Search

The author aims to discuss three topics using the memory research method. The first part discusses construction of the imagined community and collective memory of 19th century Lithuanian intellectuals in a country where education in the national language, and the printing of books and papers, were banned. The second part of the article presents the impact of the Great War and the struggle for independence on collective memory as revealed in memoirs written in the 1914–1940 period by fighters on the front lines, refugees, intellectuals, and people in the occupied country. The third part discusses the extinction of the Great War and the battle for independence from collective memory as a natural and specially constructed phenomenon, caused by the Soviet regime.

The article concentrates on the perspectives of two disciplines – the Lithuanian literature and philosophy of Existentialism – and their specific manifestations as literature of existentialism, and aims to represent how the main questions of existence began to arise in Lithuanian poetry and later were spread at the theoretical level at the university in Kaunas. Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas is the author whose works symbolically represent a turning point in Lithuanian literature. Finding himself in a difficult and ambiguous situation, having entered priesthood, the traditional education for peasant children, he had to break the ties with his past and gain status as an independent artist. The theme of choice, authentic life and questions of the human place in the universe found their poetic expression in the meditative poetry of Mykolaitis-Putinas. In the poetry of his last period, the theme of death becomes important and Heidegger’s concept “Being-toward-death” (“Sein zum Tode”) emerges as the last thrilling problem. Mykolaitis-Putinas had an impact on the younger generation of Lithuanian poets to whom existential problems were self-evident.