autumn / winter 2009 no 26 the vilnius Review new writing from Lithuania

Transcription

1 autumn / winter 2009 no 26 the vilnius Review new writing from Lithuania

2 the vilnius review autumn / winter 2009 no 26

3 editor-in-chief Eugenijus Ališanka english language editor Joseph Everatt designer Jokūbas Jacovskis translators Eugenijus Ališanka, Diana Bartkutė, Joseph Everatt, Aldona Matulytė, Medeinė Tribinevičius, Ada Valaitis The chapters books and authors, new books and events were supported by the Lithuanian Media Support Foundation. This publication was also supported by the Lithuanian Culture Support Foundation 2009 The Vilnius Review Vilnius vį Mėsinių g. 4, lt Vilnius, Lithuania Tel: zurnalvilnius@takas.lt issn

4 the autumn / winter 2009 no 26 vilnius Review Editorial 4 books and authors An Ironic Epos by Elena Baliutytė 7 Aorist by Donatas Petrošius 10 Philosophical Thought in Poetry by Neringa Mikalauskienė 19 In the Doorway by Jonas Zdanys 22 A Coming of Age by Joseph Everatt 31 Lenin s Head on a Platter by Laima Vincė 34 Life is Sweet by Valdemaras Kukulas 53 Fine Weather in the North by Henrikas Algis Čigriejus 55 the view from here Just an Intoxicated Backwater? by Jūratė Sprindytė 60 New Books 68 Events 80 books published in

5 e ditorial The year 2009 is drawing to an end. It has been a strange year, perhaps the strangest of the recent decade. Lithuania is celebrating the 1,000th anniversary of the first mention of its name, and the 20th anniversary of the reestablishment of its independence. Vilnius is celebrating its festival as European Capital of Culture. However, the fog of the crisis overshadows the fireworks of the festivals. The festive mood is suppressed by an anxiety that is sometimes well-founded and sometimes simply rising like dregs from the depths of life. Looking at it closer, it seems as if there is no need to worry. An optimist would say that we have to rejoice, since not all of us are unemployed yet, not all of us are threatened with starvation, not all of us have emigrated yet. But, it seems to me, the Lithuanian nation is a nation of pessimists, because it is first in the world according to the number of suicides. The Lithuanians tend to count their failures, rather than their blessings. Therefore, I feel uneasy, too, when I think about what the future has in store for our literary life. My head teems with lots of questions. Assistance provided to books written by Lithuanian authors is decreasing catastrophically. Some publishers that are important to our culture are on the verge of going bankrupt. It is not known how many cultural publications will remain after next year s budget has been approved. The Writers Club has been organising literary evenings all the autumn; however, it cannot turn on the heating, because it has no money to pay for it. Listeners sit with their hats and coats on all through the evening; they freeze, like in the years of the The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

6 blockade. There is nobody to complain to, because there is only one answer: who is better off today? It is the simple truth, but it does not warm us up, neither in a literal nor a figurative sense. There is only one thing to do: to radically change the way we think. Remember, in the end, that the word crisis first of all does not mean unemployment or bankruptcy, but a certain turning point, a transformation, and a change in forms. Strange as it may seem, literature has already started to long for change. In recent years, a certain calm, a deceptive lull before the storm, has already been felt. As is well known, changes in literature do not necessarily coincide with social turning points. For example, at the beginning of the last decade, after Lithuania reestablished its independence, literature found itself almost in a vegetative state. What is today s crisis going to bring? This year really is strange. When you come to think of it, it is as if nothing bad happened. In the summer I climbed the Alps in Switzerland and France. In the autumn I suffered from sciatica, and had some buzzing in the ears. There were also days when I was good to others, and there were days when I was not. September this year was unbelievably warm, like summer. October surprised us with its severity. A storm even tore down the capping of the chimney of my house in the country. When you put everything together, all the pluses and minuses, the result is quite satisfactory. Somewhere around zero, like the temperature outside today, as I am writing these lines. But when you come to think of it, it is this zero that is most likely to cause the most anxiety. Perhaps we should somehow strike with a knife across the entire keyboard? A strange year, and the thoughts are strange, too. Maybe it is different for others. Eugenijus Ališanka

7 Donatas Petrošius Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas

8 books and authors An Ironic Epos By Elena Baliutytė Aoristas (The Aorist) is the second book by Donatas Petrošius (b. 1978). Having chosen a Greek word meaning unbounded, without a horizon for the title, the author explains on the flyleaf that in Indo-European languages this word used to refer to an extinct form of the past tense. Probably, bearing in mind the semantic paradox of the notion aorist (boundless/finite), the poet used it to define his own concept of poetic time: All that was or happened at least once is always. Such a philosophy of eternal and static time can be discerned in various planes of this book: its structure, the motifs of the poems, and its poetics. For instance, quite a few poems stand out in their archaic form, due to the imitation of the rhythmic sound of syntactic intonational versification or hexameter, resorting to inversion (the verb is moved to the end of the line, the attribute comes after the determinative). Such a poem resembles the dignified narrative of the Classical epos, but this intonational dignity is usually contrasted with the low contents defining mundane routine. The effect of (self)irony arising from this discrepancy conveys the author s characteristic attitude. Epos is the world of a social environment, while the lyrical subject of Petrošius poetry is the reserved individual, possibly with some traits of autism, constantly encountering the paradoxes of the world or of the perception of the world. The narrator of the poems feels imprisoned in the world, in his body and his language. Yet it is not that he is in search of an exit from this solitary cell with the help of his imagination; more than anything, he is rationally analysing the situation. You are a relation between yourself and nothing, an incidental name: Aorist. 6 7 Books and Authors

9 Petrošius is a creator of intellectual poetry. In his poems, he reflects on essential issues of existence; yet he is free of pathos or any open emotion. Here, the lyrical content is expressed through epic form, narrative, and everyday situations that usually acquire a parabolic and symbolic meaning in the poem. The second chapter, in which excellent poems on the model of an isotopic narrative are collected, is called Įžeminimai (Groundings). A similar double narrative is characteristic of the works with other subjects. For example, in the poem Misleading Movements, concepts from sport are employed to speak about writing poetry. In this collection, the long and the short texts (of which there are fewer) are held by the language, the complex relations between words, semantic openings, passings, gaps and paradoxes. In the fifth chapter, which includes the most social poems in the collection, the manner of speaking and the posture remain the same: a cosmic memory of reality. Although in the majority of the poems the narrator is an excellent interlocutor to himself, there are works in which this total reflexiveness does not work. I have in mind the poems about the stories of two young people that contain a dialogue (even if it is asymmetrical at times), and we replaces I (this is in the title of one of the poems). The routine of objectless abstract time is replaced by the warm and soft colours of summer, the adventurous mood of holidays, and the dynamics of space. The second part of the collection includes poetry that, according to the author, emerged from the misuse of home cinema. The author calls himself a cinema fanatic, and the 22 poems in this part are all named after films. This does not mean, however, that they interpret the plots of films: the author was writing poetry at the time, and, very naturally, the poetry includes signs of and reflections on the films being viewed. Here, too, Petrošius finds it important to sort out complicated relations with the other, and also with himself as the other, to record the paradoxes of creation, the way reality and poetry (and possibly the other arts) pass one another, the meaning of fiction, and the like ( Mirror, Nouvelle Vague, Lost in Translation ). He is again a very amusing narrator, constructing with ingenuity the multi-semantic plots of autobiographical stories ( Mulholland Dr, Stalker ). Petrošius book is very consistent, conceptual and with a thought-through structure. It is made up of two parts: the first has seven chapters, with seven poems in each. According to the author s design (which is revealed by the double numbering of the poems on the contents page), the centre of the first part of the collection is the seven-part poem Aoristas in the very middle of Part One. It is preceded by 24 poems, and followed by the same number. The most curious thing about Aoristas is that is it made up of quotations from all those 48 poems. It reiterates their The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

10 central motifs, and seems to realise in practice the declared model of poetic time. The present is a meeting place for the past and the future. According to the general scheme, it would be close to the model of pagan time, yet the author does not digress into contexts of ethnic content: to him, it is the pure shape of things, the very process of thinking and its paradoxes, that is relevant (the poem There is Nothing that would not Be ). It seems that the being of the past in the present and reccurrences interest the author as the paradoxical reality of language, because he finds writing back to emptiness, here and now, the most important. In its constructive manner and specifically distorted or directed logic of thinking, Petrošius poetry at times resembles the work of Aidas Marčėnas, a modern classic of Lithuanian poetry. Donatas petrošius Aoristas Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009, 136 p.

11 Aorist By Donatas Petrošius The Taste of Water run as far as your legs will carry before you awaits the sea she is that which begins each day anew from her even lights find a line on the shore stones and all those other reptiles and slugs climb out, awaited by a pack on shore with sickles and cigarette butts between their teeth The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

12 you have to run but take some water the sea is not potable maybe she has been cried into by unhappy maidens maybe a tanker capsized no one can humanly explain why the sea is not the taste of water run, but be careful all sorts of things happen beside big water to some people Aphrodite emerges from the foam, others are totally deafened by sirens run, pillar of salt, run Books and Authors

13 Ghost Dog; Way of the Samurai My first dog was brown and wild. While I domesticated the force of gravity, practiced taking my first steps, he would work himself loose from his chain and run away. And one time he didn t come back, his name was Bear. My second dog was black, which is why I called him Bear. He was too weak to escape his chain. He howled whenever he heard our neighbour play the concertina. That s why I learned nothing from that dog. He died near his doghouse on April twelfth, during Gagarin s Easter, and one of my grandmothers (who has practically nothing to do with this discourse) explained that we were fighting a star war and if the Americans were to drop a star on us we would all freeze. I was so naïve, I believed her. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

14 It was impossible not to see that my third dog would be a legend, which is why I named him Bear. He had all the best qualities of a warrior and one fault he was too independent: he would disappear, reappearing only when it got light. He would often leave me alone, exposed from behind and only half-able to fulfill that secret command to protect myself from the shadows and the tall-growing plants, wielding a black plastic pipe in lieu of the sharpest sword. I asked the I Ching: will I ever be ordained a warrior? The most positive answer (No. 5) tumbled out, but nothing changed. And it was only after many years passed that I recognized from my actions that everything I knew in life I learned from my dog how to escape a collar, how to carry out unimaginable maneuvers, how to remain invisible, unintelligible Books and Authors

15 Coffee and Cigarettes How can you be so sure that God is like smoking if in an enclosed space one person lights up, everyone passively smokes; if in the same space one person prays it means that everyone will be saved. If He exists for someone that means He exists for everyone, which is why smoke and foam rise above everything. The smell of smoke seeps into any kind of fabric and overwhelms even the most expensive perfume, soaks through the thickest skin into the deepest convictions. Close your eyes and you will sense that foam is tasteless. Cheap coffee foam and champagne foam some time has to pass before you can sense it there s no difference, taste discerns, God levels: He is like the flavourless foam, like the odour of the film booth cement floors and gummy carpets just hope He won t shock you if out of curiosity you stick your finger between the gear teeth of that projector, the one that shows this black and white reality. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

16 Lost in Translation I m not blind which is why I cannot control my hands my fingers try to fill in the whitest surfaces with combinations of bilingual punctuation so that none of the dividing marks take on meaning don t count I cannot cease writing you, though I m swept off my feet into English out of inertia into Polish with errors from the heavens my snow is transformed into Russian I walk along both rapidly melting Arbats in the capital of this empire of foreign feelings having taken along a double mirror so I wouldn t have to turn to see if you are following as I prepare to transplant to the plains of my birth I ll learn to understand exactly half of the language of the Jelgava Latvians half the Latvians in Jelgava don t understand my language and that makes me wander unconsciously into your horizon my love my poetry again you make me search for a way to extend eternity Books and Authors

17 Not Many of Us you used to frequent the national library for studious reasons, would make notes about the most important events of this epoch taken from the records pasted into the registration pages and you saw how this was no longer very important to anybody you would wander into the theatre on Ozo Street where they showed the most important films of your life and you d look around and see to whom they were still important you could count them on your fingers you never missed a single internationally important match, screaming yourself hoarse every time later you d watch the image on the TV screen your songs of triumph and cheers to frighten your enemy barely audible one of those rare times when you liked a concert the crowd numbered less than the musicians playing on stage... at first there are masses and you don t even notice how they disperse, cannot grasp where to The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

18 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner choose too fast a pace, or try to cover a distance you have never attempted before and you will feel how the air rarifies and you can no longer get out even one word in the end all language will be meaningless and all around you mute optimists exactly the same as you catching their breath running as if they know where they are going but it only looks that way running you no longer need to know anything because the longer you run the further away the finish Translated by Medeinė Tribinevičius

