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Through literary analysis, comparative and memory studies, the article focuses on the works of Lithuanian fiction on the theme of the Great War (1914–1918), which became a prerequisite for the establishment of the Lithuanian nation­state. The aim of the article was to show different attitudes towards the war, convey the develop­ ment of collective consciousness, and present a summary assessment of the war as a spiritual shock and a global event of memory. The works selected for analysis be­ long to the contemporaries of the Great War: the classics of Lithuanian literature who stand out for their artistic maturity in the context of their war­themed works. In the first months of the war, Vaižgantas, one of the leaders of the national revival, published the allegorical story ‘Karo slibinas’ (The Dragon of War) in a periodical. The story conveys the horror and the scale of the war that had engulfed humani­ ty. The war dragon is a mythical animal that resurrects time after time and begins hunting people down without any measure or mercy. People are hypnotised by its power; they voluntarily send their children, brothers, and husbands to the jaws of the dragon. Soon after, Antanas Vienuolis’s short stories ‘Didysis karas’ (The Great War), ‘Mirtinai sužeistas’ (Mortally Wounded), and ‘Karžygis’ (A Hero) also appeared in a periodical. In ‘The Great War’, the war appears vile and not ‘great’ at all, destroying peasants’ usual environment and cynically killing those who failed to realise where they were running or why they were at war. In the second short story, the central character suffers a psychological shock because he cannot reconcile his romantic im­ agination of high German culture with the brutal behaviour of the Germans he has to experience when he is suspected of espionage. Disturbed consciousness disrupts the life of the gifted young man. The way the writer conveys the tragedy of the ‘little’ man resonates with the image created in the literature of the Great War. A different panoramic and epic picture of the world opens in Maironis’s poem Mūsų vargai (Our Troubles) completed in 1919. The national poet of Lithuania cre­ ates a verse novel about the war in which he highlights its most important events and identifies those that are directly related to Lithuania. In Maironis’s poem, all the suffering, calamities, deaths, expulsion of the peasants to the depths of Russia, and the misery of the prisoners in war camps acquire the meaning of noble suffer­ ing that leads to the final salvation: in the final scene, the main characters celebrate their wedding, and Lithuania becomes an independent state. Thus, the war that was ‘not ours’ turns into ‘our war’ in Maironis’s work. The independence of Lithuania was Maironis’s lifelong dream which he believed in and which he conveyed in his entire work. This poem and especially its final scene in the Vatican, where the Pope blesses the marriage of the main protagonists as well as the young state of Lithuania is a symbolical expression of the spiritual triumph of the poet. Still another type of a relationship with war opens up in Vydūnas’s drama Pasaulio gaisras (The World on Fire). This is an analysis of the phenomenon of war on micro and macro levels and a reflection on it in a dramatic form: here, the life­affirming procreative female civilization conflicts with the life­denying, male, killing civiliza­ tion. In this work, Vydūnas’s main idea and his concept of the human in history are most clearly articulated. The cruel and alien war in the works of Vaižgantas and Vienuolis undergoes a change in Maironis’s drama, where it is somewhat ‘domesticated’, transformed into ‘our’ war, endured yet meaningful. In Vydūnas’s drama, war is a litmus test revealing human­ ity’s greatest moral flaws but also expressing the noblest feelings at the same time. Until now, Lithuanian literature of the Great War has not been approached as a single phenomenon of memory: this study fills this gap at least partially. Observing Russia’s war against Ukraine, it must be noted that war and literature have been insepara­ ble since the time of Homer, and the nations bordering on Russia in the west have to constantly defend their independence with arms. It seems that humanity is still dealing with the problems of war and peace that were the same a hundred years ago. Much has been achieved in terms of security and stability but not everything: the ideal coexistence of nations on the planet remains a collective desire and ideal.

Šis Vilniaus universiteto profesoriaus Juozo Girdzijausko (1935–2014) autobiografinis pasakojimas buvo įrašytas 2007 m. rudenį, kalbantis jo bute Antakalnio gatvėje. Garso įrašą su gyvu profesoriaus balsu bus galima išgirsti Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos instituto šiuo metu leidybai rengiamoje knygoje Profesorius Juozas Girdzijauskas: atsiminimai, laiškai, interviu. Čia pateikiamą tekstą pagal garso įrašą parengė Eugenijus Žmuida.

The article offers a brief introduction to memory studies and the concept of collective memory with emphasis on the significance of this phenomenon, which coincided with discoveries in the humanities and deepened and expanded the spectrum of national cultures. The radical ideas of the Age of Enlightenment sparked self-reflection of nations and creation of imagined communities that eventually turned people into nations. New concepts of political coexistence, equality, freedom, and the distinctiveness and historical value of the national language and literature were published and made known to Lithuanians. The article dwells on the tsarist and Soviet Russian occupation policies on memory and national identity, modes of rewriting memory, the consequences of nearly two centuries of memory wars, the emigration situation, and the coexistence of the imagined communities. These imagined communities played a crucial role in constructing the nations and preparing them for independence. There were two imagined communities in the nineteenth century – the Lithuanian-speaking Lithuanians and the Polish-speaking Lithuanians who considered themselves Lithuanians, and two such communities in the twentieth century – the Lithuanians living in exile and the imaginary community remaining in Soviet Lithuania. It is such recurring patterns of society and recurring plots of events in memory preservation and memory wars that are discussed in the article. Upon the return of freedom of the press and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lithuanians discovered numerous unknown lands in the form of their culture that had been banned before. However, memory studies show that long-standing propaganda, press bans, and the rewriting of memory have not gone without consequences. The Great War and the struggles for independence that resulted in independence in 1918 remained in the margins of remembrance, although those events enabled the surge of national culture during the interwar period. The historical context of Central and Eastern Europe helps to see a broader panorama of common and relevant processes and to highlight the specifics of the Lithuanian situation, concluding that memory wars continue and deliberating whether memory culture can influence future prospects.

