Russia is arguably the only country in the post-Soviet space where the veneration for Karlsonas has taken on greater proportions than in Lithuania. There has even been estimated that Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the-roof is likely to be the second most common book to be found in the average Russian home next to the Bible. (When Astrid Lindgren herself was told about this by the Russian Ambassador to Sweden, Boris Pankin, she is quoted to have said: “Strange, I had no idea that the Bible was that popular”. And when Ingvar Carlsson, then Swedish Minister of State, visited Russia in the early 1990s, his Russian hosts deplored the fact that he had very little in common with “the real Karlsson”.

However, in Sweden, the homeland of Astrid Lindgren and her vast collection of beloved fairytale characters, children barely rank Karlsonas among the top-ten of Astrid Lindgren’s most appreciated figures. Similar attitudes can be observed among Western European children in general, who are more inclined to embrace the stories about Pippi Longstocking and Emil of Lönneberga.

So, does this imply that the frame of cultural preference varies significantly between Eastern European children as compared to Western European children as far as Astrid Lindgren’s stories are concerned?

No, this is not likely to be the case since the image of Karlsson-on-the-roof which has been conveyed in Lithuania and the post-Soviet space is slightly different in several perspectives compared to how he was depicted in the original Swedish versions of the popular books.

What first should be noted is the fairly haphazard translation of the book from Swedish into Russian (and latter from Russian into Lithuanian) which made the objects and the surroundings in the story appear distinctively Soviet, and thus less reminiscent of bourgeois mid-century Stockholm. Of greater importance is that that the Soviet censorship was contemplating the attitude that Karlsonas communicated – individualism, egocentrism, narcissism and anti-authoritarianism – as potentially dangerous and contradictive to the ideological tenants of official discourse. Consequently, in accordance with the stringent demands from the censors, the ensuing story about Karlsonas that was engineered deliberately saw to reduce the most conspicuous acts and elements of crudeness and delinquent behaviour.

The result, however, seems to have been an equally mischievous and innovative Karlsonas, only less wicked and more warm-hearted, who have managed to surpass the original figure’s capacity to strike a cord with generations of children. This is also the Karlsonas one encounter in the cartoons from 1968 and 1971, artfully illustrated by the famous Boris Stepantsev, which is another reason for his immense popularity in the former Soviet Union.

There are, at any case, more connections between the Baltic States and the world of Astrid Lindgren. Generations of Scandinavian children has, for example, enjoyed the pastoral and idyllic illustrations in Astrid Lindgren’s books with a sense of recognition as the surroundings are reminiscent of the typical rural landscape found in the Scandinavian countryside. However, Ilon Wikland, who contributed with the popular illustrations of many of Astrid Lindgren’s most beloved characters, had her childhood Estonia rather than the Scandinavian countryside in mind when she created images to Lindgren’s texts. Consequently, though Wikland was forced to flee Estonia for Sweden during the World War, her Estonian legacy still lives on in many of Lindgren’s books. In addition, in 2009 Wikland was dedicated her own museum in Hapsal, a small Estonian city to the south of Tallinn.

Karlsonas, then, is actually neither Swedish nor Baltic, but Ilon Wikland found the inspiration to draw him as he is normally illustrated, in books and cartoons alike, when she stumbled upon a chubby, red-haired little man at a market in Paris.

Fredrik Rydström is a distinguished academic from Sweden who graduated Vilnius University in Spring 2010. He has lived for almost two years in Lithuania where he ound true love: the kibinas. Fredrik has held several lectures about and specialized in Baltic-Nordic relations.Other articles by Fredrik Rydström

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BaltoScandia:to have (or not) a laugh at the expense of your neighbours

“Tell them that there are no cars and that women can be beaten and exchanged for new ones whenever you want,” he said, echoing similar rumours about Lithuania he had heard in foreign lands.

We were discussing the fact that many people in countries as close as Sweden or Germany had no idea about Lithuania, what its capital is and what language is spoken here and so on.

In fact the knowledge of the country in the world is appalling. On a visit to Belgium a few years ago, I had dinner with two doctors and their little daughter. The girl was just learning to speak, but they had high hopes that she would also become a doctor in future: a highly educated family.

They asked me about what I was doing in Europe and where I live and what my job is. I was halfway through a story about Lithuania when they stopped me and asked “sorry what country do you live in again?”

“Lithuania? Litauen? Lituanie? Lietuva? Litva?” I tried the names of this country in every language I knew. Didn’t ring a bell.

This couple had travelled to every continent on the planet except Antarctica, but they had no idea where Lithuania was, a European Union country already for five years at that time. They had no idea.

Another acquaintance of mine, who came to Lithuania from England also had massive troubles with the country. At first he was afraid to come here because it is in the wild wild east and he might get robbed or stabbed. Or both!

He imagined a land without electricity and without laws (okay, well that part is more or less true). Hard drugs were sold on the street and women carried AK-47s down the street. After all, this country was in the Soviet Union.

Other people I have spoken to think the country is on the Mediterranean sea somewhere near Malta.

So here is an opportunity I suppose. The Lithuanians who emigrate and those who travel could play a big role in the future of this country. The world doesn’t yet know the name of Lithuania. One day they will find out, but until then you have a blank page. Write in it whatever you want!

So, its up to you who go abroad. Perhaps you also want to go abroad and play silly games with uneducated people. Or maybe you’d like to go tell the world about the mountains of amber that everyone has in their garage. Tell them about the Seimas and how it was defended by the citizens and tell them about Lithuania’s great beaches on the Black sea.

Hold on is that a game or is that the truth?

“In our modern world one can get by without bread and butter, without stuffed fish on Saturdays; but without news, stuffed with surprises and sensations, it’s impossible to live. A normal person getting up in the morning and sticking his head out the window first asks the Holy Father: Vos chert zich? – ‘What’s new?’ – or in his ancestors’ language Ma nishma? and waits patiently until the Most High answers.

The inhabitants of Miškiniai didn’t really worry whether Chatzkel Bregman was pulling the wool over their eyes or telling the truth. It was all the same to them. Both lies and truth beautified their monotonous existence, brought them joy or sorrow, and angered or elated them, and they were all thankful to Bregman for making their blood, stagnating from boredom and sameness, quicken in their veins. There were times when the next day Chatzkel, smiling guiltily, would negate his news.

“Israelites! Jews! I want to apologize: I have to take back yesterday’s news from Berlin. Hitler is not ill with consumption. I’m very sorry, but for him, so far, I’m very sorry, it’s only ordinary diarrhoea. And one more of my inaccuracies. It appears that Churchill’s son did not marry a Jewess, but rather an Italian.

Not everyone liked Chatzkel Bregman and his “Jewish News”. The old government didn’t make any trouble for Chatzkel Bregman: Jews will be Jews, they can’t help but gossip about one another and the whole world. But later, when the barebellies came rooting to the trough, Bregman the rumour carrier was invited for a chat with some sort of district committee and was told to stop spreading propaganda against the people. Chatzkel, fortunately or not, pretended he didn’t understand this word, and continued to create further news for his clients, according to his own taste and liking, mostly about Hitler, the new Amman, sworn to eliminate the entire Jewish nation. And again he was invited to the district office, but this time not to a civilian committee, but to the police division, to the stern Russian chief who briefly and firmly explained to him that it was forbidden to gossip about Hitler, in Lithuanian, in Russian, and in your language, comrade Chatzkel. Hitler, please take note, is not an enemy of the Soviet Union but a friend, and this is shown clearly by the peace treaty we made with him two years ago, and about friends, of course, you must speak with appropriate respect.

“Is that clear, comrade Bregman?”

“Yes.”

“Very good,” the chief praised. “I hope that your gossiping will no longer stir up trouble and we will not be forced to take unpleasant measures, such as confiscating your Phillips or closing your shop.”

After his meeting with the chief Russian, much changed in Chatzkel Bregman’s life: the relatives in Paris and Warsaw, London and New York vanished, and the envelopes with foreign postmarks and rare postage stamps disappeared. Suddenly the tubes of the Phillips burned out. There were no colonial goods in his shop, Ceylon tea, Moroccan dates, Indian fabrics. Chatzkel became gloomy and withdrawn, bitter and weakened, and he fell severely ill. Worried about their stock of news, his countrymen tried hard to give him countenance: some promised to take the Phillips to an expert in Kaunas who would fix it at no cost. Others joked that for every good piece of news they would pay no less than what they would have paid for Indian fabric. Others secretly cursed the new government, which was at fault for the tubes burning out, and for the lack of Ceylon tea, and for Chatzkel Bregman falling ill.