19 Jonas Zdanys Photograph by Vladas Braziūnas

20 books and authors Philosophical Thought in Poetry By Neringa Mikalauskienė The poet and translator Jonas Zdanys was born in Connecticut in the USA in He studied English literature at Yale and New York, and has published 11 poetry collections in English, and only two, Dūmų stulpai (Columns of Smoke, 2002) and Tarp dury (In the Doorway, 2008), in Lithuanian. Thus, it seems that Zdanys does not feel so much the expressive possibilities of the Lithuanian language, but is capable of joining words into unexpectedly meaningful formations in which the philosophical thought overshadows the beginning of the feeling. His poetry is intellectual, and speaks of nothingness, the beginning of beginnings of the mortal, the abyss even emptier than the abyss of chaos. According to the philosopher Arvydas Šliogeris, the word Nothingness does not recognise euphemisms, metaphors or metonymies. It is a word without synonyms or compromises, a word-absolute that shuffles all linguistic and metaphysical cards, and even those of everyday speaking. Zdanys poetry can be described in a similar way: the cards of everyday physics and of existential metaphysics are shuffled here. His poems are joined into cycles, the colours of his world are cold, sharp and painful. The key colours, black, red and white, are found in each cycle, while all three, in different shapes (night, snow, a red bird), are concentrated in the poem Pro langą: tamsios figūros ir vienas raudonas paukštis miesto centre žiemą (Out of the Window: Dark Figures and One Red Bird in the City Centre in Winter). Yet it is Books and Authors

21 the shining white that dominates other poems. Such seeing is akin to Sigitas Geda s look at the world in his collections 26 rudens ir vasaros giesmės (26 Autumn and Summer Songs, 1972) or Mėnulio žiedai (Blossoms of the Moon, 1977) published more than 30 years ago. It is no surprise that Zdanys has translated some of Geda s poetry. These poets could create a peculiar poetic dialogue. If, in Geda s poetry, life in relics of the Ice Age, a stone, chalk, a shell, is just beginning, and everything around is bubbling with an intense shining process, Zdanys world is already stiffening and dying in salt crystals. It is an old, mournful, poetic world of black ribbons and immobile dust. In this world, the subject feels like a wedge of light cutting deep in the wall. The metaphor of the world as a wall is somewhat unexpected, but is explained in the philosophical context of Zdanys poems: while thinking of the world, the human penetrates it with his thought, and fragments it until at last it starts looking like a mirage or the product of the imagination. In the world of mirages of human existence, the category of time is the most tangible: time is the only flesh and blood. Even a certain matter of time is born: it is heavy like bones or dry like paper. It is not surprising. In philosophy, time is traditionally perceived as possessing a destructive power. Zdanys relates time to water, too, and this is close to Heraclitus maxim about not stepping in the same river twice. Relations with another person, the beloved, are desperate, and arise from the appeal-question: Do you understand? Do you understand now? However, understanding is impossible, even in everyday life. This is symbolised by the gesture of a sign scrawled with a finger on a sheet, which cannot be translated into any understandable language. Here, everyone can only speak of oneself. In the cycle Moteris ant tilto (Woman on the Bridge), an encounter is not so much reality as a seeing or dream-like vision. The lines get broken, but the reader can put a plot together: a strange woman met on a bridge is taken home, and the story of two people is developed in an uninhabited room, airless silence of the room, a room without windows. Sometimes, the woman gets up at night and goes to the bridge. She seems to invite the subject of the poems to cross the border that separates, to him, familiar yet isolated space from an alien space, in which the contours of the visible world disappear. The crossing of the border is dangerous: the subject approaches the philosophical state of nothingness, but cannot experience it to the end, because he is alive and living. Yet, while he is alive, the human has the right to be unfinished: The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

22 a creature of a sketch / living on air / a sign of some other little thing. This is the state of being in the doorway, the title of Zdanys poetry collection, and the key to his poetry. Jonas Zdanys Tarpdury Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008, 104 p.

23 In the Doorway By Jonas Zdanys from SALT 2. The voices stopped too soon. The words I hear are not shouted down from the sky but come at night like frost on the grass, like salt that dries on sea rocks in the air that remains when the tide goes out. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

24 How hard is it to believe this, tie up loose ends, understand the laws of the universe, feel the ecstasy that radiates from the tips of the fingers and makes the windows gleam? Explanations do not interest me, the tumult of discovered remains, names that can be crossed off a list. I hunch my shoulders and wait, the instant frozen and abstracted. The stairs creak, there is silence. 4. The walls of the house peel away. The days are numbered. Dust between the fingers, darkness between the lines, a tired voice in the air. I open the roof, see nothing whole, watch the door to heaven close. You can t get rid of the skin you are stuck in, the body unexpectedly heavy, the smell of the salt of the earth in your clothes and hair. At a time like this it s best to keep quiet, belong to no one, wake alone, fall slowly through the boards of the floor like old snow. The current slides: I know it s so Books and Authors

25 from REFLECTIONS IN GOD S MIRROR 5. So many names, the night like snow, the eyes at zero. My mouth cut by imperfect truths, the hollow echo of the absolute body, the hunger of cold rain. No way home, from this moment on, a vision of higher things. Shaken loose, an endless scattering, the name of silence darkening the roof, the light at the end of light. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

26 9. It was a moment in a dry corner standing in dry air no moon in the sky the wind shifted south sharper than a sword time was horizontal an overturned glass on the table outside the sky fell vast and hollow as green fire I have come to a still center I rise and try to walk this is how all beginnings come as the saw of night keeps cutting as the needle of morning threads Books and Authors

27 from THE WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE 11. When time drifts like a heavy truth across the bridge and the sky comes down and covers me completely I am held by nothing and hold on to nothing, see nothing inside of nothing, sit bewildered like the man who wondered all his life and discovered and then forgot the hidden meaning of things set loose in the landscapes of sheer earth in moments of no importance that spill themselves like dry leaves and move from one stillness to another, to the indecipherable taste and bitter dust of dry seasons kept from decay. Revelation, intuition, inspiration: it would be better to be an empty mind, the dull and dimly lit, than to live with the weariness of this uncertainty, The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

28 to be neither still nor in motion, neither force nor will, not dream or guess, but everything at once, the eternal now, where nothing returns and nothing repeats, searching for the metaphysics of the spirit not the small realities of the body, the swift-colored thing that passes in cancelled desires and the rising of the dead, not knowing and not keeping, dissolved to a drift of smoke as the moon swings dark and away and the sky withers and the ash falls. I have considered such things often, have fallen with the weight of things everywhere and unobserved, have understood how it all begins: at night when the lights come on and life changes its face in every crevice and corner, I see her in the distance on the bridge breathing the last breath of dusk, pointing with unmistakable clarity to what we had come for as the wind shifts and darkness invades the day. 15. Tomorrow when the war ends when the moon seeps like dust through the crack in the door and draws the fictions of our souls Books and Authors

29 Tomorrow when we hang our lives in the attics of old houses and fragments of time are like a knocking on the wall Tomorrow when we see dead faces in the mirror on the pillow and feel the brevity of our days in the window and water below Tomorrow when we repeat the sounds of the letters of our names and touch the thinnest edge of the voice of God Tomorrow when the haze in me lifts when every hour is mine and the song of the infinite is like a silence of the heart I will empty the drawers undress bathe breathe go out sketch the anguish of regret redeem myself feel the pain of separation complain softly rise up float across the skin of the earth feel the scales thicken fan my wings pause stare out into the distance render myself into words let go of myself let go of you be stunned astounded free of feeling be turned to stone see the long night ahead sleep dream wake wait until tomorrow The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

30 16. That year there was no spring. After winter came winter. The air grows dry and light by late December as the heaviness of fall slips away into the folding corners of the sky. The day passes uneasily, the simplicity of the moment passes, and time flows like a snapped twig on the current under the bridge. I am whole inside. I speak a language of distance and perspective, though I have no words to explain why my bones grow cold. I can run away, emptied of secrets, utter my life in words no one else understands, or sit in the corner with my mouth shut. I am beyond name and form, stillness and movement together, and when I see God I will be very small. It is a confession I am making here: I am asleep with no sense of time and dream that the moment of waking is at hand. The flow has ceased. Winter is coming again. A cold wind whistles across the bridge. A thin sheet of ice covers my face.

31 Laima Vincė Photograph by Vladas Braziūnas

32 books and authors A Coming of Age By Joseph Everatt Exactly 20 years ago this year, on 23 August 1989, people from across the Baltic States lined up along an empty road and held hands together, forming a human chain that stretched between their three capitals, in order to show their solidarity in their quest for change and national independence. In that huge linear crowd stretching from Vilnius through Riga to Tallinn stood Laima Vincė, an American student of Lithuanian descent, who was just finishing a year s study in Vilnius. She had arranged her stay much earlier in 1987, merely with the aim of studying here to become a translator, and arrived just as the Singing Revolution, as it has come to be known, was breaking out. This way, she unwittingly stepped into the centre of events in Lithuania just as the monolithic Soviet Union was beginning to sway. After the demonstration was over, as the crowd broke up and the people prepared to return home, two cars, racing to get back on to the road first, crashed into each other head on, leaving them both badly dented, and scattering broken glass around the field. The crowd let out one collective groan, writes Vincė. That image of the human chain sums up beautifully the social cohesion that is associated with the period that has since come to be known as Sąjūdis times. The crash, and the onlookers disappointment at it, illustrates well the subsequent disintegration. In the diary that she kept during her year in Lithuania, and which has been published appropriately 20 years after the event, Vincė recalls her participation in many of the ground-breaking events of Sąjūdis times that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But this is also a very personal book. She describes not only the demonstrations Books and Authors

33 and events she took part in, but also her impressions as a young American living in still-soviet Lithuania, and what it meant to her to discover her roots. Her first impressions of the failures of the communist system are particularly vivid. She describes the fear, the depressing pervasiveness of the ideology, the shortages of material goods, the crumbling infrastructure, the corrupt society, and family breakdown. She embodies it all in one convenient hate figure, Marius, who is a violent, manipulative and chauvinistic spiv. But Vincė met a lot of different people, and eventually she made a lot of friends. This gives her memoir a great deal of colour and variety. Since she already knew Lithuanian, she was able to engage directly with local people from the start. Like many wide-eyed students from the West who visited the Soviet Union, she seems to have had a knack of getting into interesting and often hazardous situations. At one point, she was drawn into an idealistic plan to make a group translation of George Orwell s novel 1984 (to give away the outcome here would spoil the diary for prospective readers). She later fell ill with appendicitis, and ended up in a hospital, promising to procure the necessary medicine for the doctor s husband s heart condition, and being made to share a needle for her injections with the patient in the next bed. This book is not just a description of the Soviet system on its last legs. It is also a major journey of self-discovery. The author shares with us thought-provoking reflections on her discovery of her homeland, on the differences between Eastern and Western values, on the differences between living in the homeland and living in the diaspora, and on the difficult task of trying to reconcile all of this. For instance, she recounts some of the multiple misunderstandings. When she attempted to pay someone a compliment, it was taken as an insult (a very familiar situation to this reviewer). She fell out with a close friend when the friend saw her unwrap a present of a jumper from America. She describes the seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers that separated her from others, and confesses how she yearned to feel included. As her year progressed, however, her experience broadened. The advice of her literature professor to travel all over the country, an idea she had dismissed at first, turned out not to be so irrelevant after all. Like the country in whose rapidly developing fate she was getting so closely involved, that year for her turned into a personal coming of age. Towards the end of the diary, the frequency of the entries reduces to only one or two a month. It is clear from this that she began to find her place at last, and it is also clear that she no longer saw any reason to confide her feelings so often in her diary, and consequently in us. Still, some glimpses of a new and much richer life come through. She made new friends. She joined a folk group. She travelled. She was swept up by the sense of common purpose that people experienced during The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

34 Sąjūdis times, by the sheer wholesomeness (no drinking, no violence) of the movement, by the clear focus, by the financial disinterestedness, and by the rediscovery of the national identity through folklore. She does not mention again the people she met when she first arrived. Material shortages do not seem to concern her any more. There is no longer the same fear of the authorities. Looking back now, already 20 years on, there was a glorious intensity to those times, a sense of daring, a sense of togetherness, a sense of standing on a threshold, that has since waned. This book conveys it all. The feeling even affected those of us who were not here at the time and who only watched the events unfolding on television in another country. We felt for and envied the Lithuanians their idealism, their single-mindedness and the rightness of their cause. This diary is a valuable first-hand account of events here that have had a lasting significance. As a rare speaker of fluent English in Lithuania at the time, Vincė was called on to act as an interpreter at political rallies. She interpreted for Vytautas Landsbergis when he gave an interview to the New York Times. She also worked as an interpreter at the first meeting of the Baltic Assembly in Tallinn. When the Soviet police broke up a demonstration on Cathedral Square in Vilnius she narrowly missed being beaten up. Compared to other memoirs which recall Sąjūdis times, it is a rather more personal and writerly account, detailing alongside the political events another story of her own personal development. In the intervening years, she has gone on to pursue her intended career as a translator, having already translated into English several collections of poetry, two anthologies of literature, and a non-fiction account of the postwar resistance struggle in Lithuania. At the same time, her own writing, including Lenin s Head and a book for children, has been translated into Lithuanian. Laima Vincė Lenin s Head on a Platter Vilnius, Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008, 185 p.

