battle with cancer. Ivanauskaitė, who published her first popular collection of stories, The Year of the Lilies of the Valley (Palanučių metai; 1985) at the age of 24, was known for her free-spoken sex scenes and despondent characters. Her books are bestsellers and printed in several editions. A prolific storywriter, poet and essayist, Ivanauskaitė became active in the Tibetan liberation movement late in life. Her novel Gone with the Dreams (Sapnų nublokšti; 2000) is set in Tibet, and her critical travelogues from India and China were collected and published shortly after her death.
Ričardas Gavelis, who passed away in August of 2002, also incorporated eastern themes into work, but brought them back to the Lithuanian setting. His last novel, The Life of Sun-Tzu in the Sacred Town of Vilnius (Sun-Tzu gyvenimas šventame Vilniaus mieste; 2003), was well received and seen as his swan song. The work consists of linked non-narrative chapters about a man imbued with the philosophy of Sun-Tzu. The author of six novels and three volumes of stories, Gavelis is best known for his novel, Vilnius’ Poker (Vilniaus Pokeris; 1989), published on the cusp of Lithuanian independence. In this bitter cityscape, four voices give their own accounts of a mysterious murder. Gavelis’ style can be detached—one Lithuanian friend described it as “cruel”—and is widely considered to be a product of, and response to, the psychological ravages of the Soviet period.
Jurgis Kunčinas, who died in December 2002, is best known for his experimental novel of love, Tūla (1993). Like another of his works, the earlier Blanchisserie, or Žverynas-Užupis (Blanchisserie, arba Žverynas-Užupis; 1993), Tūla is an ode to the gritty and inspiring countercultural enclave of Vilnius called Užupis. Here, people considered outsiders by Soviet authorities once congregated, especially in the USSR’s later periods. Kunčinas’ last novel, posthumously published as Pjūti Fjūūt! Or the Manor of Untruths (Pjūti Fjūūt! arba netiesų dvaras; 2004), also follows the lives of drug users and others at society’s fringes. The works of Kunčinas, along with Gavelis and Ivanauskaitė, are important documents of changing political and social attitudes in modern Lithuania, from the inescapable hardships as a communist state to the first years of freedom, and the latter’s trappings.
Philosophical Preoccupations
One of Lithuania’s most popular young writers is Sigitas Parulskis, a prolific essayist and poet whose novel Three Seconds of Heaven (Trys sekundės dangaus; 2004), solidified his place in the contemporary canon. Parulskis, who lectures on creative writing at his alma mater of Vilnius University, has recently alternated publishing books of existential essays and collections of terse, ironic short stories that read much like the former genre, but peppered with roughly sketched characters. Parulskis contributed a chapter to curious compilation of “improvised” essays called I Offer to Shoot the Plot (Siužetą siūlau nušiauti; 2001), edited by the revered poet Sigitas Geda and drolly advertised on the cover as a novel. Lithuanian fiction writers like Parulskis are not only in conversation with local literary critics but also willing to ply their own genre to directly address the questions of existence and violence that make up the modern philosophers’ bread-and-butter. (Geda, who briefly served as an MP in the Lithuanian parliament, went on trial for stabbing his own daughter in 2006).
The market for a blend of edgy, essayistic philosophy and fiction is no more apparent than in the case of Kristupas Sabolius. Sabolius, who holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Vilnius University and publishes academic articles in his field, is best known in Vilnius as the founder and editor-in-chief of a popular weekly art and society pamphlet with the tongue-in-cheek title, Pravda. In 2006 Sabolius published Bad Book (Bloga knyga; hard to say with the tongue still in the cheek), a “novel” consisting of interconnected stories that rehash basic philosophical concepts. Illustrated with cute line drawings (not by the author) and riddled with pop-cultural references, Bad Book has the look of a young adult work, and deserves to be taken more seriously than it is.
Jewish Heritage
Until the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in Lithuanian villages, often beating to a different drum than the largely agrarian lifestyle of ethnic Lithuanians. Today, only a few thousand Jews remain in Lithuania, but the community can claim some of the country’s most well regarded writers as its own.
Icchokas Meras narrowly survived a group execution as a Yiddish-speaking boy in 1941, when he was adopted by a Lithuanian family. His novella, The Yellow Patch (Geltonas Lopas; 1960), deals with that experience. In 1971, Meras published the novel that would lead Soviet authorities to pressure him to leave the USSR for Israel the following year. Striptease, or Paris-Rome-Paris (Striptizas, arba Paryžius-Roma-Paryžius) was too rife with allegory for the powers-that-be. Since emigrating, Meras has continued to produce some of the best short stories in the Lithuanian language. Although recognized and lauded by the Lithuanian literary establishment, Meras is practically unknown to readers in the one country where he could be read widely in the original. His 2004 collection, A Mid-Way Stop (Stotelė Vidukelėj), published by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union, showcases his impressionistic and rhetorical style in stories that run only a few pages long.
Markas Zingeris, whose first language was Lithuanian, rather than Yiddish, also manages to find an outlet in an imaginary French capital, in Round the Fountain, or a Little Paris (Aplink Fontaną, arba Mažasis Paryžius; 1998). His more recently published novel, Playing Duo (Grojimas dviese; 2003), also has a strongly cosmopolitan theme, with sections set across time periods in Berlin, on Broadway, and in the author’s home city of Kaunas during its role as capital of independent Lithuania between the World Wars. Having written everything from lyric poetry to soap opera screenplays, Zingeris, whose brother is a respected member of the Lithuanian parliament, can move through genres as quickly as he does through decades and time zones. Zingeris is known for his sardonicism and, when asked once about whether the comparison between his writings and Philip Roth’s was valid, suggested that they both may have inherited something of the black humor famous to Eastern European Jewry.
Lithuanian fiction today challenges the mores of a literary community only recently manumitted from a rigid set of principals determined by its government. Young writers are eager to overcome this history, and hold up the homegrown avant-garde master Jonas Mekas as exemplary. Mekas, who left Lithuania in 1944 and is best known as a filmmaker and the founder of Anthology Film Archive at 2nd and 2nd in Manhattan, is an idol to young Lithuanian artists. A “Jonas Mekas Center” was founded in the capital last year, and it was a great disappointment to many when he failed to show up at the 2007 Vilnius Book Fair, where he was to promote the publication of his dream journals My Nights (Mano naktys; 2007). The influence of Mekas’ films and diaristic scribblings can be clearly seen everywhere from the annual compendium of new Lithuanian photography to the unique and moving illustrated stories by Rokas Pralgauskas. By centering the avant-garde, Lithuania puts itself at the fore of the world’s most creative and experimental literary movements. If only the likes of Milosz and his ilk could have been exposed to it.