Chatzkel had no descendents in Miškiniai (his wife Golda had suffered a heart attack the summer before, and even before the Red Army came both his sons had emigrated to the other side of the ocean, to America), so a relative, a noisy, big-mouthed seamstress named Mirela, who barely spoke with Chatzkel, that miser, when he was alive, made arrangements for his burial.

Having made arrangements with Danuta-Hadassah and with the Burial Society, she chose a time for the funeral and the place. Sunday afternoon, and, for convenience, on the hill next to her parents who were also Bregman. Chatzkel would never have agreed to lie next to them, but no one asks permission of the dead. They bury you: now lie peacefully.

“He could at least have left some money for the headstone,” reproved Mirela of the shopkeeper’s miserliness.

“Don’t worry about it. Jacob will choose a stone,” Danuta-Hadassah answered, scowling and just as reproachful. “It will be Chatzkel’s headstone as well. I told him so.”

“Who?” Mirela looked at her wide-eyed.

“Chatzkel. The dead, just like the living, take joy in good news.”

Before every funeral she began to worry about something. After more than thirty years of interacting with the dead, Danuta-Hadassah had never gotten used to witnessing each unhappiness and brushed-away tear, but also could not hide her deep and uncensored happiness that, at the very least, the funeral brightened her loneliness a little bit. She would meet with many of her acquaintances, and it was good to share a word or two. It was likely the whole town would come together to say goodbye to Chatzkel Bregman. For most of the inhabitants (and in Miškiniai most were Jews), Chatzkel was a bringer of good news and a consoler. They forgave him his lies and inventions, because then no one humiliated themselves or tore their heart out like they do today to plague everyone with truth.

On the eve of the funeral, Danuta-Hadassah followed Jacob around like she was stuck to him. She saw that he would not disappear: she couldn’t dig a hole at her age, when her hands no longer obeyed her and the clay loam was harder than steel …

“Just don’t think of going off somewhere,” she warned Jacob, having in mind Eliševa.

“You must prepare Bregman a comfortable place. He’s not moving there just for a year, you know.”

“I’ll try.”

That Saturday he stayed home, he didn’t run off to Eliševa, and when the first star appeared in the sky he hoisted his shovel over his shoulder and climbed the little hill, spat into his hardened palms, and began, with heatedness and unexpected zeal, to build Bregman a comfortable resting place.

Having dug the hole, he fired up his self-built sauna, beat himself with birch, dressed in a clean shirt and lay down to sleep, so that he would not bother any of those come to accompany the town gossip on his final journey the next day with his yawning. Danuta-Hadassah wanted to tell him something, maybe about the headstone, for which the deceased did not leave any money, maybe about the horse, whose long and sad neighing frightened the dead; but she changed her mind, lit a somewhat melted-down candle and, looking at the flame, fragile and impermanent as a one-day moth, she began to weave her nightly Polish prayer, her threads rising like steep stairs higher and higher to the Holy Father. When the threads broke, Danuta-Hadassah feverishly tied them back together, and when the heavens and His heart were very near, suddenly, from beyond the window in the June sky full of stars, came a frightening drone, and then a terrible crash and a flame shot up, covering the stars and the earth in a bloody red.

Terrified, Danuta-Hadassah with her fingertips – she did not understand why in such noise she stole along with her fingertips – slunk up to her son’s room and breathlessly, repressing a constricted yell, she called:

“Jacob! Jacob!”

“What happened?” he murmured through sleep, thinking that his mother had been worn down by sleeplessness.

Jacob squeaked up in his bed, listened and, blinded by the thundering dawn, ran into the yard in his shirtsleeves.

The explosions did not stop.

White as a ghost, Jacob stood in the middle of the yard and did not lower his eyes from the flaming sky.

“War,” he said.

He stood there, stroked the mare tied to the rotting post, and returned to the cottage adding hopelessly:
“They’re bombing the tank range in Juodgiria …”

“Where is Eliševa?” Danuta-Hadassah now understood that it wasn’t the Russian tanks that were worrying him, but Gedaljė Bankvečeris’ daughter.

“As soon as Bregman’s funeral is over I’ll ride to her.”

“If there will be a funeral at all.”

“What, during war they don’t bury the dead?”

“They bury them, they bury them,” said Danuta-Hadassah, and then remembered how Lomsargis had talked about the imminent arrival of the Germans. Maybe Chatzkel Bregman will be the last Jew buried in this cemetery.

“I heard that in Poland the Germans closed all the Jewish cemeteries. They’ll close ours too … What will we do with ourselves, Jacob? What will happen to us? Eh?”

“You, Mama, the German’s won’t touch. You’re …”

She didn’t let him finish.

“What do you know about me, son? What? I myself don’t know what I am. I forget. A Pole? A Jew? A Byelorussian? A moth heading for the flame? A ladybird?” Danuta-Hadassah sighed heavily and began to sing a tune: “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home …”

Around midnight German planes with crosses on their sides appeared in the sky above Miškiniai. Howling bestially, they pealed over the town where, other than the Jews and the new Red government, there were no targets. One of them nosedived, and, maybe practising or maybe trying to scare them, dropped a bomb on Bruchis’ (who had been sent off to the white bears) furniture factory. The echo of the crash seemed as though it could be heard all the way to that unbearable Siberian flatness. Later, everything quieted. The only sound to be heard was the usual church bells signalling the end of prayers.

“The mourners have been held up for some reason,” worried Danuta-Hadassah.

“Does anyone hurry to the cemetery? No matter what you say, things didn’t go well for Bregman. In times like these, the dead don’t matter to the living. Everyone is thinking about himself or herself … about how to survive in this mess.

“Not everyone is thinking about that,” argued Danuta-Hadassah, fixing her gaze towards the town, on a crooked clearing in the trees. “Jacob, your eyes are still, thank God, not eaten away by tears and see better than mine. Look at the clearing! It looks like they’re bringing him.”

“It looks like they are bringing him.”

He wanted to fill the grave all the more quickly, to flatten down Bregman’s clay home nicely with his shovel and, jumping on his anxiously waiting horse, to fly to Juodgiria to find out if anything had happened to Eliševa: the estate of Česlovas Lomsargis was separated from the tank grounds and the emergency Red Army landing strip by only a narrow swath of hemp.

Soon Danuta-Hadassah also saw the mourners.

Bregman was driven over in the spacious wagon belonging to the joker Pinchas Žvairys, who, in the good old days, brought from Kaunas for Chatzkel the in-demand colonial goods that he sold so successfully for many years.

Besides the deceased’s distant relative, the seamstress Mirela, ceaselessly and with some joy cried tears as fat as currants, the wise and patient rabbi Gilelis, nervously twisting his payout and the trio from the local Burial Society, almost no one was at the grave. And this was not surprising. German planes raced like lightning over Miškiniai, chasing away most of Bregman’s buyers and listeners, who were no longer worried about accompanying the honoured shopkeeper on his final journey, but about how they needed, oh most likely they had all long needed, to save themselves; because if the Germans beat the Russians not one of the town’s, and not just the town’s, Lithuania’s, Jews would escape misfortune.

Rabbi Gilelis chanted with rumbling pauses and overtones and began a prayer, not only for the late Bregman, but, it seemed, for his Phillips with its good and bad news, for the colonial and local goods, for his responsible and irresponsible debtors, for his neighbours, lying in rest under the pines, and, what sacrilege, for the whole town, where it seemed that soon there would be no one to mourn. His voice rang out like never before, and when he finished no one moved from where they stood.

After a moment, they all shuddered and moved as though coming to. Mirela quickly unleashed a bucket of unending tears, and the mourners slowly and respectfully closed the gate.

“Ma’am, hard times are coming,” Rabbi Gilelis said in Polish to Danuta-Hadassah as he was saying his good-byes. “Especially for us Jews.”

“Where is God looking? Does He not love His own? He chose you from all of His people. Doesn’t He love you?” Danuta-Hadassah asked with irony. “Does He like wars … murder?”

Rabbi Gilelis looked at her in amazement with eyes full of an unusual sadness; he couldn’t think of an answer, it was as though he was guilty of all the world’s misfortunes, and he began to look around sorrowfully at his fellow tribesmen, until the joker Pinchas Žvairys took him by the hand and led him to the wagon. After walking a little way, Rabbi Gilelis unexpectedly turned around and said:

“I am too small and too weak to bother the Heavenly Father with my questions, or give Him advice, though sometimes, like any Jew, I really, really would like to …”

He bowed to the cemetery and climbed into the wagon, along with the inconsolable Mirela and two old women who never missed a funeral.

Danuta-Hadassah could not remember so short and hurried a good-bye to any deceased. Only Rabbi Gilelis and the weepy Mirela did not hurry during the funeral. The trio from the Burial Society made a sign to one another, as though understanding what was going on: we have to hurry home, gentlemen, to our wives and children.