35 Lenin s Head on a Platter By laima Vincė One hour into the flight I was seated over the right wing. Gintarė sat close to the tail. When the seatbelt sign went off, I wandered over to chat. What bothered me most about America, Gintarė said, was that everyone eats well, even the dogs and cats. They even have their own aisle for food in the supermarket. Meanwhile, in my country you have to stand in line to buy one single stupid hot dog and sometimes you don t even get that much! Gintarė turned to gaze out the oval window. She had chin-length light brown hair and hazel eyes. Her features were delicate, perfect, like those of the angels in the renaissance tapestries at the Cloisters. Only, there was a hardness in her face, a hardness I d never seen in anyone I knew in America. Gintarė turned back towards me and asked, What is your stipend? A hundred rubles a month, I answered. A hundred rubles! she sputtered, Lithuanian students only get forty. No one gets a hundred rubles, no one, except bus drivers or maybe the professors themselves. Waiting at the Vilnius airport baggage claim This is what my mother said to me when I received the telegram: If you want to be a writer, you need to know a little hardship. And so here I am standing in The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

36 the Vilnius Airport baggage claim area with one suitcase and a missing backpack filled with everything I was warned I couldn t buy here clothing for four seasons, vitamins, cough syrup, antibiotics, and twelve packages of tampons enough to last the year. September 14, 1988 When I left the University it was raining. I decided to take a taxi instead of the trolleybus, then the bus, followed by the walk through the woods to my dorm. I waited in a long taxi line and when one finally came it turned out that three of us were going to Antakalnis, so we rode together. After the two other passengers got out, the driver asked me where I was from. I told him and we started to talk. He pulled over onto the side of the road and turned around in his seat. He began to talk about Sąjūdis and Laisvės Lyga. He said that a lot of people didn t trust Laisvės Lyga because they were going much too far much too quickly, demanding independence, refusing to cooperate with the Soviet structure. He said people thought the KGB might be supporting Laisvės Lyga to get them to incite the people into demonstrating openly and giving the Soviet authorities an excuse to crack down. That would undermine Sąjūdis, who was trying to work for more freedoms within the Soviet structure. The taxi driver pointed out that the people in Sąjūdis know how to work better with the Soviet system than the people in Laisvės Lyga. The people in Laisvės Lyga are mostly former political prisoners. They are outsiders. They don t know how to compromise. Then he spoke of the armed resistance fighters who fought the Soviets in a deadly game of hide and seek in the forests for ten years after the war had ended. He called the partisans, Holy People. We talked like this for a long time and then he drove me to my dorm. When I asked him what I owed him, he said, Nothing. Then he thought a moment and asked, Do you have any gum wrappers? My daughter collects them. Wait a moment, I said. I ran inside my dorm and up the stairs to my room, not bothering to stop and sign in. I dug around in my bags until I found packages of fruit striped gum wrapped in yellow, green, and red packaging the colors of the national flag. The Lithuanian flag was still illegal despite Gorbachev s recent loosening of control. I grabbed some packs of Lifesavers and Dentine too. I ran back downstairs, past the guard, and outside to the taxi. I passed it all through the driver s open window. Thank you, the driver gasped through tears, Thank you Books and Authors

37 September 26, 1988 When I signed in at the dorm reception last night, Ada, one of the guards, said to me, A nice young man has invited you to the theater. Who is he? I asked. I was hoping it was one of the students I d met a few times at the university. I don t know, Ada said cagily, but nice looking. Should I tell him you ll go? The theater? It was next to impossible to get tickets. I ll go, I said and didn t think twice. Always a mistake. The next day the young man arrived. I d never seen him before. His skin was too smooth. His hair too blond. His clothes too pressed. He d brought me flowers roses. I assumed the KGB sent him. Of course they sent him. I was naive to think I d be spared the ordeal of the KGB. The devil appears in a pleasant form, folk wisdom tells us. I should have known better. But then I thought, at least I ll get to go to the theater. I don t need to actually tell him anything. Just sit in the theater beside him. First we drank coffee at a café and there was the talk. I answered his questions carefully, trying to avoid saying too much, not allowing myself to get drawn into conversation. Then we walked to the theater. The usual milling crowd was not there in the lobby. The theater was dark. The street was empty. My date put a distraught look on his face and looked down at the tickets in his hand, Oh my, he said unconvincingly, I must have misread the dates. I m so sorry. How cheap! I thought, angry at myself, angry at him. What a wasted effort, sidestepping all those loaded questions all evening long just to get into the theater and they couldn t even provide real tickets! And then, I thought, there will be no more dates for me while I am here. I must let my hair go, my nails, forget about wearing make-up. September 29, 1988 There was a mitingas last night. This one hadn t been advertised in the press and there had been no posters around Vilnius. But I figured it would be like all the rest peaceful, with flags and songs. I d planned to meet the girls from Punskas at 5:45 beside the bell tower in Cathedral Square. At 5:45 I stepped off the trolley to find Cathedral Square blocked off by rows of soldiers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder holding Plexiglas shields before them. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

38 Photograph by Giedrius Pocius Vilnius Cathedral Lines of ambulances and buses blocked the narrow side streets. Mobs of people were shoving each other to get past. Even so, things seemed peaceful. Off in Cathedral Square there were the usual flags and songs. Somewhere, far away, a voice speaking through a megaphone drifted across the square. Someone called my name and I turned around. It was my friends. They told me the mitingas was happening in the park behind the Cathedral. Only, it would be hard to get there. They said we would go around through the Old City. We managed to get to the mitingas as it was ending. Laisvės Lyga was assembled. The hunger-striker, Petras Cidzikas, was on stage. There were the illegal tricolor flags everywhere. It was hard to make out what Terleckas, the leader of Laisvės Lyga, was saying through the megaphone. His words came out garbled and too loud. But we did hear a request that everyone present should go home quietly to show that our resistance was a peaceful one, a nonviolent resistance in the spirit of Ghandi and Martin Luther King. The crowd sang Lietuva Brangi and Lietuva Tėvynė Mūsų, patriotic songs, like church hymns, with soothing melodies. These were the songs we used to sing in America at Lithuanian summer camp. We usually sang them around the camp fire, before bedtime. Here the songs were illegal, anti-soviet. The lyrics were deemed capable of inciting revolt. You could end up in jail for singing these songs. During the post-war period, you could have been shot on the spot for singing them. Old women wiped away tears as they sang, but still the tears came, streaming down their Books and Authors

39 lined faces. They propped their placards on their elbows as they dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs. Many of these women had been exiled to Siberia. We began walking home. And then an interesting thing happened. Strangers in the crowd started talking to each other, telling each other their life stories. A woman came up to our little group and told us she was a dancer, that she d been a dancer her entire life, and that in her entire life she d never feared anything, that she was happy now that more people were finally speaking out for what was right. I saw another friend, Ligijius, standing with a group of students and ran over to say hello. Ligijius asked me if I d like to hear Sąjūdis speak at a closed session. I said I would. I had a tricolor flag with me. I pulled it out of my bag. Ligijius grabbed the other end of the flag and we walked like that through the streets of Vilnius. Ligijius looked at me quizically from across the flag and said, Are you really from America like everybody says? Because I think your accent is Latvian. You must be a Latvian. I told him I was American. But you look like us, he protested. And you re wearing a home-made sweater and faded jeans. You don t look anything like an American. At the Sąjūdis meeting, they answered strategic questions. They said their aim was to overthrow the government legally from within. They said they needed accountants, legal advisors. In the middle of the meeting, two men pushed their way through the crowd to the front of the room. They re using tear gas to disperse the crowds in Cathedral Square, one of them shouted. They re beating women and children with clubs. Are there any medical personnel in the room? one of the Sąjūdis members shouted out to the crowd. Who can go to the hospitals and find out how many injured were brought in? Who can find out how many were arrested? As it turned out, I d walked away from the mitingas just moments before the militia began tear gassing the crowds and beating them with clubs. If I hadn t run into my friend when I did and hadn t been invited to this meeting, I would have been there in Cathedral Square right now in the middle of the beatings. Ligijius shot me a look. He grabbed a few copies of the Sąjūdis newsletter from a stack and motioned towards the door. Let s go somewhere and read these, he said. And then we ll go over to Cathedral Square. Ligijius led the way to a small café. At the café there was a group of Russians sitting drinking vodka. We sat down at the only empty table. The waiter quickly rushed over to where we were sitting. There s no room for people like you here, he said. We got up and left and headed for Cathedral Square. About a hundred people were there, assembled into two groups. In one group people were singing church hymns. In the other they were listening as the hunger striker, Petras Cidzikas, spoke. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

40 The hunger strikers had built themselves a little wooden hut right in the center of Cathedral Square. The hut was cozy and had a low fence around it. The fencedin area had a garden of cut flowers and candles and placards with prayers written on them or with political information. One of the posters read that Cidzikas had returned from hard labor in Siberia just that year. Another poster read that the hunger strikers requested the release of all political prisoners. There is a link, one of the hunger strikers said to the crowd of mostly old ladies assembled around him, Siberia Lithuania. Then another strange thing happened. An old man approached me and said he was looking for his relatives in America and could I help him. I asked him the name of his relatives and it turned out I did know them. I knew them well. I gave him their address right away. I knew it by heart. The crowd spontaneously began to chant Laisvė, Laisvė, Laisvė, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. This went on for about ten minutes. Then someone shouted, The militia is coming! The crowd dispersed. Ligijius grabbed my hand and led me through the park, towards the river. At the path that leads to the top of Gediminas Castle about fifty militia were assembled armed with shields and clubs. Ligijius told me that the students had come up with an idea. They sent someone to tip off the militia that students were planning to sneak up to the castle that night and replace the flag of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania with the tricolor flag. They spread the rumor to keep the militia busy. The tricolor flag will go up on another night for real, Ligijius said. We both laughed and hurried towards the river. When I got back to my dorm, Mark asked me if I had any tacks. I didn t, but I suggested we go ask Vidas. Mark went and opened up Vidas s door. Come and look, Mark called out. I ran over and there was Vidas s room completely emptied. Down to the last tack. September 30, 1988 The night after the demonstration and beatings in Vilnius, I was over at my aunt s apartment washing laundry. She pulled out her big old tub of a washing machine and wrung my wet clothing with her old tired arms while I fiddled with her shortwave radio, trying to catch any news from the West. I wanted to find out if in the West they knew anything at all about any of the chaos going on in Vilnius. All I could get was static. It s a revolution, my aunt said, those Russians were gods here for so long and now we want them out. I was surprised by her sudden openness Books and Authors

41 Now they ll let Lithuania fly the freedom flag on Gediminas Castle, my aunt continued, now they are beginning to barter with us, now they are beginning to respect us. I kept turning the radio dial until I found something, but the program was interrupted constantly by static and my aunt s muttering, You stupid, stupid girl. Despite everything, she was still angry with me for mixing with people she considered dangerous and for endangering her family s well-being by going to the mi tin gas last night. Aunt Aldona told me what she d found when she d gone to look for me at Cathedral Square that morning: 1) Eight people were arrested and beaten. 2) The militia was not Lithuanian. They were teenagers brought in from Moscow. They came from orphanages for juvenile delinquents. They were given uniforms and clubs and were instructed to beat the Lithuanians. 3) Women were beaten too. 4) One person reported that he saw a woman being beaten on the head and on the shoulders as she clutched an infant to her chest, protecting its head with her arms. 5) Protestors were herded out of Cathedral Square and pushed against a wall where they were tear-gassed. 6) One hunger striker had been strangled for twenty minutes. The others had been beaten. And who is to blame? Aunt Aldona demanded, slamming down her fist on the coffee table, Who?! Not waiting for my answer, she shouted, Laisvės Lyga! That s who! October 3, 1988 Nobody cares if you drink milk that causes cancer because it came from a cow with cancer of the lymph nodes due to the fall-out from Chernobyl. The farmers are too poor to slaughter a perfectly good cow. Nobody cares if you get run over by an out-of-control speeding Lada or Volga while crossing the street even on your own light. Nobody cares if you re sick to your stomach because you ate egg salad with mayonnaise in the University cafeteria that had not been refrigerated or because you ate some sort of unidentifiable gray meat rumored to be rat flesh. Nobody cares that you ve wasted the better half of a day standing in line to buy something as stupid as a watermelon or a grapefruit from Azerbaijan because even those are getting harder and harder to come by. Nobody cares that you didn t have patience for the line and decided it would be better to go hungry instead. Nobody cares that the trolleybuses The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

42 Photograph by Giedrius Pocius Cathedral Square in Vilnius are packed so tight that you are propelled out onto the street at the wrong stop, left standing alone, late at night, a young girl, in a deserted industrial neighborhood with shadowy figures lurking in the darkness around you. October 4, 1988 Your freedom follows you wherever you go. Even if back home in the United States you were the lowliest welfare recipient or a homeless bum on the street, here you d be treated with respect, much more respect than a Lithuanian intellectual or scientist or doctor. And that s because your freedom follows you wherever you go. You were born into a country that is free and powerful and you take your freedom with you, even to a place like this where the very word is an object of ridicule an overused slogan on a faded propaganda banner Svoboda!* October 7, 1988 Today is my little brother Vincas s fifteenth birthday, but today, today the Lithuanian tricolor flag symbolizing freedom and independence was legally raised on Gediminas Castle! * Russian for freedom Books and Authors

