COURAGE

Mbledhje koleksionesh

In 1948, Jonynas openly criticised the final thesis by the student F. Levitac ‘The Struggle by the Lithuanian Communist Party against the Fascist Regime in 1934–1936’, for its poor academic and professional quality. Levitac was a member of the Communist Party, and Jonynas’ remarks caused a severe reaction from the university council. He was accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Jonynas gave a speech to the university council in which he accepted his ‘political and ideological mistakes’. This helped him to keep his academic position at Vilnius University. The document illustrates very well the dramatic situation of a talented scholar and intellectual who made a career in interwar Lithuania under Stalinism.

The year 1983 was the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian newspaper Aušra. This newspaper, edited by Jonas Basanavičius, played an important role in the Lithuanian national rebirth in the 19th century. Aušra was an illegal newspaper, published in Prussia and smuggled into the Russian Empire. A conference on Aušra was held in Soviet Lithuania, at which Vebra was not allowed to give a presentation. Nevertheless, he stood up to make a comment, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the situation in the state of research into this important issue.

During his detention in Mordovia in 1963-1969, Knuts Skujenieks wrote several hundred poems. He was allowed to send two letters a month, and sent poems in letters to his wife which were read by his colleagues. After his release, he composed a collection of poetry, but it could not be published until 1990, and was only published in its entirety in his complete works in 2002. As Skujenieks said, this poetry ‘is not "gulag" poetry, but poetry written in the gulag [...] The initial shock and protest gradually turned into a fight in prison within myself' (Bitite Vinklers. Introduction. In: Seed in Snow. Poems by Knuts Skujenieks. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2016, p. 9).

In the Manuscript of Jan Čep, a book of the week for the radio broadcast of Radio Free Europe was prepared. In this paper, he introduced the novel ‘Fox and Camelia’ by Italian writer Ignazio Silone, to the audience behind the Iron Curtain. The novel is based on the contrasts of political ideology and human honesty, against the privacy of man to the indiscriminate means of political struggle. It condemns the conviction of certain methods of political struggle and violence. The presentation of this book was probably broadcasted on July 1^st, 1960.

Jan Čep had been contributing with the Book of the Week for almost fifteen years, from the start of the broadcast in 1951 until 1965. He was a member of Radio Free Europe with authors who have not been allowed to publish in the Communist countries. Jan Čep selected for this program mainly Catholic-oriented writers and new French and Anglo-American literature. Čep's work could not be published for almost forty years in Czechoslovakia. Until 1989, his work done under exile was also made available to Czech readers. His texts from the Book of the Week program in 2015 thanks to Petr Komenda and Jan Zatloukal, who worked on the materials from the archives of the Institute of Slavonic Studies in Paris, where Jan Čep lived in exile, was made available too. The machine-readable text of this program is located in this Parisian archive.

Vincas Pietaris (1850–1902) was a Lithuanian national activist and writer. He is famous for writing Algimantas, the first historical novel in Lithuanian. The novel was published for the first time in the United States in 1904–1906. (It was published for the second time in interwar Lithuania.) The novel takes a popular approach to the formation of the Medieval Lithuanian state, and the heroic struggles between the Lithuanian dukes and their enemies. By glorifying Lithuania's past, it influenced Romantic nationalism. Because of this, Algimantas became very popular in interwar Lithuania.

However, the novel and its author were practically unknown in Soviet Lithuania. Gediminas Ilgūnas started to work on his biography of Pietaris in about 1980. He travelled twice to Russia, where Pietaris had lived and died. The biography was published during Gorbachev's perestroika in 1987. At that time, various historical studies and popular works about the history of the Lithuanian state were becoming more popular among different sections of the population. Various historical issues relating to the Medieval and modern state were being discussed in the Sąjūdis press. The biography of Vincas Pietaris was part of this growing movement. The novel Algimantas was published later in 1989, and became very popular with the Lithuanian public.