The strapping Jacob also darted about, gazing at his horse whose neighing demands for attention and oats denigrated and weakened the solemnity of the remembrance prayers.

“Mama, I’m going,” said Jacob, when the cemetery had emptied.

“But you haven’t eaten anything.”

“Eliševa will give me something … Lie down, rest …”

His mother’s garrulity bothered him. Knowing her testy disposition, Jacob never stopped her. He would pretend to listen closely, and he was unwillingly forced to say endlessly needless and meaningless words. Normally he made do with very few spoken words: usually he stammered, nodded his head, sighed sorrowfully, wrinkled his face, or smiled in agreement; words did not give him any pleasure. In Jacob’s opinion, all that is best for a person lay in silence, and had to be protected like money in a Jewish bank, which is why he took as an example not his chatterbox brother Aaron, but the cemetery pines and headstones, austere and silent, guarding under bark and stone that which is unexplainable in any language.

“Listen … I won’t bother you for long … I had a thought: maybe you should stay there for a while?”

“Where?”

“In the village. With Eliševa … It looks to me that it would better for you to stay out of sight. I feel that no one else is going to be buried in this cemetery.” She was silent, and then quickly added: “Like you said, they won’t touch me. I was never a Jew to the Jews, and to the Germans I’ll be even less of one. But you …”

“Do you think that in the village I won’t be one? A Jew is a Jew everywhere. And so far the Germans are only in the sky …”

“They’ll soon be on the ground … Like in Poland. I said last year that the angel of death was flying towards us.”

“Okay, I’ll come back. We will talk. Rest,” he said and turned to his horse’s inviting trumpeting.

Translated by Medeinė Tribinevičius

In the Shadow of the Devil

BY ALGIS KALĖDA

Grigorijus Kanovičius’ new novel Šėtono apžavai (The Devil’s Spell) is not a sudden twist in his rich output. We could say that this work grew on the foundation that he has been building for several decades, the basis of which was created in the trilogy Žvakės vėjyje (Candles in the Wind), consisting of the novels Paukščiai virš kapinių (Birds Above the Cemetery, 1977), Palaimink ir lapus, ir ugnį (Bless the Leaves and the Fire, 1980), and Lopšinė seniui besmegeniui (A Lullaby to a Snowman, 1982). In these novels Kanovičius depicted, as if through a magnifying glass, the lives of several characters, and recreated the fate of the Jewish community of the whole of Lithuania in the pre-war years and during the Second World War. His other novels deal with a similar set of issues, and each of them is original and interesting.

Kanovičius’ novels have enriched Lithuanian literature with new artistic paradigms. This was not only the theme of the fate of the Jews (for other authors, primarily Icchokas Meras, also write about it), but first of all an originally arranged composition, individual and never before seen portraits of characters, and an especially suggestive narrative in which realistic images, mythological parables, confessional monologues and the polyphonic counterpoints of the tale merge into a whole. The writer resorts to aphoristic generalisations and ordinary details of everyday life, and raises the craft of the dressmaker, shoemaker, craftsman or gravedigger to a metaphysical level, projecting the characters’ individual feelings on to a genuine human plane into a timeless space. These features are characteristic of the writer’s later novels Kvailių ašaros ir maldos (Fools’ Tears and Prayers, 1983), Ir nėra vergams rojaus (There is no Paradise for Slaves, 1985), Козленок за два гроша (A Twopenny Goat, 1987), Nenusigręžki nuo mirties (Turn not your Face from Death, 1992), and the play Nusišypsok mums, Viešpatie (Smile Upon us, God, 1991).

The heroes of these works usually live in two spheres: in the real one, which is reality that has undergone all historical catastrophes; and in the sphere of visions, myths, one could even say eternity. The first is concrete: it contains details of pre-war life in Lithuania, and easily recognisable historical signs. The action usually develops in Vilnius, Kaunas, or in small towns. The characters are mostly shoemakers, tailors, synagogue servants, musicians, and, recurrently, gravediggers. The latter (usually represented by a comparatively young, still maturing, man) seem to possess the possibility to relate this earthly reality with the one on the other side, the transcendental one. The image of the cemetery that arises in several of Kanovičius’ works, quite often, and paradoxically, represents vitality, because it offers the opportunity to show the permanent status of human fate, the continuity of the family, kin and nation. But in work by this writer, it is continuity without continuation, because life’s natural passage through centuries is tragically disrupted by the massacre of the Second World War.

In an interview the writer once said: “To be honest, when I look back at the road I’ve covered, at all those books I’ve written, I realise it’s one and the same book, one saga about the life of Lithuanian Jews. I am happy I came to be a peculiar chronicler of the Jews who lived in Lithuania. Probably the cemetery is the symbol that is dictated by my subconscious and that permeates all my creative work, all my books. I am not an optimistic writer; therefore, the metaphor for the world as a cemetery is very deep in me. The tragedy of the Holocaust, when so many people stayed to live in cemeteries … And I mean it, to live.”

In general, Kanovičius often shows the marginal situations, when a human finds himself between life and death, and experiences a real existential catastrophe. On the other hand, such states, which often emanate a fatalistic hopelessness, seem to crystallise the kernel of the personality, and show the scale of its moral values. In the novel Žydų parkas (The Park of Jews, 1998), the author reveals variations of different moral postures, without condemnation, and just states, melancholically, this is how it is … The narrator’s sensitivity in all Kanovičius’ novels lets the reader experience the depths of the human soul, to experience catharsis, and a feeling of spiritual enlightenment. The individual’s relation with eternity and divinity unfolds in his work with special suggestiveness. The writer creates an extraordinary atmosphere in the communication between a human and God, he allows his characters to “speak” to the Almighty, and to reproach sadly him about deeply rooted injustice. To small people unfairly wronged by their neighbours, God is like a source of hope that the wrongs will be redressed. God is different to the Jews led to the mass grave or tortured in the ghetto. He becomes like an equal with them. He shares the same fate, and seems to encourage some to be resigned (“Happiness is not on this earth”), and others to sustain their resolve to defend, at least by weak actions, their human dignity.

The plot of Kanovičius’ latest novel develops along the line of the previous novels. The action of Šėtono apžavai is inscribed in the historical context of 1940 and 1941, when Lithuania was overrun by the Soviet army, and shortly afterwards by Nazi troops. The population of Miškiniai, a small town in Samogitia, is predominantly Jewish, outnumbering the Lithuanians. Danuta-Hadassah, a Pole, who some time ago came here from Belarus to her father-in-law, and who is looking after the cemetery with her son Jacob (his father was a Jew), is a peculiar intermediary between the two ethnic groups. The author weaves a web of national relations that is not rare in reality, is natural and does not give rise to extraordinary passions. However, the town’s comparatively quiet life is shattered by demonic political conflicts, and the residents of the town and its environs become victims of demonic powers, and hostages of a peculiar struggle between good and evil.

The novel consists of eight parts, telling about the behaviour, feelings and experiences of the main characters. Kanovičius seldom uses an internal monologue: he depicts his characters from the narrator’s point of view by introducing the look from aside approach, and resorting to the abundant expressive dialogues and that kind-hearted irony so characteristic of him. An extremely voluminous style, rich with a diversity of meanings, associations and connotations, and aptly echoing a ­perception of the world, thoughts and spiritual state, facilitates in creating that special atmosphere of the work. The author’s narrative seems to imitate the character’s manner of speaking and events that befell him or her, and judges them from the point of view of the character.

Due to the specific communicative structure, semantics and suggested reflections in this novel are not limited by the contours of reality but step beyond the field of meaning of directly depicted events and phenomena. Following the principle pars pro toto (a part for the whole), the writer has succeeded in making a symbolic generalisation of the experiences of individual characters. Among the most characteristic versions of psychological-social existence are the fates of the Nazi henchman Juozas, the communist sympathiser Aaron, Jacob, the Jewish patriot Eliševa, who wishes to go to Palestine, the Lithuanian farmer Česlovas Lomsargis, and, of course, Danuta-Hadassah. In one way or another, all these characters experience the temptation of sin, bliss, and find themselves trapped in cruel challenges. The writer creates an unusual genre form, consisting of a parable, a ballad and a historical realistic novel that has allowed him to reflect on numerous aspects of the endless space of the human’s world.

The literary critic Elena Bukelienė once wrote that Kanovičius’ writing “abounds in biblical parallels, biblical wisdom, metaphysical feeling and, simultaneously, rich images of everyday life”. The inimitable characters of the heroes, their archetypal way of life, customs, habits, faith and feasts that come from ancient traditions and preserve the legacy of thousands of years, unfold against the background of daily rounds. It is these traditions that determine the writer’s originality and artistry, and establish links between him, born and having grown up in Lithuania, and such prominent figures in world literature as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow.