43 Yesterday, as I was walking to the University to meet Professor Mardosaitė to work on my Kukutis translations, a student stopped me and said, Tomorrow at 10:00 they are raising the flag. Then he went and stopped the next person crossing the square and told him the same thing. I thought it was going to be an illegal student act, but as it turned out Sąjūdis had negotiated the right to display the national tricolor flag on top of Gediminas Castle. This morning I got up at 8:30, made breakfast, dressed, and knocked on Anita s door to ask if she d like to come with me to see the flag go up. I d rather sleep, Anita called through her locked door. Alright, so she d rather sleep through history. I went down the hill through the woods to the beginning of the trolley line in Antakalnis. When I got on the trolleybus, it was already quite crowded. When we got to the next stop, more people crammed their way in. At the next stop after that, even more people pushed their way on. Soon the trolleybus was packed so tightly you could scarcely move. No one spoke. Except for one old woman, bundled into a black wool coat and headscarf, who said, This is what the cattle cars to Siberia were like. Almost like this. The trolley lurched and jerked forward. Two stops before Gediminas Castle the trolleybus came to an abrupt stop. The driver crossed his arms over his chest and refused to open the doors. Everyone started yelling at the driver. He ignored them. People began to curse at him. He shouted back in Russian. It was so claustrophobic. I felt like I was going to go mad if I didn t get out of that trolleybus! The driver went one more stop to Kalnų Parkas and again he stopped and refused to open the doors. People started yelling at him in Russian. It was already 9:50. People began pounding on the door, rattling the windows. A baby cried. Someone in the back of the bus cursed loudly and then shouted, Open the doors, damn it! And the doors swung open. Everyone squeezed out all at once. The crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk and everybody ran, silently, from around the back towards Kalnų Parkas. More crowds joined our trolleybus crowd. All around me people were walking briskly, pulling small children behind them. Tears were streaming down people s cheeks. I found a good spot just in time, just as the flag started to rise. The band began to play. The tricolor flag inched towards the top of the mast. When the flag reached its pinnacle the crowd burst into the Lithuanian national anthem. It was an incredible The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

44 moment in my life! The independent flag on top of Gediminas Castle! Although they are still going to build the third block of the nuclear reactor at Ignalina and although Lithuania still has little real autonomy, this is a beginning. This is still Lithuania and the people are still alive, alive, alive! It s just a symbol, said a voice behind me. I turned around. There was a reporter speaking with a young man from the crowd. Behind him the new flag was fluttering on top of the castle. The government hasn t given up much, the man continued. Young man, said an elderly woman wrapped in a black shawl, breaking into the television interview, you don t understand, they ve given up quite a lot. They ve given us our flag back. I ve been to Siberia and I know. This is just the beginning. You will see. Then Petkevičius, Landsbergis, and Marcinkevičius from Sąjūdis spoke. After their speeches, everyone sang Lietuva Brangi and Graži Lietuva. The square was packed with people, many of them carrying flags. I had my flag with me, of course. After the mitingas was officially over everyone stayed and sang all sorts of songs. Various ethnographic groups came in costume and sang while others played music and people in the crowd danced. Around 11:00 I met Gintarė. She told me about her concert tour in Poland and then we went to buy some food because Loreta was coming tomorrow. I had invited her to come from Vilkaviškis. I wanted to make the visit special for her. I had gotten us tickets to the Opera. Gintarė and I followed one of the singing groups to Aušros Vartai where mass was being held outside on the street. Afterwards, we waited for the trolleybus to Antakalnis. At the grocery store in Antakalnis I bought coke and a watermelon for Loreta s visit. Then I had to drag all that heavy stuff through the woods and up the hill to my dorm. At my dorm, I wanted to make Gintarė a nice warm lunch, so I really extended myself and guess what, I was actually able to cook something up for her. Everything here has to be cooked from scratch. It s so time consuming, but people here really expect a hearty meal when they come to visit. After Gintarė and I ate, we took the teapot and some cups into my room. I had a supply of instant coffee from America and Gintarė was dying for a cup of American coffee. I pulled open my door, set everything down on the coffee table, and went to hang my flag in its place in my window. When Gintarė saw what I was doing, she burst out laughing. What have you done with your curtains? she asked. I put them in the closet, I said Books and Authors

45 And you re using a flag as your curtains? Gintarė asked, still laughing in disbelief. She shook her head. It looks strange. I m sorry, but it really does. October 10, 1988 Gintarė brought me to her apartment in Justiniškės to visit her parents. The entire evening her mother had tears in her eyes. Her mother said to me: How is my daughter going to earn a living in America? But Gintarė s father is more optimistic. He likes to talk about all the changes Lithuania is going through. Laima, you must keep a diary, Ponas Vytautas, said. We were sitting in Gintarė s parents dining room, which was also the living room, and at night, their bedroom. We ate plates of peas and carrots mixed with mayonnaise and slices of salted herring in mushroom sauce. They had picked the mushrooms themselves in the pine forests outside of Vilnius where the family has a small dacha*. These are historic times, Ponas Vytautas continued, and you are lucky to be here to live through them. You must record what you see." But I am keeping a diary, I said, as best I can. The problem with my diary was that as soon as I wrote something down, it was obsolete. Every night when I went to sleep I couldn t wait for morning to come because I was so eager to hear what new changes had occurred overnight. Ponas Vytautas told me all about himself. He has just retired this year from his post at the Ministry of Education. For years he oversaw the annual Lithuanian language exams and other Lithuanian language and literature programs in the Lithuanian Socialist Republic s schools. Ponas Vytautas was a member of the Communist Party. But, as he explained, he was still a Lithuanian patriot. He told me he spent his life working from inside the Communist system to preserve and promote the Lithuanian language and Lithuanian literature. He said that his efforts helped safeguard the language against the constant Russification that was going on in Lithuania and in Latvia and Estonia. We cleared the dinner plates and Gintarė and her mother brought in desert. My father was deported to Siberia and died there, Ponas Vytautas said, pouring coffee into my tea cup, I could never talk about it out loud before, he continued, but now with perestroika I can. I was just a teenager when they took him away. I became the head of the household when I was seventeen. I worked as a teacher to * Summer cottage. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

46 Photograph by Laima Vincė Vilnius in Soviet times provide for my younger sister and brother. I had to make compromises, so we d all survive. And then, when my daughters came along, I made compromises for their sake. So that they could have a life." He paused meditatively as though weighing whether to go on. Listening to the older people tell their stories is one of the most interesting parts of being here. I didn t know anyone in America who had lived through the types of traumas people here lived through and had survived with dignity. The older émigrés in America never shared their stories with us. They just kept up a brave optimistic front and told us to be patriots and not to sell out Lithuania. Ponas Vytautas continued: In the summer of 1944 when the Red Army came back and the Germans were fleeing my parents thought it would be safer for us children to go and live in our aunt s village, further inside Lithuania s interior. There was heavy fighting going on in our region and they worried about our safety. My father worked as a customs official during the Smetona* era. We lived in the customs house officers quarters in Kybartai, which literally stood on the border with Germany. We could hear them speaking German across the border. We could see Germany through our windows. Before the war, one night we heard glass breaking and shouting: Jude, Jude. Later we understood that that night the Germans had killed the Jewish merchants across the border and had vandalized their shops. * Antanas Smetona, president of Lithuania, , and Books and Authors

47 The summer of 1944 the front separated us children from our parents. My parents had wanted to flee to the West while they still could, but my mother refused to leave without the children. When the fighting was over, it was already too late to flee behind the retreating German army. My father came to the village where we were hiding to make arrangements for us to come back home. My father and I were walking along the road when a truck filled with Red Army soldiers drove up behind us. They stopped and demanded that we stand still and raise our hands up above our heads. My father was wearing his green customs officer s jacket, only he had removed the buttons with the government emblems on them and had sewn on new plain ones. He was no longer a customs official, but it was the only jacket he had. That jacket made him very suspicious to the Soviets. Because of the jacket, they thought my father was a foreign spy. The soldiers decided to bring us in to their superiors for questioning. We were both interrogated, but since I was underage, they released me after a day. They kept my father for a few days more. His passport made them even more suspicious to them. You see, my father had been born in Scotland. His birthplace was written on his passport. My grandfather had gone to Scotland to work in the coal mines for a few years and my father had been born there. When my father was still a baby, the family returned to Lithuania with their savings. Because of his birthplace, my father must have looked like a British spy to them with that passport and with his strange customs official s jacket. After a few days in prison, they released him, but they held onto his passport. When they released him, they told him he had to report back to them on a certain date to retrieve his passport. My father was a very dutiful man and he had no intention of not coming back on the appointed day. But my mother s intuition told her otherwise. My mother begged him not to go back. She pleaded with him to run and hide. But my father said, I have nothing to be afraid of. I ve done nothing wrong. My father reported to the Soviets on the appointed day to retrieve his passport. He never returned. Ponas Vytautas stood up and walked over to the wall of dark brown cabinets lining the end of the room. He opened up one of the cabinets and dug through a pile of papers. He pulled out a small leather folder and carried it over to where I was sitting and sat down beside me. Carefully, with his long thin fingers, he opened the folder. Inside was a yellowed document with Jonas Jakelaitis written in oldfashioned cursive in faded black ink. He opened the passport and there was a black and white photograph of a nineteenth-century-looking man, standing upright and proud, dressed in a black suit jacket and tie. It s my father, Ponas Vytautas said. This is his passport. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

48 I looked up at him, But how? Now that things are freeing up and I m retired and both my daughters are married and have completed their educations and have careers, I decided that I would pay a visit to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and find out what happened to my father. I had a meeting with them and they directed me to the KGB headquarters next door to the Conservatory where Gintarė works. There I met with a KGB officer. The KGB officer was kind enough to retrieve my father s file for me. He showed me where it was written down in Russian that my father had died of starvation in Vorkuta. The file said that my father had been declared an Enemy of the State. Then the officer said, you may have fifteen minutes to examine the file and I will leave the room. He stepped out and I had my fifteen minutes, but everything in the file was written in Cyrillic and my eyes were filled with tears, so I did not absorb much of what was written there. Ponas Vytautas paused to compose himself. Exactly fifteen minutes later the KGB officer returned. He asked me if I would like to have my father s passport returned to me. I said I would. He left the room and came back and handed me this passport. Forty-four years have gone by and I have now retrieved the passport my father set out to bring home the day he disappeared. Ponas Vytautas sighed and leaned back into his chair. I ve always felt very guilty about this, he said, all those years I was never able to do anything for him. October 22, 1988 Our folk singing group had finished singing. We took our places at the back of the platform serving as a stage in Cathedral Square. Poets, performers, and speakers would climb up onto the stage, recite a poem, sing a song, say a few words and then take a few steps to the back of the stage where the crowd was growing bigger and bigger. Every once in a while someone would lift a toddler onto the stage and whoever was closest to the microphone would say, Attention, we have a lost child here. I looked out from the stage at the immense crowd. It was impossible to estimate how many people had gathered for the candlelight vigil. There were thousands upon thousands. Every generation was present, from swaddled infants to elderly men and women dressed in black wool coats and felt boots. People were packed so tightly together that if any one person stumbled, they d all come down, like dominoes. The crowd was like grasslands shifting ever so slightly in the wind. Every person held a candle. Lights flickered across Cathedral Square, lights moved along the winding Books and Authors

49 side streets leading into the square, lights floated alongside the opposite riverbank, where processions of people were continually making their way towards the square. Martinaitis climbed up on stage. He was helped up by a student wearing a green armband with the symbol of Gediminas Castle on it. Just a few months back wearing that symbol would have landed that student in jail. Martinaitis walked up to the microphone and pushed his tousled, gray hair away from his thick glasses. The crowd began to chant, Lie-tu-va, Lie-tu-va, Lith-ua-nia, Lith-ua-nia. The poet grinned, lifted his hand slightly. The crowd went silent. He spoke into the microphone: And for you, Spring, isn t it spring? Isn t it beautiful, spring, when it s beautiful, when it s spring. How beautiful it is, how beautiful, even for the not-beautiful, it s beautiful when it s spring when the sun thaws in the windowpanes. How beautiful it is to be grass, or smoke over your homeland. Even for the dead it s beautiful on earth. How beautiful it is, for you Spring, when it s spring, when all of Lithuania returns with plows and hoes after a long winter s exile. And I thought to myself, this is how revolution begins with candles, with songs, and with poetry, mostly with poetry. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

50 Photograph by Laima Vincė In Tallinn, Estonia May 14, 1989 Our bus was a Soviet-style eyesore that looked as though it would never make it around the block, much less the six hundred kilometres across the three Baltic States. Seated on the bus were the future prime ministers, the future president, the future presidential advisors, and the foreign minister. All of the people on the bus were considered dangerous. They were poets, professors, environmentalists, activists. We were returning from the first Baltic Assembly in Tallinn. The bus was travelling through the Estonian forests. Pines, firs, birches glided past our windows. The farmlands of the Lithuanian and Latvian landscapes ceased this far north. The land was more barren, harsher. I hadn t seen a single car on the two-lane gravel road so far. Two other women were seated across the aisle from me. They were Olympia Armelytė and Dalia Tekorienė. Professors of English philology at Vilnius University. My colleagues. My fellow translators. We were still wearing our badges from the Baltic Assembly. The badges read: Technical Help. They treat us as though we were the electricians, I whined in a moment of weakness to Olympia and Dalia. They both found that very funny. The room we had rented had one narrow sofa and a cement floor. I had slept on the floor and Olympia and Dalia wrestled on the sofa all night. After two days of simultaneous translation and little sleep, we were exhausted Books and Authors

