Adolfas Šapoka ir nepriklausomos Lietuvos istorijos mokslo programa „Raskim lietuvius Lietuvos istorijoje“.

On the basis of Lithuania's postwar emigration press, the author discusses how Lithuania's eminent historian Adolfas Šapoka understood the project, developed by him and other Lithuanian historians, "to find Lithuanians in the history of Lithuania", to become free from the influence of foreign historiographies and to acquaint the society with its history. The author analyzes A. Šapoka's attitude towards history as well as similarities and differences of these attitudes between him and Zenonas Ivinskis, a representative of the younger generation historians, and also raises a question why Šapoka was concerned about the role of Lithuanians in the history of Lithuania and why this issue was important for Lithuania's history. The main task of independent Lithuania's historiography was to disconnect Lithuania's history from the conceptions of neighbouring countries' historians, which could be considered as a natural self-defense reflex. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a vast state extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and pursued its own independent policy even after the Lublin Union in 1569. Lithuanian historians tried to defend the history of Lithuania from the conceptions of Polish historians (political context-struggle for Vilnius), Russian historians (negation of the existence of the medieval Russian-Lithuanian state) and German ones (polemics about the existence of Lithuanians in the Lithuania Minor before the 16th century) thus trying to "find" Lithuanians in the history of Lithuania. As a result, they paid less attention to the history of other national minorities. A. Šapoka, the editor of The History of Lithuania published in 1936, was a scholar with a positivistic view who encouraged the society to dissociate itself from the romantic images of Lithuania's history. He emphasized that every nation had the right to create its own national history. Acknowledging the inevitability of the influence of Western culture, A. Šapoka claimed that Lithuanian-Polish political relationships hindered the development of the unique Lithuanian culture. A. Šapoka was of the opinion that Byzantine civilization and Orthodox Church were incompatible with Lithuania's history. The project "to find Lithuanians" was aimed, first of all, to challenge historiographic conceptions of neighbouring countries-Russia, Germany and Poland; secondly, it also aimed "to show Lithuanians" to their own country-people. In A. Šapoka's opinion, the conception of monarchist historiography formed the notion that the territory under the Polish king could have been only Poland, and this conception was accepted by the societies of many countries. Therefore, A. Šapoka's task was to introduce Lithuanians to foreign historiography and foreign societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]