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Former members of the George W. Bush administration and critics of President Barack Obama have endorsed this narrative. It also contends that Obama’s foreign policy advisers are amateurs and beyond their depth. Among other things, they moved too quickly in withdrawing support for expanding NATO to Georgia and Ukraine, and in addition to their scrapping Bush’s anti-missile defense system in Europe, they have engaged in risky arms control agreements with Russia. And there is more: Obama has not staunchly resisted Kremlin claims that Russia enjoys a “special sphere of influence” throughout the former Soviet space. After the 2008 Georgian-Russian War, all of these accusations caused alarm in Central and Eastern Europe.

Lucas, the author of a book that pillories the Kremlin leadership—The New Cold War—has been a resolute supporter of the Baltic countries in their confrontations with Kremlin hard-liners. This year for his commitment to Lithuania’s security he was awarded the “National Defense System Medal.” His commentary on the charges leveled at Obama then are of special interest to anyone living in the East Baltic Sea region.

In commenting upon the claim that Obama has betrayed the Baltics, Lucas has observed. This “is a potent and poignant narrative. It is popular among Republican critics of the administration. If it were true, it would be a scandalous story. But in reality, (in) almost every element (it) is untrue.”

To provide perspective, one must acknowledge that Obama inherited a poisoned legacy from Bush including two wars and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. It is especially noteworthy that the invasion of Iraq, and subsequent abuses associated with it, represented a monumental savaging of the very Western values that Bush and his associates had celebrated. “It was not just that western values and credibility were shredded, first by the contempt for international law, second by the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, thirdly by the incredible incompetence of the American occupying forces, and finally by the scandalous abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.” Worse yet, all of these things were done “under the guise of a common cause: freedom.” Consequently, when members of the Bush administration correctly cited human rights violations in Chechnya, the Kremlin leaders responded that the Americans were engaging in double standards. “The final ignominy came during the Georgia war, when America’s impotence was starkly exposed. It was neither able to restrain Mr. Saakashvili, nor to deter Russia.” Lucas might have added: Had there been no Iraq War, Russia probably would not have risked one with Georgia.

Lucas concludes, when one considers the legacy that it inherited from Bush: “…it is actually rather surprising how much the Obama administration has achieved. The single most important decision has been the president’s personal decision to push through full NATO contingency planning for the Baltic states.” Furthermore, Obama has pledged to employ U.S. power to protect all three of them. “This year sees no fewer than four American military exercises in the Baltic states, involving thousands of troops, dozens of aircraft and ships, and intense involvement of everything from electronic intelligence to special forces.” Consequently, “Russian military planners are in no doubt now that America has serious plans and capabilities to defend its weakest allies.”

Lucas finds the Obama administration guilty of some mistakes in the former communist space in Europe, including: its failure to forewarn the Poles and Czechs that he was scrapping Bush’s anti-missile system; personnel limitations among U.S. diplomats in the area; and not inviting Azerbaijan’s leader to the recent Nuclear Security Summit, but when considering the charges against Obama—well, he finds them bogus.

In this connection, a few words should be said about Georgia since its summer war with Russia is responsible for fears about Russian aggression throughout much of the former Soviet space. It is significant that many Georgians take issue with the anti-Obama-pro-Bush narrative. According to Giga Zedania at IliaUniversity in Tbilisi, “One of the problems of the Bush administration was that it had no leverage over Russia, because there was no cooperation” between Washington and Moscow. “When these links are established that mutually benefit Russia and the United States, Russia will have more incentive to think twice before it does something like it did in 2008.” Or listen to Irakli Alasania, Georgia’s former Ambassador to the UN. “I strongly believe that if the U.S.-Russian relationship expands and grows closer, it will only benefit Georgia.”

Furthermore, recent trips to Georgia by Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been applauded by the Georgia government; in particular, their pledge to protect the country against foreign aggression. In her visit to Georgia, Clinton demanded Moscow end its occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Because both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have clearly stated that they welcome close relations with Obama, such pledges take on more meaning than similar ones that were made by the Bush administration but never acted upon. Indeed, many Georgians recall that under the Bush administration there was lots of tough talk when it came to Washington’s protecting Georgia but no concrete actions when it clashed with Russia in the summer of 2008.

Finally, Obama’s critics chastise him for caving into Russian pressure when he scrapped Bush’s plans for an anti-missile system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Last year, this development prompted prominent statesmen from the region to express their fears that their countries would be harmed by Washington’s re-setting relations with Moscow. But these noble dignitaries, all of whom played a vital role in bringing their countries into the democratic camp, ignored some important facts:

As Bush indicated, his anti-missile program had nothing to do with Russia’s awesome nuclear-missile strike capability. Conversely, the same holds true for not deploying it.

During his race for the White House, Obama indicated that he saw no reason to deploy a missile defense system in Europe that did not work to address a threat that had not yet materialized—namely, an Iran nuclear arsenal.

As U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has indicated the new system championed by Obama is far more sophisticated than that which the Bush administration favored.

Consequently, Radek Sikorski, Poland’s Foreign Minister has indicated, he is quite happy with the Patriot anti-missile system that the Americans have begun to deploy in his country. Indeed, he has invited Russian observers to visit the project when it is completed. Such transparency is consistent with a re-set in relations between Russia and all members of the Western alliance.

Consequently, Lithuanians should welcome the Americans and Russians finding ways to address common security problems—assuming the Obama administration does not remain silent in face of actions from those hapless hard-liners in Moscow who remain mired in the cold war.

And one more thing: listen to Lucas’s message to all EU citizens. “So the grand narrative of betrayal by a cynical, weak and distracted superpower is phony. The real betrayal is different one: it is the betrayal of national and European interests by the politicians charged with promoting them. If Ukraine’s security is in trouble, it is not America’s fault, but Ukraine’s politicians. If Europe fails to gain American respect and attention, then it is because Europe’s leaders are weak, distracted and cynical.”

Perhaps Lucas is being too harsh here but no one can argue with the observation that as Washington’s influence in world affairs diminishes, Europe must help fill those spaces of instability left vacant by the Americans. But is Europe ready to re-set relations with a world in turmoil or will it choose to be a mere bystander?

Dick Krickus is professor emeritus at the University of Mary Washington and has held the H. L. Oppenheimer Chair for Warfighting Strategy at the U.S. Marine Corps University.

***In the fall, Dick Krickus will be serving as visiting professor of international affairs at Vytautas Magnus University.

Finncomm domestic flights are integrated in Finnair’s route network, and the company is trying to avoid that the small carrier will be bought by the Latvian company, AirBaltic, as it was reported in Finnish business media Kauppalehti.

A fact that shows how important is for Finnair to avoid the small carrier to be taken by “AirBaltic” is that the Finnish national airline won last week from the court a precautionary ruling to avoid Finncomm owners to be able to sell their shares.

And this because the biggest Finnish airline thinks that due to their partnership, it has the right of pre-emption (the right of existing shareholders in a company to buy shares offered for sale before they are offered to the public) over Finncomm.

Despite of the ruling, AirBaltic keeps having talks dealing a future acquisition, as Tero Taskila, commercial manager of airBaltic in Finland has said.

What is Finncomm?

Finncomm is a private Finnish airline. It was created in 1993 as an air taxi operator (an air charter passenger or cargo aircraft which operates on an on-demand basis). The company grew over the years and five years later, the airline started to have scheduled routes.

Finncomm has cooperated with Finnair since 1998, in a way that the domestic routes offered good connections to Finnair’s international routes.

Finncomm is Suomi’s biggest domestic airline. According to the airline’s data, last year they carried about 872,000 passengers
 

All rivers bubble in ancient languages. I should tell that to my friends. But I doubt they would listen to me. After all, those ideas don’t fit with the ideology of the Party Congress, and those ideals define the importance of the state language. But in that important language there are no diphthongs for water. The water bubbles in from underground springs. Every time I taste it, I feel the taste of sand in my mouth.

I will wade into the Black River and I will wash the sand from my lips. Though, I doubt this water will betray me.

My children sit on a blanket and stare at me. My son looks worried. Only, for my little one is it all the same. He is rolling around on the ground, angrily banging his pacifier. What an idiotic child. I am certain that he will soon shove that pacifier into his mouth and start to scream, choking on sand.

I ought to take it away.

But what for?

He needs to get used to his own language. He’ll often need to spit it out of his mouth.

I take another step.

“Mama, don’t go,” my son says. There is fear in his voice. “There’s a ditch over there … Under the water …”

“There is no such ditch.”

“But, Sonya said …”

I don’t pause to hear what Sonya had to say.

That is how the earth speaks with dusty lips. Still, what is bound happen to a dust speck, will happen.