51 We had been only too happy to volunteer our time. We were a sleight of hand. All the foreign correspondents sent to cover the Baltic Assembly were fluent in Russian. All the speakers from Sąjūdis, Latvijas Tautas Fronte, and Rahvarinne were fluent in Russian. The conference could have easily been conducted in Russian, making communication effortless. However, the organizers had decided to conduct all speeches, interviews, and press conferences in the occupied Baltic languages and provide translation into English, German, and Russian. This was done to prove a point. I slouched down into my seat, groggy. I murkily thought to myself how easy it would be for them to end all this right now a single bus travelling unescorted, unprotected through kilometres of uninhabited forest. The bus could have an accident and there would be no witnesses. There were no foreign journalists on board. The brakes screeched and the bus ground to a halt. I looked up, suddenly alert. At the front of the bus, Vytautas Landsbergis stood up. He lifted his fist to his mouth and made a slight cough. Women to the right, men to the left, Landsbergis said. Dalia and Olympia and the few other women aboard rose and exited the bus. Then the men filed out. I watched through the window as their suit-clad bodies disappeared into the forest. Dalia returned and tapped me on the arm, Don t you think you should go, Laima? This is the last stop before Vilnius. August 23, 1989 We joined hands: a human chain across the Baltic from Vilnius to Tallinn. We were showing our solidarity to the world. We were now going all the way. The three Baltic States had resolved to declare their independence from the Soviet Union. Vytas invited me to drive out in the Zhiguli to join his colleagues from the Institute in their assigned spot along the highway outside of Vilnius, somewhere out in the fields. I thought that going outside the city to join the human chain would be more of an authentic experience somehow. I thought the isolation of people holding hands out in the middle of the farmlands seemed more of a statement. I wanted to get away from the carnival-like frenzy of the capital. This is my last day in Lithuania. My last day. My visa expires tomorrow. I am taking the train through Poland and East Germany tomorrow. The Berlin Wall with its armed soldiers and control points is my last obstacle on my way home. After I pass through the Berlin Wall, I will be in freedom again. Next spring I will graduate and begin my life in the adult world of work and responsibility. Who knew if I d ever get The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

52 a visa again? Who knew if after today all these people standing here holding hands would end up in Siberia? Vytas was as cheerful as ever. He too would be going to America to work soon. It is one of the ironies of freedom, he said, the freedom to leave. We found our places in the human chain and stood solemnly for a while all of us holding hands like people in church, saying the Our Father. We stood there like that and a few wary cows watched us from a distance. After a while people let go of each others hands and walked towards their Ladas and Zhigulis and the buses that had transported larger work groups. Vytas and I walked across the flat fields towards his Zhiguli. We watched from a distance as two cars rushed to be the first to enter the highway from a dirt entrance ramp. The two cars crashed head-on. Two cars alone in an empty field. The crowd let out one collective groan. Glass smashed out of the windshields. The front of one of the cars was dented in. People rushed over to help. A head-on collision? How could that happen? I could not understand it. Just two cars and no traffic how could they possibly crash into each other?

53 Henrikas Čigriejus Photograph by Vladas Braziūnas

54 books and authors Life is Sweet By Valdemaras Kukulas At first glance, Henrikas Čigriejus poetic world seems very simple: grass, birds, small animals, beasts and young wild animals, and, on the whole, all the natural world that is close to man, which is surrounded by extraordinary kindness and sympathy, and if it were absolute truth today we would speak about modern varieties of Virgil s Bucolics and Georgics. Nonetheless, everything is much more complicated: this cosy natural world does not exist per se, and not as much as it wants to, but as much as man s existence therein and its reflection in man s mind and memory allows, which creates a rather strict hierarchy of assessment of natural phenomena. One bird swears in other than the Lithuanian language, another listens to a paragraph from Ecclesiastes; a horse runs so that one does not need to chase it, because the earth is strange to it; wolves bind the history of their life in a nice way, etc. We could collect lots of similar fragments of natural life, but everywhere, as a necessary component, the history of the life of an animal, a bird or a plant will or will not be inserted. The poet suggests we listen attentively to it, and read it first of all. This is where that gentle, subtle morality of Čigriejus poetry comes from, softly speaking, inclined to moralising, because, in essence, it is not nature that the poet speaks about. In essence, he speaks about life, developing Justinas Marcinkevičius adage in an original and peculiar way: gerumas tas gyvenimas, gerumas. Only, arguments here are presented not in abstract notions or generalisations, but in metaphorised images. It is true, the further one reads, the more of man one finds in Čigriejus work, without Books and Authors

55 the argumentation of nature. However, in this case, I speak about the whole creative work of the poet. It is not by accident that I mentioned the morality of Henrikas Čigriejus poetry. This is related to lessons in the classics. His poems, as well as his book Žiemių pusėje giedra (Fine Weather in the North), contain lots of classic quotations, from Maironis, Baranauskas, and other poets, but the main source of the image of the world in Čigriejus work is Donelaitis Metai (The Year). As we know, the book Metai was written first of all as sermons. This not only determines to a great extent Čigriejus vocabulary and images (personified birds, etc), but also, what is most important, the intonation, the structure of a sentence, the inclination to spoken language, both in a semantic sense and intonation. Here, a rather creative contradiction that is characteristic of Čigriejus work alone starts: both critics and the poet himself attribute him to the tradition of Aukštaitijan lyricism. However, we will not find its melodiousness in Čigriejus work. A slow, thoughtful poetic narrative and original poetry more characteristic of the epic than of the lyric poem prevail. On the other hand, it is out of such contradictions that the original style of the poet, his original poetics, is formed. Of late, Čigriejus has been known more as a prose writer than a poet (the collection Žiemių pusėje giedra contains verse written several years ago, only one or two poems were written later, though not last year). Hence, it is interesting to watch how poetic talking colours the sentences of his prose, and how the prose writers experience influences his verse. We have to admit that both discourses go together perfectly, which once again confirms the insights expressed earlier about this poet s poetics. henrikas Čigriejus Žiemių pusėje giedra Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009, 104 p.

56 Fine Weather in the North By Henrikas Algis Čigriejus Full Moon A full moon shines onto a bookcase Will the books now start going mad Like lunatics; old Hidalgo, Already a seasoned lunatic, now, I see, standing around. His helmet shines furiously. And it thwarts my desire to sleep, Naively thinking that at least at night On the infinite road of time It is still possible To rest. The highway of highways a strange string Continually burning in the moonlight, And there they are the somnambulists, Those crazy Books Books and Authors

57 The Roof Mender Now this is what it means to climb a little higher! Stepas Zobarskas, from The Roofer My father never scaled the Alps, Why would he do that?! But when a roof required mending Atop a granary or barn, Oh, what a world opened up before him - Oh, and not only, not only the neighbor s cottages. He saw the road and a tiny little person A big bug; and how the road turns on past Through the birch grove, winds, meanders Through autumn and homeland And sometimes he saw the journey of journeys, The strange one, the final one He also saw how clever doubt, un-hanged But also unreleased Pushes you from one ditch to another (Is this the beer talking?) Well, know this you can see The most interesting things from A rooftop. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

58 The Deceased One day a fool wanted to see how he would look When laid to rest, so he lay down In a flower bed, rustled, He may have startled The dahlias and asters. Looking up he saw: small light clouds gather, Swallows skate by, birch trees waving to someone To those still suffering, bearing their Small crosses Along Adam s and Eve earth. A hornet attempted to nest in his hair, But changed its mind: This kind of corpse?! He may not get the joke Fool And lying there he heard everything: the fox bark, How children ran from house to house, He just lay there, until an old lady stood at his head With her hands at her hips I like these kinds of scenes Because they are peaceful and provide healthy laughter: You ll see with your own eyes just how easily, how quickly A person sometimes Leaps away from Death Books and Authors

59 *** Do you still have time to read good books? You do. Read then about important people, Biographies of the Ingenious, so to speak this is what you ll read: There and there (and then and then) this person was born, And at the very end: there and there (and then and then) He up and died. Well, you can skip over a few of the pages, actually hundreds of pages In the middle is it terribly important to know Where he lavishly squandered his honor or drank wine, Tore through secret doors after illicit trysts Took vengeance on, or shot, or stabbed his brother or friend, Amassed a small fortune, misspent that same small fortune, Corresponded even with kings, But then like an eagle owl One day He up and died. *** Who is still searching for me in those fields? Oh that s the voice of the unhappy bird. Surely, but what shall I Share with him? I will read him a stanza of poetry Or a verse from Ecclesiastes About the fog, only the fog Perhaps he ll understand. Well yes we ve seen those fogs We flew and waded underneath them. Oh birds and humans; oh uncles and aunts, The dearest the dearest (most important!) Girls The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

60 A Puff of Tree Bark Smoke Smoke of smoldering birch bark is the finest fragrance Unfortunately there are no more birch trees. And summer is over, After we beat one another with birch branches in the sauna, we ll honor the jug, And that is all. And that is all. And it is time. Your heart aches, a chill runs down Your warmed back: well where did you go, Where did you run away and where did you fly away, Where did you take my pants?! I see the brave birds hunt far away, Bouncing from treetops, Cursing not in Lithuanian, but like brothers Lithuanians Not sharing The small honor Autumn approaches with absolute certainty It will arrive and say: you don t have to think About honor and death You ll end up dying Which is really unhealthy. Translated by Ada Valaitis Books and Authors

61 the view from here Just an Intoxicated Backwater? By Jūratė Sprindytė In Soviet times, we were a closed society. Now we seem to be open: or are we just balancing on the border? Due to our geopolitical location, suspended independence for several decades, and the absence of big cities, Lithuanians accepted a quiet, sedentary and inert life characteristic of the provinces. The change in the concept of openness versus insularity in literature should be linked not only to the outbreak of creative freedom after the recovery of independence, but also to the whole socio-cultural situation in the world that has been changing so dynamically during the past 20 years. I was surprised by the recently discovered fact that the ideological orientation of the Louvre changed in I had always thought that 1988 and 1989 were the years of the post-soviet turning point. However, at the same time, Europe was undergoing changes inspired by globalisation processes, and when notions of multiculturalism, hybridisation and post-colonialism established themselves in the intellectual space, the Louvre opened its doors to a different art of a non-european canon and of exotic nations (Oceania, Africa), and its artefacts were equated with masterpieces of European art. I am using the example of the Louvre in order to show that large nations, too, are prone to questions of openness versus insularity that have been brought to the surface by the processes of mass migration. (Thousands of illegal Vietnamese immigrants grow vegetables for the metropolis in the fields around Moscow. The fact that these vegetables will be discarded due to levels of chemicals exceeding the standard is obvious. The fear of cultural invasion is quite serious, and plans for defence against it are designed.) The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

62 Internalising the correlation of open versus closed is possible only by understanding that opposing members function simultaneously, and it is not so easy to point out which one dominates. Externally, openness is more visible and adored, especially during the post-sąjūdis decade. The borders opened, censorship disappeared, the blank spots (the return of creative work by émigrés, deportees and partisans) were done away with, memoirs prospered, letters and diaries were published, and so on. An engaged transgression of taboos is taking place. The prose writer feels liberated from the traditional bounds of the family, religion, nation, sex and politics, while literature itself has stepped out of all the canons of the genre and restrictions of the form. Openness pits itself against ideological engagement, norms, dogmas, regulation, academism and stagnation, and it questions traditional relationships and values. During the first post-soviet years, openness was seen exclusively in a positive light. However, over the last decade, things have become somewhat more complicated. Openness no longer looks very progressive, and insularity no longer scares us with its conservatism. The issue of openness versus insularity acquires not so much a relation built on antagonism as one built on ambivalence and complementariness. One of the most obvious developments in literature is that openness has played a positive role in liberating femininity, and has inspired a wave of women s writing. The outburst of female openness has brought works about mature existential experience (by Vanda Juknaitė, Birutė Jonuškaitė, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, Danutė Kalinauskaitė and Violeta Šoblinskaitė) in the form of the novel (novels that sprang out of topical issues of the day, by Zita Čepaitė, Jurga Ivanauskaitė, Ugnė Barauskaitė and Dalia Jazukevičiūtė) and a new type of psychological sensitivity (Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė). It is women who developed, in quantitative terms, the romantic novel that is attributed to belles-letres writing (Viktorija Vaitkevičiūtė, Elena de Strozzi and Irena Buivydaitė). Valentinas Mikelėnas has just published a book about family civil rights that are very strongly influenced by the European Union (Šeimos teisė, 2009). In it, he gives some comparisons, which include a shocking example of the law that was in force in Lithuania from 1918 to 1940: the wife not only had to obey her husband and accompany him everywhere, but also to be totally submissive to him without any reservations. Patriarchal relations were unquestionable in Lithuanian literature in the period between the wars, while the height of eroticism was symbolised by the image of two young people under blossoming lime trees from Antanas Vaičiulaitis novel Valentina. Over the last two decades, Lithuanian literature has finally been enriched by images of the body, carnality and eroticism, and the era of Soviet the view from here