The article analyses memoirs by Lithuanians dealing with the Great War (1914-1918). The events of the early 20th century led to the emergence of Lithuanian independent state. They affected the lives of every Lithuanian, and shaped the most important part of individual and collective memory. Many famous political and cultural figures of that time left behind their memoirs. A variety of memoir literature opens a broad panorama of historical events and personal experiences, expressed in a wide diversity of forms. The article presents examples of the most notable memoirs from different fields. Aleksandras Uspenskis served in the Russian Army, Teodoras Reingardas in the Russian Navy, and Jurgis F. Jonaitis fought on the side of the Entente. The situation in occupied Lithuania is told by such authors as Gabrielė Petkevicaitė-Bitė (from North-Eastern Lithuania), priest Pranciskus Žadeikis (from North-West Lithuania) and Antanas Gintneris (from Southern Lithuania). Priest Pranas Bieliauskas writes about life during the war in Vilnius in his Diary of Vilnius. Memoirs by Martynas Ycas, who was the deputy of the Russian State Duma and a chairman of the Lithuanian War Relief Society, provides a detailed account about lives and affairs of Lithuanians who evacuated to Russia and views of Lithuanian intellectuals on the future of their homeland. The article, using methodological concepts of memory discourses (Maurice Halbwachs, Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, and etc.), aims to return this significant part of literature to the horizons of historical and cultural memory, and to analyse the interplay of memory vs. forgetfulness as political and social constructs in the context of historical cataclysms of the 20th century. Keywords: history, the Great War, independence, memory discourses, forgetfulness. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15823/zz.2018.2

Straipsnyje tiriamas kultūros sureiksminimas Maironio istorinės tematikos darbuose, kūryboje, egodokumentuose. Maironis sugebėjo perorientuoti lietuvių santykį su istorija, rasti joje pozityvųjį pradą ir jį aktualizuoti įvairiais komunikaciniais kodais. Kultūrinio matmens iskėlimas nesirėmė vien lietuvių kalbos archajiskumu ar pagoniskuoju unikalumu – dalykais, kuriuos nuo Simono Daukanto kartojo daugelis atgimimo autorių. Maironis vėrė perspektyvą tautos ateiciai, siedamas ją dar tik su būsimu kultūriniu klestėjimu, tautos kultūrine savirealizacija. Rūpestis kultūra yra viena esminių atgimimo veikėjų korespondencijos temų. Kūrybinio prado kaip esminio tautos ir žmogaus egzistencijos sando akcentavimas sulaukė plataus pritarimo jaunoje lietuvių visuomenėje, kuri savo teoriniais, filosofiniais ir grožiniais rastais konceptualizavo ir toliau isplėtojo Maironio kultūrines ir filosofines idėjas. Maironis as a Man of Books: the Ontologization of Culture in the Works and Egodocuments of Maironis The national poet Maironis is best known as the reformer of versification, the creator of normative language. Nevertheless, his first book was dedicated to the history of Lithuania and was extremely important in the 19th century, when history was supposed to be the most important science, and when all the European nations were concerned to have books written on the subject of national history. Many authors in Lithuania wrote on history, but only the book of Maironis, published in 1891, presented a new model of Lithuanian history, breaking the stereotype that had dominated the field for many centuries. He replaced the elegiac vision of history with an optimistic, forward-looking picture, predicting the cultural renaissance of the nation. In the second edition (1906), by adding a short history of Lithuanian literature, taking part in new periodicals, discussing cultural concerns in correspondence and writing new fictional and science works, Maironis practically realized his cultural-philosophical aims and these activities frequently served as examples for the younger generations of artists. His model of history, also of history of literature, his optimistic vison regarding the future became a common average of the awareness of the nation, and this great contribution of Maironis to the formation of the present Lithuanians is often forgotten. The goal of this article is to revive the relationship with Maironis.

Straipsnyje svarbiausi lietuvių kalba parasyti Igno Seiniaus kūriniai proza aptariami is mitopoetikos perspektyvos, pasiremiama loginės analizės, lyginamuoju, analitiniu-kritiniu metodais, ieskoma „amžinųjų“ temų, kreipiamas dėmesys į personažų kūrimo principus ir lycių santykius. Dalį „klajojancių“ siužetų Seinius sąmoningai perkūrė modernistine maniera, transformuodamas žinomus siužetus ir juos praturtindamas sava interpretacija. Taciau Seiniaus kūriniuose esama ir fabulų, kurios glūdi kūrinių potekstėje autoriui sąmoningai jų nesuvokiant. Analizuojami abu variantai, daromos apibendrinancios isvados. Esminiai žodžiai: Seinius, lietuviskoji proza, mitai, pasakos, „klajojantys“ siužetai, genetiniai rysiai. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/alc.2017.4