I take one more step and it’s the water, murmuring in Lithuanian, swallowing me up over my head, I hear something smack above me, maybe it’s the baby’s pacifier hitting him in the face, or maybe I’m getting a belated smack for carefully ironing the wrinkled diapers. Toli mumbles, the idiot doesn’t need diapers and why is money being thrown away; and when I tell him that the baby is his child, and that I make the baby’s diapers out of old worn sheets, Toli goes mad, screaming: “Are you calling me a fool!” He rips the iron out of my hands and smacks me across the face, on the head, and the children scream as though they were being slaughtered. They say that the water doesn’t allow sound to pass. That scientific fact is as wrong as all the others.

I surfaced with difficulty, like the moon surfaces from under a high-tide wave. The pretty radioactive craters shine at me.

Stop howling, damn you, damn thieves! Can I have even a moment of peace.

The little one didn’t stop. He kept on howling just as loud as before. And my son was twitching as though stung by an electric fish. The poor thing was as blue as I was.

I wanted to comfort him, but I couldn’t get myself out of the water. I collapsed on the shoreline and people ran over to carry me up, but I couldn’t even get myself together to thank them. I was angry at them for dragging me, soaking, wet as a sculpted oak, with my dress clinging to my thighs, looking like a wrinkled rotted bark. They pumped my breasts, swung me around, took me by my feet, one of them even leaned down over my face, but then jumped back, frightened.

My son ran behind them and his eyes were filled with tears. There was a wrinkle on the edge of his lips that looked like disappointment. He probably understands that life is a bad joke, or better said, a complete flop, but people laugh, most likely because they are used to laughing – or maybe because laughter is something to annoy, like a cough; if you don’t cough, you’ll feel terrible, it will tickle you from the inside.

Sonya is leaning over the baby, the stupid kid has shoved sand into his mouth. Maybe she will pick him up by the legs and shake him out. But no! She only cries and strokes the baby’s head.

Good old Sonya. She is a slob, fat, flabby as old rancid butter.

Get away from me because I am about to vomit.

Sonya can’t hear me. Her face is covered in tears and she is stroking my hair now, murmuring, “Pretty little ring,” and trying to press a bandage onto my mouth. The bandage keeps popping off because I am green and cold as a pike at the bottom of a bucket and water keeps coming up from inside. I talk non-stop, saying everything that I am thinking; after all, there is nothing to hide, and Sonya is sobbing, because my mouth looks so terrible, as though someone had hurriedly yanked out the hook.

My son sits there with his back turned away from the coffin. The baby’s eyes are bright and empty. No one has written his first words on them yet. He gazes at me and sees nothing. He’ll probably never even remember my face. Thank God. No, no, not God. The Party.

Sonya tosses the bandage and brings a needle and thread. She gazes at me for a long time, then shoves the thread into her pocket and begins to cry. The fool, the thread is black. How would I look? What a cannibal. Then Sonya gets another brilliant idea – she comes trundling in the door with a dirty tube, the kind you can only find in the Chornomaisk hardware store. The glue isn’t bad, the shoemaker Pashka uses it to glue shoe soles; they only come apart after a week, if it doesn’t rain.

She drips a drop onto my bottom lip and then freezes with her mouth gaping open, fearfully pausing. What an idiot that Sonya is; maybe she thinks I’ll bite her. Glue it faster, damn you; can’t you see that my smile is frightening the children. I’ve told them so many tales about cannibals and Bluebeard’s wives.

Sonya tosses the tube and, sobbing, hurries out of the hall. Most likely, this was the first time she wasn’t gluing the sole of a shoe, but a dead person’s lips, and that is why she couldn’t take it. Or she thought it wouldn’t hold.

Poor Sonya. All that work and all that planning!

I am lying in the center of the main hall of the House of Culture. Above me hangs a banner that says: “Art belongs to the people.” That is comforting. That means that I too belong to art.

A crooked burning candle bowed forwards towards my face and singed my eyelashes. A hot paraffin drop marked my left eye.

Nobody noticed. It was late at night and the House of Culture was locked up.

Only a gray rat scaled the side of the coffin up a mourning ribbon and gazed at me curiously from the edge of the coffin. She sniffed at the air, stood up on her hind legs, and gave an unsatisfactory sneeze. I guess she didn’t like the reek of Pashka’s glue. She clambered down.

No good. Everyone will be upset tomorrow when they see that my nose is fine and my ears weren’t touched. Only one eye is singed and covered in dripping paraffin. I will remain a foreigner even after my death. From away. Someone who never became accustomed to local traditions. According to them, the corpse on display in the House of Culture must travel off to the cemetery chewed by rats because local tradition did not allow them to close the coffin overnight. It was a tradition from the distant past. Notwithstanding their modern ways and their Marxist ideology, most of the local citizenry secretly believed that at night the corpse might decide to go have a smoke or take a trip to the toilet. What was so strange about that? Material is all powerful!

The Party organizer’s secretary Bibikov says that what is on the exterior is not important to a Communist (well, unless it is on a placard inviting everyone to the 1 May parade. There you must have classical features). And for a dead Communist, this is even more true. Though, I doubt that he’d want to lie here for the wake and then travel into the Great Nothingness without his nose intact.

Bibikov’s wife is a tough broad. She’ll slam the lid down on him as though he were meatloaf. And Bibikov will never get over it because he won’t be able to get up for the last time and look over the October Revolution photographs hanging in the director’s office – a much more meaningful thing for a corpse to be doing than having a smoke.

But, death does not enter into Bibikov’s daily schedule, and, in general, it looks as though it is going to be crossed out of the list of prospective plans as an obvious idiocy.

By the time he slowly leaves the hall, stinking of wet cardboard and camphor spirit, he’ll miss it all. I’ll have to understand how time flew, so that nothing is dependent on me anymore.

I don’t think I’ll see Toli here.

Bibikov will come for sure. He’ll show up at the last possible moment. His pride won’t allow him to come any earlier. If only I could, I’d say to him, worms cling to pride first, but I don’t think he’ll listen to me.

And my daughter.

I have myself to blame for that. I let her leave with those fools. Anastazy’s shirt collar, as always, was rumpled. And when I saw mother-in-law with her frightened horse-face and with her tattered ancient handbag, I was overcome with such disappointment that I couldn’t utter a word. Will they ever understand that such things exist as neck ties and toilet water, and that serfdom has actually ended, and that clean clothing each and every day is no longer a luxury only the masters may enjoy?

The mother-in-law stared at me with her head cocked, like an owl. Afterwards, she had a long cough. And why wouldn’t she? She travels together with a colony of mold! If that wasn’t enough, in the middle of her coughing fit, she began to cry sadly. No one knew what happened – not even her. Only I heard, and always hear, those sobs, innocent and animal-like.

It’s a good thing that Toli wasn’t there. He’s a terrible aesthete and would have gotten very upset. Not because of the sad sobs, but because of my daughter. He’d be furious that I let her go with those people. They said it was only for a short time. A vacation. Then they’d bring her back, they promised.

I never believed Anastazy. He lied without thinking twice. He lied as naturally as his mother. An uncontrollable sob. He probably fooled his own self, that’s natural. He wandered into deepest Russia believing himself to be an honorable father, but open opinion is responsible for everything, buzzing around his ears: take the children before their horrid stepfather kills them! If it wasn’t for opinion, would he have even come? Probably it’s the only means of quieting annoying do-gooders. Probably the mother-in-law was an accomplice. She cried to scare away the children, to turn them into wild animals, they won’t learn how to talk, they’ll only howl in a foreign language and stamp around with their hooves!

They don’t care what I’ll turn into. No one took me into account in any of their rescue plans. After all, I am not a weak and helpless child. I am a monster, a crazy woman. I am Bluebeard’s wife with her face burned by an iron.

Anastazy was not interested in finding out why I was as blue as a forget-me-not. Or, maybe everything was clear to him, or he didn’t care. Now, can you be angry about that? How can you be angry at a person who doesn’t even care about himself?

I remember one time when we were near the store. Women walking past modestly turned away. And then I was overwhelmed with anger and kicked Anastazy. Immediately, they turned around. One of them screamed at me for tormenting him.

The dean of the church was walking past carrying a package from abroad. He told me I had to learn some holy humility – the old hypocrite! What kind of humility can there be these days when men and women have equal rights! He’d be better off admitting to how he spends his evenings with his housekeeper chewing on American candy made from Negro bones.

That was why I kicked Anastazy one more time in the ass. I’d have kicked him again, but the mother-in-law stuck out her moldy hand, as though it were a shield, and I felt sick. I lost the will to fight.

“Okay, take her, but only until the end of summer.”

“Oh, how wonderful, Anastazy, did you hear?”

“I heard.”