63 euphemisms ( he stayed for the night or they turned the light off, followed by a full stop) has come to an end. Of course, I am not speaking here about Tomas A. Rudokas unsuccessful attempt at a porn novel (Pornomūza, 2007) or the utter lack of taste in Edmundas Katanas novel Moterys ir meilužiai (Women and Lovers, 2007), in which men are turned into aggregates of instincts, and women into highly pragmatic and clever beings who are concerned only with catching a rich man. In general, however, the various representations of carnality have considerably broadened the scope of prose. In actual works, the proportions of open versus closed are felt in the semantics of the plot that can be specified by pairs of antonyms (the first word refers to insularity, second to openness): home wandering, love eroticism, sedentary lifestyle travel, family partnership, attachment freedom, stability dynamism, happiness pleasure, will lust, integrity eclecticism, order adventure, certainty doubt, experience uncertainty, and so on. In prose, openness is best observed through basic structural elements, the plot, and shifts in the scene of the action; in other words, through geographical expansion and the characters movements. It has become fashionable in novels and essays to expand the scene of action to England, Germany, India, Greece, Italy, the USA, Scandinavian countries and even Africa. The mobility of the characters manifests itself as both the passion for travelling and knowledge, and the search for a better life or personal fulfilment. The plot of the novel Nojus ir Ema (2007) by the young Lithuanian writer Aistė Vilkaitė unfolds in Riga. The main character is a psychologist who is invited to an experimental research group in which seven girls and 14 men from different countries are taking part. I want to point out that the ingredient of multi-nationalism, as a sign of modern openness, is a must. In addition, the characters travel to a conference in Venice, and then return to Riga. I speak about this love story, complemented with esoteric elements (selfless love dispels a curse over a young man), because it was very popular among young people. And indeed, the manifestation of openness is guaranteed by the protagonist s perception of the world and not by mobility. The gaze of the traveller slides along the surface, and impressions crumble if the narrator does not have the intellectual energy to reflect on his or her experience. The book Egziliantės užrašai (Notes of an Exile, 2008), about prominent artists from different professions whom the writer has met in the course of her life, should be called a memoir. The author, Aušra Marija Sluckaitė-Jurašienė, defines it as evidence of her life at different times in different countries and cultures. She sees the transitional situation of the medium as a swinging monkey bridge spread over the Atlantic on which one balances with a penetrating sense of relativity. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

64 The essay form is especially suited to travel romanticism and mind-liberating wanderlust. One of its advocates, Rolandas Rastauskas, is capable of reflecting on the cultural auras of foreign cities and junctures of mentalities in different countries, and does so with elegant irony. The traveller travels, the writer writes. The more I travel, the less I write. Ah, I know: I travel in order not to write. It does not matter at all whether the action is taking place in Paris or Slovenia or Mozambique. What does matter is why the author sent his personage there, and what is happening in his mind. For this reason, quite a lot of ostensibly open works are just a simulacrum of openness. They are closed by the primitive level of the mentality and all sorts of sensational stories. In Soviet times, young writers protested against the establishment. Now, young people often laud the pleasures of the consumerist lifestyle: travel, luxury, a life under the thumb of a rich husband. A typical specimen of a buoyant narrative about this ideal is Eglė Černiauskaitė s novel Visos Italijos dulkės (All the Dust of Italy, 2005), which appeared in the series Madame from Alma Littera. The novel has a detective element, and the twists and turns of changelings and surrogate husbands characteristic of soap operas. Yet, the main aim of the heroine is her desire for a good and comfortable life. I have never experienced homesickness for Lithuania, says the girl who landed in Italy and hates the Lithuanian rain and Lithuanian food. Specimens of this sort of literary tourism abound nowadays, and the reason why I have singled out Černiauskaitė s novel is that it was translated into Latvian in What encouraged the translation of this hedonistic work into Latvian? (Incidentally, the above-mentioned novel by Katanas has also been translated into Latvian.) In the view of the editor of one thick Russian literary magazine, a certain logic has taken root, according to which the publishing business produces money and not books (20,000 copies of Katanas novel, hardly imaginable in this small country, were sold in Lithuania). Speaking of the Latvians, we could say that here in Lithuania we still do not have examples of such extreme cosmopolitanism as what appears in the work of the young Latvian writer Inga Žolude. Her debut novel Silta zeme (The Warm Land) shows a family, a man, a woman and two almost adult children, permanently wandering around the world, and not living in Latvia. It could be an extreme example of how openness turns into an illustration of the consequences of civilisation. Total estrangement is reflected not only in the relations between the characters, but also in indifference to one s ethnic roots the view from here

65 Insularity is linked to the preservation of the identity, ethnic conservatism, and the historical memory. In the novel Daiktai (Things, 2008), Leonardas Gutauskas pays homage to the material heritage, objects belonging to the family, by imparting the status of relics to them. The novel is static and without a plot. Traditional prose used to be characterised by at least some movement (farm market church inn) and a narrow localisation of the action. Today, a similar extreme minimalism is represented on a superficial level by the homeland bed in Andrius Jakučiūnas novel Tėvynė (The Homeland, 2007). However, this insularity of space is expanded by the active consciousness, dreams, flights of poetic fancy and visions, and therefore it is impossible to qualify which plane, openness or insularity, dominates Jakučiūnas Tėvynė or Donaldas Kajokas novel Kazašas (2007). In the end, it may be quite pointless to contemplate this. The same could be said about works by reflective writers, like Sigitas Parulskis, Vytautas Martinkus, Dalia Staponkutė and Kęstutis Navakas, which contain deep insights transcending the boundaries of time and space. Openness should also be seen as the boldness to criticise what is one s own (in this respect, mention should be made of the work of Petras Dirgėla, Marius Ivaškevičius and Herkus Kunčius, who revisit and revise complicated periods in the nation s history). In the novel Rūkas virš slėnių (Mist over the Valleys, 2007), Romualdas Granauskas tells the story of a lame provincial photographer, without resorting to open criticism of the Soviet era. The impact of the ideology is shown through the daily routine, through the emptying and degrading daily life of ordinary people. The writer does it without particular style: his narrative is emphatically unadorned, just like the attire of the Soviet era itself. Granauskas has succeeded in disclosing the inner logic of totalitarianism, the destructivity of a regime that ruins people s lives and their view of themselves. Today, Granauskas books appear paradoxically retroactive in their style, but active in their human value. Everything is closed in Renata Šerelytė s novel Mėlynbarzdžio vaikai (The Children of Bluebeard, 2008). Its characters are crippled by the Soviet era, which has not ended in their recovering consciousness, and has programmed an existence without illusions, and thus the arrival of independence is viewed with a large dose of melancholy. Grievances have not yet been overcome, losses have influenced the subject and he cannot (or maybe does not want to) liberate himself from the past, and the victim mentality has not yet been defeated (the life of the brother in the novel is shattering). Novels by Granauskas and Šerelytė dwell upon the impact of Soviet anomalies on the human psyche, and this impact is finite and fatal. The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

66 Regarding the success of Danutė Kalinauskaitė s book Niekada nežinai (You Never Know, 2008), in the form of two weighty awards and two printings, it seems that the very juncture of closed versus open is highly productive, as well as balancing on its edge, and is innate in every mortal who is aware of the sweet attachment to the lost past and painful liberation. Openness in any culture presupposes not only a surge of new information, but also the existence of a certain core or integral structure, a certain point of reference. When the narrator in Kalinauskaitė s story Once in Tunisia touches a rough woollen blanket, it makes her remember her lost childhood home, the texture of wool, and she wisely realises: You haven t lost anything, because on this earth nothing has ever belonged to you. It is then that the past loses its magnetism and lets you go, and this marginal experience of stepping over the boundary is cathartic and close to many. Some genres of literature seem to be closed due to their unambiguous nature. We can observe the birth of a new variety of didactic literature. The bestseller by Julita Varanauskienė, an analyst with SEB bank, Pinigų medis (The Money Tree, 2009), belongs to the closed dimension, as an applied didactic work giving clear answers: invest, save, and you will be happy. The author s choice of main character was very successful: the impractical 30-year-old Severija, with a background in the humanities, points to the numerous problems of a young family and learning what to do with money. This saving and investment primer is well written and alternates with warnings and advice. The method for the interpretation of reality is reduced, and has the flavour of an advertising product. Pinigų medis is dominated by an educational, and at times propagandist, element. Occasionally, it made me think that it promotes exclusively mercantile values, the summit of which is a detached house, a luxury holiday and investments. Values are balanced when the author speaks meaningfully of children, of guarantees for their future and their education. Pinigų medis is also an example of financial education, and a timely project (at the time of the economic crisis). Fortunately, the author takes the sensible attitude not of a new writer emerging, but of an individual with writing skills writing a useful book for households, in the format of a novel to make the reading of it merrier. In this case, the interests of SEB bank found a match in the needs of the modern consumer. Unfortunately, today the book market is flooded by the far-from-modest confessions of show business personalities (singers, actors, musicians, one-day television stars), the authors of which see themselves at the pinnacle of a writer s career after their first and probably only book. Insularity in art can be an opportunity and a privilege, as is shown by the success in cinema and literature of Romania, probably the poorest and the most disadvantaged the view from here

67 country in Central and Eastern Europe. It seems that Lithuanians, too, attract the West by images of a well-preserved backwater (witness the success of Rimaldas Vikšraitis photography at the international exhibition in Arles, or the intentions to export the film version of Romualdas Granauskas novel Duburys [The Waterhole]). It is worth considering the concept of the province which was playfully reflected on by Jurgis Kunčinas ( ) in his essay The Intoxicating Syndrome of the Province, published shortly before his death: Even if we are less provincial than our parents, we are still staid and limited provincials, capable of stunning only the unlearned and the illiterate with our omniscience. I can confirm that my generation is as provincially accomplished as previous generations of Lithuanians. From here comes this pathetic syndrome: go back to your town. Visit the cemetery. Put flowers on the graves. Sit alone in the park. Go to a bar, get drunk, bellow out a song about the homeland and burst into tears. In Soviet years, such a plot was realistic, patriotic and sentimental, even if it were to end with fighting and arrest. Today, it is not enough, even for my no-longer-generating generation. Irony and self-irony have always served openness. Umberto Eco urges us to see a work of art as an open message. Open is an aesthetically international work of art, and necessarily ambiguous. The person who perceives it is an active interpreter. The possibility of a unanimous solution signals the absence of artistry in the work. Tired of the din of civilisation and verbal self-expression, Regimantas Tamošaitis, the university lecturer, critic and essayist, localises his being in as remote a province as possible (the essay Last Summer s Clouds ). A closed space, silence, nature, simple labour using almost primeval tools, are a refuge and a return to oneself, a natural state. The gaze again turns to the grass it is asking to be cut, and it is very genuine. Reality protects and comforts me. This farmstead, although almost uninhabited, is large, and the grass needs to be cut several times during the summer. The principle of reality and nature given to me as a present by distant grandparents obscure in me the principle of pleasure and eliminate the lure of self-expression. Do as you wish, I say to the grass, and set off to the barn for the scythe. When familiar economic structures started breaking down after the declaration of independence, and the first economic crisis began, the poet Marcelijus Martinaitis quietly observed that the technological backwardness of the country halted its external development, but helped to preserve knowledge about how the individual survives with only a home, a woman and some seeds here it is still known how The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

68 to survive having lost historical time, how to live under oppression, when a disaster strikes, or on the eve of an ecological catastrophe. And indeed, a Lithuanian can at any time (if needed) reduce the area of his lawn, dig a couple of vegetable patches and plant some onions and potatoes. The conflict between openness versus insularity, the province versus the metropolis, and the intellect versus nature never ends. Farouk Y Seif, an Egyptian émigré who is a professor in the USA, proposes the tolerant and indispensable view that tension between opposites is essential, yet it should not be labelled as a conflict or as an evil. Perception through difference (and not similarity) is more productive. Tension in any antinomy should be maintained, because it is creative.

69 new b ooks Between Resignation and Emptiness Liūnė Sutema Tebūnie Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2006, 46 p. Liūnė Sutema (whose real name is Zinaida Nagytė-Katiliškienė) is a poetess whose creative work forms an inseparable part of her life. She was born in the town of Mažeikiai in Lithuania in 1929, into a family in which Lithuanian, Latvian and German roots intertwined. Her brother, Henrikas Nagys ( ), was a wellknown poet. Her husband Marius Katiliškis (his real name was Albinas Vaitkus, ) was a prose writer. The loss of her husband undoubtedly determined the genesis of the collection Vendeta (Vendetta). The deaths of her brother, son and daughter have been pressed into her latest collection of verse Tebūnie (Let it Be, 2006). However, strange as it may sound, the main idea and the source of her entire creative work is exile, the loss of her home and her native land (the poetess left Lithuania in 1944, when the Soviet army was approaching, and has lived in the USA since 1949). the Vilnius review autumn / winter 2009

70 Sutema refuses to use the poetics of romantic nostalgia that is so popular in the literature of Lithuanian émigrés, and chooses non-ornamented language instead. Algimantas Mackus ( ), the closest relative of the poetess, who, like Sutema, is one of the generation of landless people, or the exodus, protests against exile and death. In the face of these great human ordeals, the poetess chooses a stoical position rather than a protest. Her second collection of verse is Nebėra nieko svetimo (There is no Longer Anything Foreign, 1962). The first collection was entitled Tebūnie tarytum pasakoj (Let it Be Like in a Fairy Tale, 1955). This title characterises the relationship with a defective reality best, and declares the universal nature of very personal, historically and geographically restless poetry. How does this universality manifest itself? First of all, in the refusal of personal and national martyrology. From the point of view of poetics, in that it was undoubtedly determined by the Lithuanian poetic tradition (separate folklore motifs, or even paraphrases of narratives, a mythological layer of images and situations), and from the point of view of themes, it is determined by the course of the personal life. Sutema s poetry speaks to us about several essential planes of human existence, about what helps man survive in the face of death and loss. A vitality that outgrows all losses is perhaps best expressed by means of the image of the creeper. Losses are counterbalanced by the intersubjective relationship that is evident in specific declarations of solidarity (for example, with an Indian or an Afro-American who has been turned out of his native land), and in the dialogue structure characteristic of all poetry (the situation of a conversation, or attempts at it, prevails). The dead, with whom a conversation never ends, belong to that intersubjective world, too. She speaks about the complicated relationship between poetry and reality, which is most obvious in the collection Graffiti (1993), about the necessity to choose a poetic language that puts into words reality and experience authentically (the collection Badmetis [Famine], 1972). Hence, the dialectics of life and death, and the obligation to reality created by these losses, is one of the essential features of this poetry. Tebūnie is an unquestionable quintessence of all these aspects, including the specific rhythmic pattern of verse that is characteristic exclusively of Sutema. The main thing which distinguishes this book from the earlier ones is probably the greater distance between the main coordinates of the poetic world. The space of death here is more real and extensive, and occupies an ever-increasing part of existence, and the space of life is even more concentrated, and more desired new books

71 Everything has been taken away, is a sentence that is repeated in several poems in the collection. However, the book is entitled Tebūnie. In 2007 the poetess was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for this book. DALiA SATkAuSkyTė Light Through the Leaves Alfonsas Maldonis Šviesa pro lapus Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009, 495 p. Alfonsas Maldonis ( ) belongs to the same generation of poets as Algimantas Baltakis, Janina Degutytė and Justinas Marcinkevičius. In Soviet times, they were often regarded as people who brought poetry back to life after the Stalinist eternal frost. At the beginning of independence, there was much talk about their conformism (only Degutytė was less criticised for it), and they were told to repent publicly for the real or imaginary sins of that time. Their compromises were compared to the unsubmissive attitude of the dissidents. Today, their evaluation is clearly more sober and more objective, taking into account the contribution that this generation made to the preservation of Lithuanian literature in the Soviet era. On 22 August 2009, Maldonis would have celebrated his 80th birthday. To commemorate this date, the Lithuanian Writers Union Publishers published a book of his selected verse Šviesa pro lapus (Light Through the Leaves), compiled by Valentinas Sventickas, who also wrote the introduction and the commentary. The book covers the entire creative work of the poet, beginning with verse written in his youth as far back as 1950, and ending with the last stanza put down the day before his death, on 5 October Maldonis was a moderate lyric poet, considerate to the form of the poem, ranging from traditional sillabotonics to vers libre. This collection gives us the opportunity to see all the colours of his poetic voice: it contains emotionally open love poems that at first glance seem quite unexpected for the poet to write. It provides a quiet, wise observation of man and the world, mercilessly ironic, often even sarcastic, speaking the Vilnius review autumn / winter 2009

72 about the society of that time, and a self-ironic glance at himself. It contains a batch of unpublished and sometimes unfinished poems. The book s appendix is significant too. It contains Maldonis answers to Sventickas questions in 1981, and several letters to the Latvian writer and translator Daina Avotinia, written between 1987 and 1994, with whom Maldonis developed a longstanding friendship. The answers to the questions deal mainly with poetry, whereas the letters are concerned mainly with the sudden change in the political system, its reflection in people s consciousness, and the impact it had on cultural processes. This is what Maldonis writes about the squaring of accounts that became especially sharp during the first years of independence, and similar vices of his fellowcountrymen: It seems that all of us will have to go through this puddle of mud. Our country was the last to abolish serfdom. The Catholics were much more fanatical, hence, there are more features of spiritual serfdom, and they are vicious. It is only years of freedom that can erase them. Nobody knows how long it will take. Alfonsas Maldonis filled many official positions: he was chairman of the Writers Union, a deputy to the Supreme Council, and a member of the Initiative Group of the Sąjūdis movement. The collection Šviesa pro lapus reveals the creative work of one of the classics of Lithuanian poetry of the 20th century. In Soviet times, it was somewhat overshadowed by the creative work of other poets of his generation, but it was easily understood by a wide circle of readers. DoNATA MiTAiTė Verse Broken like Thinking of an Oaf Rimantas kmita Švelniai tariant Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009, 89 p. Rimantas Kmita is a well-known literary sociologist, an active observer and appraiser of phenomena in literature and art. His reviews, articles and essays have been translated into English, Swedish and other languages. For a couple of years, he coordinated the work of the literary e-zine Skaitymai (Readings), and was the organiser new Books

73 of the Placdarmas annual gathering of poets ( ). He teaches at Vilnius and Klaipėda universities, and conducts seminars in the sociology of literature at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. His book on the modernisation of Lithuanian poetry under totalitarian conditions, which is based on his 2008 doctoral thesis in the humanities, will appear shortly. Thus, Kmita joins the not-sonumerous ranks of Lithuanian literary theoreticians writing poetry. Švelniai tariant (Mildly Speaking, 2009) is his third book of poetry. His earlier collections were Nekalto prasidėjimo (Of the Immaculate Conception, 1999, awarded the Zigmas Gėlė-Gaidamavičius Prize for the best poetry debut) and Upės matavimas (Measuring the River, 2002). Švelniai tariant, with the subheading verses, continues the explorations of Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Jan Satunowski and others as to how much one can expand the borders of ever-changing poetry. With a flavour of naivety so characteristic of his poetry, Kmita provokes: if thinking of an oaf can be put in verse, will it be poetry? The world according to an oaf and the corresponding stand dictated by the world is what wins over and what is familiar to the reader. The character of the oaf is not homogeneous: with his consciousness overflowing with cultural texts, he is simultaneously very close to those on the margins of society. He takes buses because he does not own a car, he eats on a bench because to have lunch somewhere is too expensive. Thus, he has to be a sensitive and empathic interlocutor not only to szymborska two litas each, but also to a drunken sailor still living in the glory of his young days. The topos of public transport stops recurs in the book. It is a place of forced idleness, where life s social grimaces and, in general, the non-bookish (natural) reality open up. In a number of poems, there emerge hints of cultural presentations taking place somewhere close by (wise academic books in a bag, or a volume of poetry on the knees, a theatre shows that only the narrator s wife is watching, a museum s sterile space), but they do not come into contact with the life at bus stops. The consciousness of the oaf is probably the one possible location in which the experiences of these different worlds intersect. The thread leading to one s own existence stretches from a line that the other has read, a sentence one heard the other saying. Most of the poems are written in that murmuring inner language in which main and subordinate clauses are shaken into one. This language reflects very organically the oaf s consciousness that the world attacks simultaneously on several levels. There appear poems-post scriptums that not so much comment on earlier written pieces as justify the inability to eliminate something from their amorphous body, because The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

74 this wandering and bumping against the inter-texts lurking everywhere, the doubt and the lack of decisiveness, is the poem s I, who lives with a swinging heart (this is a reinterpreted metaphor about good poetry by Vladas Šlaitas). Edvardas Racevičius drawings complement organically the writing in Švelniai tariant. NiDA gaidauskienė Anti-Utopia with the Blind Jaroslavas Melnikas Tolima erdvė Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008, 260 p. Jaroslavas Melnikas novel Tolima erdvė (Distant Space), representing the distant future, can be called a work of science fiction, though the philosophical plane and allegorical expression are very clear. The initial idea inevitably recalls H.G. Wells story The Land of the Blind. Blind people can hardly understand what vision is, or who the sighted person that has found himself among them is, but they decide that this is some mental abnormality which has to be treated by taking away the eyesight. This happens in this novel too, where we see a repressive, totalitarian society, whose narrowness is essentially symbolised by physical blindness, and this, without doubt, recalls another genre, anti-utopia, for example, Orwell s 1984 (with a similar dreariness in everyday life and the hopeless situation of a lone rebel). Melnikas novel, however, differs in its unusual scope, the scale of which does not reveal itself at once. Life among the downtrodden blind is merely the first plane. Later, Gabras, the main character in the novel, comes under the influence of a powerful organisation of rebels, consisting of apostates who had a rare eyesight abnormality in this world of fantasy that the repressive system had deprived them of. These are people with a contradictory mentality, who arouse admiration by their self-sacrifice, and terrify us by their readiness to sacrifice others: a revolutionary archetype new Books

75 Finally, Gabras, having had lots of adventures, gets into the stratum of the secret ruling elite of the sighted. This is like the most convenient existence for him; however, even that does not satisfy him in the end The novel differs in other features as well. First and foremost, from the very beginning, the megapolis represented by the author seems impressive, evocative, majestically horrible, a technocratic monster that outgrows almost the entire known world. The blind do not need any visual aesthetics, hence, endless grey concrete cages stretch in all directions. It becomes a nightmarish prison for the sighted, in which slovenly, shaggy creatures plod along ( rags hanging on the bodies, bentdown heads, closed eyes ) and monster-like pneumatic trains, magnetic blocks, run at great speed among them, and menacing helicopters dive between the squares. When the abundant forces of the security services are concentrated to catch Gabras, the novel acquires the dynamics of a thriller. The hero experiences dangerous adventures, and this gives a clearer narrative impulse to the novel that becomes a philosophical one. The vividly imagined world of the blind is revealed here very suggestively, with all its curious features. Reflections on the long-lost world of the sighted that is well known to us still flash like a vanished mirage. These worlds are separated by a precipice. It is impossible to step into a yearning for that unreal, old world, but the hero of the novel takes that step. LAiMANTAS JoNušyS The Bitter End Elena karnauskaitė Pasaulio krašte klaipėda: Druka, 2008, 80 p. Elena Karnauskaitė is the author of four poetry books. She has twice been nominated for the prize of the Poetry Spring festival, and is a recipient of special awards from Kaunas radio and television, the literary magazine Nemunas, and others. The collection Pasaulio krašte (At the End of the World) was selected by the Institute the Vilnius review autumn / winter 2009

76 of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore as one of the 12 most creative books of Her previous poetry collections are Briedė jūroje (A Moose in the Sea, 1990), Tiltas iš pelenų (A Bridge of Ashes, 2000), and Iš smilčių (From the Sands, 2004). Karnauskaitė s poetry stands out by its original timbre and concise language, which convey the ever more complex relations between a woman and the world and its daily routine. Through genuine communication, she tries to overcome the state of ringing isolation and otherness in her work. The (re)creation of the connection, and at the same time of the connectivity, of the world is always fragile, and is described with metaphors such as the bridge of ashes, from the sands, and in her most recent book it is defined as the border, at the end of the world. In Pasaulio krašte we feel as though we are on the margins of a sunlit field. The Lithuanian language relates pasaulis (the world) to vieta po saule (a place under the sun), and kraštas is the margin of it. In the peculiar Arctic circle that is cold, wet and dark, anxiety shuts the mouth up or makes the speech concise, straightforward and surly. The literary historian Brigita Speičytė has aptly observed that the speaker in Karnauskaitė s poetry resembles the characters in Scandinavian prose: uncomfortable and untamed women merge with northern coastal landscapes, and unbendingly live out their unfavourable fates. The poetics of the cosmic winter, a void and a dead end, is prominent in Pasaulio kraštas, together with a spring of life that is tightened to the maximum and is ready to run loose at any moment. It is more being than a conscious choice of how, where, what and with whom or without whom to be. This mode of a spontaneous process is defined in impersonal and reflexive verb forms. The ricocheting action implies the crisis of the addressee (a letter and a message, such important signs in Karnauskaitė s poetry, in this collection are devalued as bills, official information and advertising leaflets in the mailbox). The formula of the fairy-tale opening, behind nine rivers, behind nine forests at the other end of the world does not proceed to the closing formula and they lived happily ever after. This deepening of the interpretational space is not incidental in her poetry. With its changed stage design, the scenery of blocks of flats with armoured doors and ebony / towers where the beloved is locked, is far from a miracle story. Besibaigianti meilė (The Ending Love, the title of the third part of the collection) is suffering love, love in agony. Poetry that is no longer the outcome of that explosive energy of feeling probably implies that Samogitian stubbornness to proceed to the end in writing a book. It is a peculiar rebellion, learning how to be humble in the presence of the irrevocable laws of nature, without heroic pathos. Love would save a person from routine, but, paradoxically, it is the routine and the recollection of things that new books

77 help to endure non-love. Unspoken states, like drops of mercury, are for a moment driven into the drop of a parabolic mirror, which aptly characterises the image of convex vision in the concentrated text that Karnauskaitė creates. Her writing conveys persuasively the inner conversation with the self. She resorts to syntax suggesting an arrhythmia of breathing and the heart, pauses that pierce the jamming search for words, and frequent omissions at the end, expressed by a dotted line. NiDA gaidauskienė In a World of Temporary Matters Evaldas ignatavičius Laikinųjų reikalų patikėtinis Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008, 70 p. Evaldas Ignatavičius (who was born in 1969) has been publishing his poetry in various publications since His first larger publication was in the magazine Svetimi (Strangers, 1994), and gave rise to much discussion at the time, turning into a significant event, with claims to renew Lithuanian poetry. However, Svetimi did not last long: to create freely one did not have to rebel as a group. For a long time, Igna tavičius combined his poetic calling with the duties of ambassador to Germany and a position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thus, his first poetry collection, Lai kinųjų reikalų patikėtinis (Chargé d Affaires, 2008), appeared 15 years after his appearance in Svetimi. The title of the collection could refer to the job of a chargé d affaires. In the collection, it opens up a poetic-philosophical meaning to the phrase: I am / the chargé / of this world s / most important / affaires. The opposition is eye-catching: chargé of the world s most important affaires and chargé d affaires. Ignatavičius world is temporary and transient, in would-be time, while the power of rulers (and the human in general) is, like eternity, just an illusion. The space of the home is linked to the past tense. Attempts to return are made both through childhood experiences and the images of Classical travel myths: in the Vilnius review autumn / winter 2009