“Will you maybe let us take the boy too? Ah?”

“No.”

“Why not? They’ll have more fun together!”

I’m angry all over again. I’m as angry as though I were standing in the dark town shop at the counter arguing for one more piece of sausage. The shopkeeper won’t sell it to me. She’s keeping it for her old maiden aunt. That one only feeds that sausage to her cat because he’s too old to catch mice anymore.”

The constant shortage of sausage brings strange thoughts to my head. For example, that Communism is a system in which the citizen should not need to worry at all about what he will eat, and the bright future is unavoidably tied either with this practice of denying oneself this harmful tradition, or with some sort of entirely new outlook on food. For example, with cannibalism. It sounds horrific, but it’s unavoidable. That’s because Soviet pig farms look more like strange reservations where the pigs are locked up for re-education rather than a place where they are kept along the way to the slaughter house. Therefore, the main reserve is – human beings. As always. And when you find a scrap of cloth in your sausage and that scrap looks like it’s part of a cuff, or when you find a false tooth, you quietly make peace with the prognosis for the future. What else is left for one to do?

The child ought to go to Lithuania.

The mother-in-law keeps a few pigs. He won’t need to eat Communist sausage – long as sewage pipes, intact with mouse skeletons and plastic doll fingers.

But I won’t let my son go. As soon as they have the both of them, they’ll give me the middle finger. They won’t give them back. Stay there with your freak of nature, they’ll say! Their eyes say it all. They won’t even blink, so I wouldn’t hide them away.

While my daughter is in Lithuania, I will try to talk Toli into stopping. She’s just a child. Not even ten. She doesn’t understand what Toli is doing. She squirms out of his arms and screams, “Mama, it hurts!”

And I’m not supposed to do anything. Toli doesn’t like it. He calls me a “stupid foreigner” and threatens to leave me for Sonya.

For Sonya! Peaceful Sonya, the butter whore. I couldn’t even hit her. My hand would catch inside her fat.

Go, what are you waiting for? Are you waiting for me to start screaming and fighting like Aza the gypsy? Don’t worry – I won’t howl. You won’t have anything interesting to say about me except that my face was blue, only you don’t know why. You don’t know whether I fell down the stairs or drank some acetone. You’ll be too embarrassed to ask. Or maybe, you’re afraid. Because you wouldn’t be able to tell the neighbors and relatives what I said. You’d bumble that I was speaking gibberish. That I was going on about nothing! I was drunk! I was crazy! It takes a high style to show craziness! Therefore, I’m better off keeping quiet.

I’ll gather up all the child’s things, I’ll hand them over, nastily, so that later mother-in-law would say, not a word, not a whisper; Jesus Christ, what a terrible mother, what a good thing we took the child; too bad she didn’t let us have the other one too, the ghost!

I waved after they turned the corner around the store and I couldn’t see them anymore. And then such a panic took over me that I wanted to run and catch up with them, to wrap my hands around their calves and hold onto them; but how, if my arms won’t listen to me and I can’t lift my feet off the ground, and my lips are glued shut with glue from a dirty shoemaker’s tube?

I blow like the crosswinds. So lightly that I gently raise the colony of mold growing on mother-in-law’s handbag. When I return, in my body of wind, it won’t be so bad. I’ll find furious Bluebeard, who lost his gentle and innocent head, and the blow will go straight through, like the chop of an axe; only there will no longer be anything to chop.

Translated by Laima Vincė

A Memory of Intimidated Consciousness

By Regimantas Tamošaitis
The 39-year-old prose writer, poetess, playwright and critic Renata Šerelytė graduated in Lithuanian philology from Vilnius University in 1994, and made her debut in the press in 1986. She writes original prose in sharp and expressive stylistics, and portrays a man with a restless, rebellious and desperate character, whose formation goes back to Soviet times.

Šerelytė’s character lives on the periphery of society, and often comes close to the existence of the social “bottom”. This is not a freely chosen situation, as is characteristic of characters in bohemian literature. It is thrust on the character by life itself. The person is simply thrown into grim reality, and he has struggled in it since his very first days, and has only himself to rely on. He is left to himself, he cannot expect to receive support from society, there is no safe social background, no protective warmth of the family, no well-wishing authorities, and finally, there is no God. This is a one-dimensional world, without friendship, and without a transcendental dimension. The idea of the spiritual development or the moral rebirth of the personality here is choked by a grim fatalism. This is existence without any ray of hope, the individual’s movement towards death. Šerelytė’s world is orphan-like; however, her character is neither weak nor languid, he is vital and violent, keeping a firm hold on life.

These features of the character give the writer’s creative work signs of shocking avant-gardism, and sometimes attempts are made to define them by means of the meaningless concept of Postmodernism. This is due to the fact that Šerelytė’s writing is a spontaneous discharge of memory, testifying to the creator’s efforts to settle accounts with the past, and to give a rational meaning and consistency to the chaos of one’s own suffering and experiences, rather than a literary experiment or the self-expression of a self-satisfied artist. The writer creates the story of her own personality through her writing.

Šerelytė’s orphaned character, first and foremost, is a woman, a young girl. Even the modern, expressionistic or avant-garde stylistics of her writing are a peculiar disguise concealing the real feelings of the character, and concealing human fragility especially carefully. As if denying that fragility, which would be a quite understandable and humane feature, her character arms herself with aggressive behaviour, looks around like a frightened animal, defends herself by her hysterical reactions, and sometimes strengthens her existential positions with the help of the intellect. Šerelytė’s woman is clever, with great insights, and these features do not reveal themselves naturally within her, they are the result of a hard life. Sometimes the trained mind serves the individual as his self-defence. Therefore, only one force is hidden behind the intellectual features of her character: a strong instinct for life, the desire to survive.

Šerelytė’s latest novel Mėlynbarzdžio vaikai (Children of Bluebeard) shows a qualitative turning point in her work. First of all, I would evaluate it as the author’s strengthened self-awareness, moral courage and sincerity, because through this creative work the author refuses modernistic mannerism; the role of a popular writer seems to take off the anonymous mask. The work grows out of the author’s heavy memory, and it has some features of autobiography.

The universal metaphor of Bluebeard points to the female’s unhappy fate, and the cruelty of the male world. Some people tend to interpret this work as an allegory for the Soviet regime; but it is not right, because that narrows the layers of meanings of the work, imposes an ideological status on it, and brushes away the existential aspect of the person’s consciousness. The Soviet era is simply a favourable background for Bluebeard to flourish, it legalises the cruelty of a strong man, and a woman is either a helpless victim or a self-renouncing conformist in this epoch of male engineering and the ideological technologies of the authorities. It was an epoch of impressive shoulder straps and high caps, which imprisoned a woman in a cage of everyday routine and family duties. Therefore, a more sensitive woman is unable to survive in such a patriarchal world, she withdraws from life. The story is told in the names of the children of an unhappy noble-minded woman who committed suicide. The author is not only concerned about Bluebeard’s victim, but also about who remains, the fates of the unhappy children. This is a novel about orphans, and about the inherited suffering in life.

The action of the book takes place in two states, an occupied and occupying one, Lithuania and Belarus, and the story is as follows. A mother, with her two children, leaves her husband, a kind-hearted but weak-willed and drunken Lithuanian, and goes to Belarus to live with a Russian man who is elegant and handsome, but extremely cruel. Being unable to endure the cruelty of that man, she drowns herself, as if withdrawing to natural and motherly waters. The grandparents take the two children of the first husband back to Lithuania, to a provincial town, and the third child, of the cruel husband, is left in a children’s home in Russia.

The temptation arises to interpret the Lithuanian man and occupied Lithuania as femininity violated by the Bolshevik Bluebeard, but this would be too allegorical. Nevertheless, the situation expresses some psychological truth: Lithuanian culture is of an agrarian, rural origin; therefore, it is lyrical and passive. The Russian character points to the militaristic expansive Slavic policy, and Russia’s attitude towards occupied nations.

In the novel, the story is told in four voices speaking in the first person. The most important of them are the voices of the Lithuanian orphans, a brother and sister. Their voices are supplemented by the voice of a conditional character, the mother’s voice from beyond. The mother is like the spirit of motherhood here, looking at her past and at her children from a distance, and giving the narrative an objective, evaluative meaning. These three narrators are sometimes supplemented by that unwanted disabled child who, having been left absolutely on his own, tries to make sense of the world, to find his place in it, and to establish relations with people, though all of them are complete strangers.

The author manages to create two original and psychologically realistic characters that at the same time contradict the stereotypes. The brother is an introverted, lyrical and contemplative character. He withdraws inside himself from the brutal, materialistic and ideologically engaged provincial world, and is steeped in melancholy, like his mother in the waters of the Black River. Finally, impulsively, without realising it himself, he follows his mother, having not revealed the talents of his sensitive soul. The subtle man in this cruel world cannot fight, he has no willpower to live, and he is neither able nor wants to adapt to it.