78 a littered train, Odysseus is coming home. Return, however, is impossible. It seems that nothing new has been said, except possibly that the subject of Ignatavičius poetry is the modern exile, whose exodus is not forced, like that of a war refugee, but is a conscious decision to leave the homeland, which even more intensely casts one into a state of meaninglessness. The unevenness of the collection and the diversity of form catch the eye: some poems are unrhymed, and reflect the subject s restless, even nervous, state, and his spiritual tension. Others are purely minimalistic, of just two or three lines broken down into words, while still others rely on the aesthetics of the rhyme. As the poet says in the afterword, To long and intricate daily texts, and avalanches of images and sounds, I respond with short pro memoriae that need ever fewer words and ever more space around them. Thus, in the space of pure poetry, in the anaesthetised world of temporary matters, all readers turn into the poet s chargés d affaires. As in the last poem in the collection, Paskutinis (The Last), it is to them that the secret of calligraphically falling snowflakes is revealed for a moment. NERiNgA MikALAuSkiENė Strokes of Vilnius An Echo of Vilnius Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009, 75 p. This book is one of not many published in the English language in Lithuania. At the same time, it is not a standard publication. At first glance, it resembles a tourist information booklet: thin, small, with a colour photograph of Gediminas Castle, a symbol of Vilnius, on the cover. The first impression, however, is wrong. It is intended for visitors who are interested not only in the physical but also in the spiritual image of the city. It contains verse about Vilnius by 15 Lithuanian poets. Authors from different generations allow the reader to look at the city from unexpected angles, to see a city which we will new Books

79 never find in picture books or leaflets. The architecture of the city seems quite lonely. According to one of the authors, it has to be spoken to. This is what poets do, by revealing contradictory, multiple features of Vilnius, their existential relations with the present and the past of the city in their work. The book is richly illustrated with photographs by Arūnas Baltėnas. These pictures not only fulfil the function of illustrations, they also express the photographer s personal attitude to the city. Sometimes it is difficult to say what is more important in a photograph, sights of old Vilnius, snow in front of the Church of St Catherine, clouds over the spires of the Church of St John, or fog in Cathedral Square. It seems that the book has managed to catch some strokes of the city. Another issue is whether the reader leafing through the book will feel them. EugENiJuS ALišANkA A Haiku in Two Languages Vėjo namai / A Home for the Wind Lietuvių haiku antologija / An anthology of Lithuanian haiku Vilnius: Vaga, 2009, 256 p. The impact of oriental culture on Lithuanian culture has always been noticeable. The East was given special attention in the Soviet era, and old systems of philosophy, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, in particular. Men of letters were also less interested in modern oriental literature than in its classics, especially Chinese and Japanese poetry. The Japanese principle of versification, or, to be more exact, the poetic form of a haiku, gradually turned from an exotic into an everyday dish of poets. Quite often, poets tried their hand at writing them. The number of them has increased during the last few decades. Artūras Šilanskas, the compiler of the book A Home for the Wind, has done work that is of great importance to the history of Lithuanian literature: he has tried to collect and sift through the poetic contribution of Lithuanian authors of recent decades to the centuries-old haiku tradition. Besides, he has translated selected Lithuanian haikus into the English language. Perhaps the reader who tends to find fault the Vilnius review autumn / winter 2009

80 with translations into English will have some objections, since in the book I failed to find the name of a more competent native English editor. We find works by both well-known and less distinguished Lithuanian poets in the book. This only testifies to the fact that interest in oriental poetic forms has never been and is not a matter for poets workshops alone. Another question is to what extent Lithuanian triplets correspond to the requirements of the strict canon of this form. Here, the opinions of Lithuanian poets themselves are divided: some maintain that to write a haiku is easy, like pressing the button of a camera; whereas others say that much more than three lines and 17 syllables are required to write a real haiku, that this requirement is only the minimum. But, probably, this dispute should be settled by the reader himself, because, according to the Japanese canons, it is the reader who is the final instance uniting a pinch of the poet s words into his own whole. Lithuanian poets seldom observe all the main haiku principles; however, this is not a sin of Lithuanian authors alone. This autumn, during the Druskininkai Poetic Fall, a conference was held in which haiku writers from all over the world participated. Unfortunately, the majority of the guests also ignored the strict requirements of the canon. This only confirms the idea that any form, in this case the haiku, is alive as long as it lends itself to improvisation, as long as it is the starting point rather than the ultimate purpose. It would be difficult to distinguish more peculiar features of the Lithuanian haiku, with the exception, perhaps, of the tendency towards philosophy. Lithuanian realities prevail; usually the Lithuanian landscape is meditated on. There are a variety of themes, from the history of Lithuania to the latest technologies rendering modernism to this genre. And one more thing: the Japanese tendency to avoid verbosity has undoubtedly borne fruit in Lithuanian poetry too. To conclude, I cannot help citing the haiku by the poet Aidas Marčėnas: late at night in Rasos Cemetery to be? not to be? the light of a full moon plays on tombstones Eugenijus Ališanka

81 e vents Poetry Spring 2009 Many people waited for this year s Poetry Spring with anxiety: would it take place at all? Will we manage to organise at least the main events? This is a crisis. The festival was held not only during the last week of May, it began in the middle of the month; and not only in Lithuania, but also in Ireland, the Kaliningrad region, Poland and Germany, where large Lithuanian communities received the poets. The total number of events exceeded a hundred. Of course, such a wide spread of poetry would have been impossible without some financing from Vilnius European Capital of Culture For almost three years, the Lithuanian Writers Union had been trying to persuade the organisation that the Poetry Spring festival was also a part of the culture of the capital. And this year it succeeded. The opening of the festival started with the ringing phrases of Vladas Braziūnas Čia tūkstantį metų dabar (Here a thousand years now) at the Museum of Applied Art. The laureate was honoured at the Literature Museum in the Old Town of Kaunas. And the closing evening took place in the Sarbievijus Courtyard in Vilnius University. Hence, the main framework of the festival remained unchanged. Only this time, the almanac Poezijos pavasaris 2009 (Poetry Spring 2009) was published with two compact discs: Poezija ir balsas 2009 (Poetry and Voice 2009), and 44 čiulbė jimai (44 Twitterings, compiled by Vladas Braziūnas). The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

82 As every year, groups of poets, readers and singers dispersed all over Lithuania. Readings took place in schools, libraries, churches and the home towns of poets who have passed away. One of the groups traditionally visited Naisiai, where the book of verse by the poet Gvidas Latakas Kol išsiris varniukai (Before Young Crows are Hatched) was awarded the 33rd Zigmas Gėlė Prize. Near Salomėja Nėris old home on the Paežeriai Estate, Erika Drungytė was awarded the prize named after this poetess for her book of verse Rūkas ir vėjas (The Fog and the Wind). This year, despite all the hardships, the Šilalė region founded the Dionizas Poška prize for a book of poetry that reflects ethnic motifs, Lithuanian traditions and the historic memory of the nation. The first prize, for Priedainė and Saula prė laidos, went to the poet Vladas Braziūnas. Rimvydas Stankevičius became the 45th laureate of Poetry Spring, and was awarded the Maironis Prize for the collection of verse Laužiu antspaudą. The prize given by the daily Kauno diena was awarded to Kęstutis Navakas, for the collection Stalo sidabras (Table Silver). As usual, young people were not forgotten either. The prize of the weekly Nemunas went to Indrė Meškėnaitė for her interesting debut in the almanac Poezijos pavasaris (Poetry Spring). Ieva Gudmonaitė, a 12th-form pupil at Vilnius St Christopher Secondary School, was recognised as the best in the poetry readings by schoolchildren We Grow Together with Verse. It is impossible to list all the events that took place in the cities and small towns during those two weeks. It is worth mentioning that the evenings in Vilnius were very colourful. For example, take the evening performance Letters to Nowhere based on letters and poetry written by Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak in 1926 (devised and directed by Birutė Mar). The poet and translator Ramutė Skučaitė, who translated Tsvetayeva s book Į niekur laiškai was awarded the prize of the Meno Niša gallery for the translation of world poetry into the Lithuanian language. This year the night readings moved out of the Writers Club and became the social evening Night Readings by a Fire in the Botanical Gardens of Vilnius University. Aušra Kaziliūnaitė was awarded the Edmondas Kelmickas Antique Shop Prize. There were also many evenings of sung poetry. The poet Vytautas Stankus was chosen as the best performer, and the actor Gediminas Storpirštis was awarded the Laimonas Noreika Prize of Vilnius City Municipality. Poetry Spring unites poets of all generations. Justinas Marcinkevičius, who on account of his poor health appears in public less and less often, came to Vilnius Town Hall to accept the prize of the mayor for Rudeninė puokštė Vilniui (An Autumn Bouquet for Vilnius) in the collection of verse Naktį užkluptas žaibo (Caught by events

83 Lightning at Night). Those who not only write but also assess poetry were not forgotten either. The literary critic Valentinas Sventickas was awarded the Lietuvos rytas newspaper prize for 2008 for his monograph-study Šitas Aidas, šitas Marčėnas (This Aidas, this Marčėnas). It is gratifying to know that our poetry is known beyond the borders of Lithuania. Last year the poetess-translator Aksinia Mikhailova translated the book Необик новено е да си жив by the poet Marcelijus Martinaitis into the Bulgarian language, which was published by the Bulgarian Literature Foundation. As a guest at this year s Poetry Spring, she was awarded the traditional Arka Gallery Prize for translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages. She was not the only guest of the festival. Also participating were: the Belarussian poet Ales Razanov, a translator of Lithuanian poetry, who stands out in the panorama of Belarussian poetry by his emotional attitude and his creative style; the young Turkish poetess Zeynep Köylü, one of the most distinguished poets of her generation; the Finn Jyrki Kiiskinen; Christoph Janacs, an Austrian lyric poet, prose writer, essayist and translator; Yelena Isayeva from Russia, the author of seven collections of poetry, two books of plays, and articles in Druzhba Narodov, Novi Mir, Yunost, and Sovremenaya Dramaturgiya; Paul Perry, an Irish poet, editor of the publication The Best of Irish Poetry 2009; Gastao Cruz, a Portuguese poet, literary critic and artistic director; and an old friend of Lithuania, the Swedish-born Latvian Juris Kronbergs, a poet, translator and freelance journalist. Birutė Jonuškaitė Between Vilnius and Minsk The European Borderlands: Language Landscapes of Poetry Festival was held from 23 to 27 September 2009 in Vilnius and Minsk. It is the third year in a row that Allianz-Kulturstiftung (Allianz Cultural Fund) and Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (Literary Colloquium of Berlin) have organised a literature festival in a different border country of Europe. What started in Lvov in 2006 and later continued in Leipzig and Bucharest, Jassy and Kishinev, this year took place in Vilnius and Minsk. The following partners contributed greatly to organising the event: the Goethe- Institute Vilnius, the Goethe-Institute Minsk, and Books from Lithuania. Participat- The Vilnius Review autumn / winter 2009

84 E u r o p E a n B o r d E r l a n d s s p r a c h l a n d s c h a f t E n d E r p o E s i E Europos pasie nio re gionai K a l B o s p o E z i j o s l a n d š a f t a i Designed by Jokūbas Jacovskis Vilnius and Minsk: the poster for the festival ing in the festival were: Vladas Braziūnas, Daiva Čepauskaitė, Gintaras Grajauskas, Agnė Žagrakalytė and Eugenijus Ališanka from Lithuania, Vera Burlak, Dmitri Dmitriev, Volha Hapeeva, Andrei Khadanovich and Uladzimir Arlou from Belarus, Tadeusz Dąbrowski from Poland, Tanya Malyartschuk from Ukraine, Ilma Rakusa from Switzerland, and Marcel Beyer from Germany. The festival began with a reading of poetry in Vilnius Town Hall on 24 September, where poetry is seldom heard, because this solemn space is used for the more formal needs of the city authorities. However, this somewhat unusual place did not embarrass the poets, their poetry sounded convincing, and a large group of listeners received it warmly. Early in the morning the following day, all the poets, a couple of journalists, the director of the Goethe-Institute Vilnius, and several organisers of the festival caught a train to Minsk. Staff from the Goethe-Institute Minsk met us, and it was mainly they who took care of the poets visit to the capital of Belarus. Two events were held in Minsk, a discussion and poetry readings. The discussion had the resounding title European Borderlands. Language Landscapes of Poetry. Cultures Meet in Words: Authors from Belarus, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland and Ukraine in Dialogue. The conversation itself was quite personal, and a large audience had the possibility to learn more about the authors lives and their artistic ideals. However, it was impossible to avoid a small conflict when one listener raised the issue of ignoring Russian-speaking writers in organising this festival. We felt events