His sister is quite different: she expresses an active principle, a strong will to live, which is also apparently a matter of the instinctive feminine origin. She is energetic, clings firmly to life, protects herself from the gloomy provincial world by her anger, and is quite clever and resourceful. Her strategy is interesting: since everything that is ugly and strong is based on communist ideology, this character seems to take over her enemy’s weapon: she masters the rhetoric of this ideology completely, and starts defending it. She attacks the army of nobodies surrounding her. The daughter becomes an ardent young communist, this is another mask of the writer’s character.

She perceives the rules of the game, and makes use of them. The writer portrays her character consciously, with a light irony, and this ability of hers to sacrifice the autobiographical element is an excellent, fascinating quality of the novel. It is an auto-ironic parting with a rather painful past, a particular way of overcoming it.

Yes, the woman’s instinct is stronger, she survives. However, can Bluebeard’s child be happy? Of course, he cannot. His life is a prolonged trauma, like a form of consciousness, like the nature of man, which it is impossible to change. This trauma is a feeling of guilt, the suffering of self-image, a constant pretence before the world. In essence, a character with traumatic experience has lost touch with life. He is asocial because Bluebeard has killed the humanistic origin within him, and its place is taken by the instinct for adaptation. Having shut the book, we have the feeling that some deep problem remains unsolved in this work, that Bluebeard’s room remains unlocked, where the body of a daughter rather than that of the mother is waiting for the light of consciousness.

Šerelytė’s book engages the reader. The author is an excellent narrator, and her talent manifests itself especially clearly when depicting the coarse details of reality: the authentic textures of everyday life. Elements of everyday life that are interesting in themselves easily become generalising metaphors, they open up in the depths of the meaning. Her writing is semantically informative and says much about human psychology, about life, about the environment forming the consciousness. Finally, this is a novel about the most important themes of literature, about love and death, about two forces which govern everything and which often interchange.

The Vilnius Review publishes the best new writing from Lithuania translated into English.  Each issue contains translated extracts from the most interesting recently published works of prose, and verse by the country’s best poets.

The magazine also publishes book reviews, criticism and in-depth articles on current issues relevant to the Lithuanian literary world.

The Vilnius Review comes out twice a year. An annual subscription costs 15 Euros.

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But don’t take my word for it. EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said as much when the EU member states approved the latest tranche in loans to the Latvian government: “The program is on track, financial conditions have largely stabilized and the economic situation is showing signs of improvement”.

Yesterday in an analysis of the International Monetary Fund, Martin Hutchinson wrote in SIFY FINANCE: “Nor is the IMF’s track record by any means perfect. On the positive side, its loans to Latvia appear to have had the desired effect in encouraging the government’s austerity program, allowing Latvia to maintain its exchange rate parity and to generate the beginnings of economic recovery. Industrial production, for instance, rose 10.9 per cent in the year to May.”

The Bank of Latvia President Ilmārs Rimšēvičs agrees. He points out that Latvia’s growing current account surplus “…confirms the assumption that the lowest point in the economic decline is already in the past, which is vital both for the real economy and psychologically. We expect positive GDP growth also in the second quarter as suggested by the results in May, and the manufacturing industry will make the greatest contribution to positive growth.”

BBC is equally positive in its outlook for the Latvian economy. In a country-by-country review of “The Eurozone in Crisis”, BBC passed the following “verdict” on Latvia:

Experienced one of EU’s deepest recessions, but confidence is returning;

iscal measures having encouraging impact, but still much work ahead;

Exports now expected to grow at healthy pace;

Property market recovering and consumer spending growing;

But fragile economy could still be hit by any threat to confidence.

Pēteris Strautiņš, an economic expert for DnB NORD bank, describes what happened from an insider’s point of view: “Almost everything that was fragile in our economy has been broken, and the explosive potential that accrued during the beginning of the crisis has already exploded. Now the rubble is being cleared and things are turning forward.” Strautiņš agrees with other more optimistically inclined observers that the Latvian economic recovery „will be slow, but steady”.

Actually there’s a lot of good news coming out of Latvia these days. Latvia’s national airline airBaltic just announced that that it carried 1.472 million passengers during the first six months of 2010 at a 22% rise from the same period a year ago. Many of those passengers may be flocking to our beaches, because Latvia has been experiencing a record high heat wave in July, and more unbelievably hot Nordic weather is expected through August.

Economic recovery is a product of many complex factors, including perceptions, regardless of whether they are all true or not. Latvia’s sudden popularity is evident in a very hot new ad campaign by Old Spice, where the “Old Spice Guy” boasts that his products are so popular in Eastern Latvia “that they made me king”.  He adds ”that’s great, because I love grapes”. And if you don’t believe me, you can see it at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/oldspice#p/p/484F058C3EAF7FA6/0/0Cs95FmimP0

Like the improving economy, the blue cows and flying people are really real, although I hope those airBaltic passengers don’t start coming here for the grapes
The Latvian Institute

The airport itself is small, but efficient. On a recent trip I went on, I got a refresher on the place.

On arrival at the airport I went to my gate where there was no line. I flew with Star1 Airlines and they had three desks open so there were enough staff available to make sure the check in process was quick.

Going through security was quick because it is about 20 metres from the check in. Again, there was very little wait for this and I went through without issues to the gates. Just behind the security I found my gate beside a shop that sold Lithuanian goods.

The size of the airport is its forte and now the management has started to fill up the place so it looks like a real airport. There is a bar sponsored by Heineken that looks much more attractive than before. The shop selling Lithuanian products is finally open meaning that you can buy the souvenirs you forgot to pack for your friends or loved ones. Most of the food and drink products at the shop are at regular prices and the handmade goods were surprisingly cheap.

This is not an airport where its good to hang out, but that’s good because it is so small and you can turn up 60 minutes before a flight and manage to get on no problem. This is no Brussels or Hong Kong airport where you walk for kilometres up and down passages and through doors looking for signs that point you to your gate. The whole journey from the front door to the gate is about 200 metres. If you do turn up early there is free wireless internet.

The airport isn’t that far away from the centre and is quite easy to reach if you know what you are doing. Information for tourists about the quickest and best ways to reach the place wouldn’t be a bad thing though.

There is the new train there that connects the airport to the train station in Vilnius, which is nice when there is traffic problems in the city. But a small request to the airport management: it would be nice to have a schedule for the train station in the arrivals hall, so you don’t need to walk all the way to the platform to see if its quicker to take the bus or the train.

People say that an airport can affect people’s impressions of a country: it is the first and last thing they see. Vilnius airport is finally starting to have a good effect on the country’s image.

If the management keep it up, it won’t even be the laughing stock of the Baltics anymore. Lets hope.

However, according to the author, books stopped taking part in the life of the political thought of the country a long time ago, or only books that are needed participate in it. Historiosophy as the object of analysis (separation) is on the whole unpopular, because the book market is currently occupied by works as subjects of emotional recognition (identification).

The author of many historical novels, Petras Dirgėla is an excellent short story writer. His latest collection of short stories Jauno faraono vynuogynuose (In the Vineyards of the Young Pharaoh) contains many things that remind us of the cycle Karalystė. The short stories in that collection are united by an interesting principle of allusions, and remind us of a novel with a polyphonic plot. Stories of families breaking up and the paradoxically intertwined fates of heroes again create a small cycle of Karalystė. Only this time, the world is devoid of that natural spontaneity which unfolded in powerful images of the sea and the wood in the first volumes of the cycle Karalystė (such as Books of the Homeless), and Lithuania rose as an archaic country after the sea had left its place and gave it up to the sea. This time, in his collection of short stories, the author speaks about the vineyards of a young pharaoh, the land of Egypt, metaphors of captivity. Intoxicating wine, the forgetfulness of hope, incest, degeneration and disappearance. And the distant call of ancestors urging us to put up with captivity because it can be not only bearable but also perhaps even pleasant.

Is this not one of the models of the current reality? For example, let us take Antanas from the short story “Atsargus elgesys” (Cautious Behaviour). Coerced by a bigwig of the criminal world named Angel (a reference to the fallen Lucifer), he does not resist; however, his “cautious” behaviour has hardly anything in common with Christian docility. It is sooner an indifferent reconciliation with reality, which wounds modern society with luxuriant vines. On the other hand, the resistance of the character of another short story, Filė, seems to Angel to have been dictated by haughtiness, which is not a Christian virtue either. Rather than a spiritual force, it is closer to a deadly sin.

One of the main emphases of the short stories is Father’s collapsed authority, the destruction of parenthood as a metaphysical concept which creates and manages the world. Without Father’s concept, the family tree is doomed to decay and transformation, which lead to fruitlessness and the mankurtism of the children. Many of them do not know their father’s name, only the dead definition, “a biological father”, a “social” father, the sperm of an unknown donor, coming into this world with the help of “a long metal tool” (thus, the concept of a father becomes mechanical). However, the attitude of a wise historiosopher prevents the author from imposing the parents’ sins on the children, and vice versa. Perhaps this is so because the sin is not only a thing inspired by ties of blood and inheritance, but is also a personal thing, inspired by the human will.

Seeing his distant grandchild with the eyes of a soul, or perhaps those of a dream, the sinned forefather prays not to be forgotten, rather than to be forgiven. Hence, forgetfulness can be treated as metaphysical death; as non-existence, which, according to philosophers, is impossible to contemplate; as an absolute disappearance from the world, which is governed not only by the laws of physics but also by those of metaphysics.

The book Jauno faraono vynuogynuose contains a lot of curious, mysterious, magnetising images, which allow us to experience a nondescript déjà vu, as if we had encountered the old, forgotten, magical past of man, which reveals itself in the most unexpected ways, and which would be too simple to be called merely “history”.

It Shall Not Be

Two brothers arrived by car in a barren field where once their grandparent’s farmhouse had stood surrounded by a large orchard of fruit trees.

The elder brother strode through tall weeds towards an oasis of dark green stinging nettles in the middle of the field. This was exactly where his grandfather’s farmhouse had stood. The elder brother stood there among the stinging nettles, which were quite tall and reached up to just under his armpits. He gazed at the leaves, and through them he could see his younger brother standing beside the car.

He ought never to know where he came from, the elder brother thought to himself. While I was being born, my mother’s womb was dislodged and became crooked. After that, our father’s seed would bang up against the walls of her uterus, never reaching her egg.

For many years Mother tried to get herself pregnant secretly with other men, strong men, but their sperm also banged up against the walls of her womb, and never reached their target. His younger brother’s life was begun artificially, with the help of a curved metal tool, and sperm donated by an unknown donor. His brother was clearly experiencing strange inexpressible thoughts, and that was why he was over there now, leaning against the car, a real bomb, parked alongside the edge of an irrigation ditch. He was not interested in walking around the area. Neither the weeds nor the nettles stirred any emotion in him. This land was foreign to him. He did not acknowledge his ancestors as being his ancestors, although he was not even aware of it.

The younger brother sat on the edge of the ditch and, with sad eyes, gazed at the point where the horizon met with the barren fields. But all he saw the entire time was his elder brother, who stood among the nettles with the silhouette of his bent head against the horizon.

He should never know where he came from, the younger brother thought to himself. My grandmother was obsessed by an evil spirit. She raised six children, each of them by a different man. When Grandmother was dying, her eyes shone with an evil joy – she was happy to be leaving this life, and leaving her six children behind. Mother didn’t get to the hospital in time to say goodbye to Grandmother. She barely had the time to whisper to Grandmother, as she took her last breaths, that she was pregnant. That was all the evil spirit needed to hear. She quickly jumped out of her dying body, and into Mother’s womb. She did not manage to kill the fetus though and let the evil spirit inside. He had been begun with artificial intervention, and by the seed of an unknown donor. Mama was afraid to begin a child in sin. Brother was begun in her body while she wracked with fear. Mama was even more afraid of childbirth. The fear out of which brother was born straightened out Mother’s womb, and then I was begotten by Father.

We are not real brothers, the elder brother thought. He had wandered deeper still into the thicket of nettles to the very place where his grandparents’ house once stood. Father is my biological father. For my brother, he is only a step-father. Father felt the same way.

Once he told us about a dream he’d had. Our family was rushing about the orchard. There was starvation in the land, and we could no longer survive. We knew we must die. Mother and I had a hope that we would be able to save at least our children. We were running. We felt the earth beneath our feet, the marshes, we could smell the grass, the air. We could hear the wind in the trees’ branches. We could see other people running from death. At the crossroads, our paths separated. Mother took the younger boy in her arms and walked off in one direction. I took the elder boy by the hand, and we walked off in the opposite direction. We thought then that, by parting and running in separate directions, there was more of a chance to save one of the boys. Father had tried to save me in his dream. Father cared more about me, his real son.

We are not real brothers, the younger brother thought, sitting on the edge of the dirt road alongside the irrigation ditch. Father once told me and Mother about a dream he had had when Brother was not listening. We were running from death, from starvation that had come over our land. At the crossroads, we parted. Mama took the elder boy by the hand and led him off in one direction. I carried the younger boy in another. I ran for a long time. When I could no longer carry him, the younger boy ran beside me. When we lost our strength entirely, we crawled together the rest of the way. We lay our heads down on the ground – the younger boy and I – close beside each other, and together we peacefully accepted our weakness and the fact that we were dying, together. Father could die peacefully. He felt, and knew for certain, that I alone was his real son.

I was wrong, thought the elder brother, standing there in the stinging nettles. I should not have asked my younger brother to drive me to my father’s land. He does not know that his ancestors did not come from this land. He does not know that Father is not his father, that Grandfather is not his grandfather. He does not know that he is not a Jundzilas. He does not know at all who he is. However, he senses that he does not know. He is sitting alongside that ditch on the side of the road, sensing the emptiness all around him, and therefore will not go into that emptiness. He does not know what he should do, where he should go, how he ought to conduct himself in this situation. He is suffering.

I was wrong, the younger brother thought to himself, sitting among the weeds that grew alongside the irrigation ditch on the side of the road. I should not have driven him here. My brother senses that this is not his ancestral land. But he does not have any ancestral land that he can claim as his own. And now he is standing out there now, among the nettles, waiting for his legs to grow into the land.

Just then, Father was at his new farm raking the freshly mown hay in his new orchard. He sat down beside the garden, beside the poppies and the peas, and smoked, gazing out at the young apple trees, at the yellow and blue bee hives, at the currant bushes. Above them the horizon opened up. The sun broke through the plum tree’s leaves.

Life had turned out altogether different from how the old beggar, my childhood friend, had predicted it for me. He had predicted that I would never lose my wife, that I’d have her with me forever. But I lost her. She left me. He could not comprehend it. His wife had left the boys for him to raise. They will never know the story of their family’s past. His family, the Jundzilas family, begun several hundred years ago, will die together with him. Why had his wife taken away from him the opportunity to further his family heritage? He could not understand it, nor did he try to understand. When talking with a woman, you have no idea who you are talking with. And there is no hope of finding out the entire truth when not a single bit of the truth fits inside her head. The beggar had also said: Everything your younger son will do will be the work of the Holy Spirit. Maybe this has come true. The hierarchy at the Vatican found out about this particularly pious young man. They sent a representative here to take the boy back to the Vatican with them. There he studied languages and theology and many other things, and after a few years he was sent back here with a mission: to minister to families, to broken families, and to bring them healing, to reunite them. But my son does not go out to the families and minister to them. He does not want to fulfill his mission and serve as an apostle.

And a thought came into his head: perhaps it is a good thing that his family heritage will die along with him. After he dies, there will be no more Jundzilases. For this reason, it will be easier for others to live, and there will be peace for the Jundzilases because they will no longer walk this earth.

Father, after feeling happy over this thought, was suddenly overcome with a feeling of fear. As though hiding from the sun, he crawled into the peas and began to cry. He shoved pods into this mouth, so that he would not cry out loud.

The Jundzilases Cannot Cease to Exist

While visiting the places that I had planned on writing about here, I met people who firmly believed that the Judzilaitises, who had arisen from the Jundzilases of Aleksandrija, cannot cease to exist. There were simply too many of their descendants walking the earth. Their descendants were too hardy. The poet V. S. was fully convinced of this fact as well. He told me an unusual, but at the same time fairly simple, story about the power of love and love’s secret powers.

Many years ago there was a girl named Magė Burytė who was enthralled with art and artists. At that time, when Magė was in love with a talented sculptor, a friend of the poet V. S., an Eduardas Jundzilas began hanging around this romantically inclined girl. No one knew where this loquacious man had come from. He did not create art himself, although he lived in a perpetual fantasy world, entertaining listeners in cafes with his incredible stories. In exchange for his stories, people bought him food and drink. Whenever Eduardas Jundzilas walked past Magė Burytė, he would growl like an angry wolf. The girl began to gaze more and more at Jundzilas. When she’d had too much wine, she inadvertently found herself seated beside him or standing next to him. The great storyteller would growl, only now more gently and flirtatiously. The sculptor realised that he had lost Magė, but it did not worry him. All her previous lovers had lost her as well. The time had come for him too to give up his fairy. It happened as it had been fated to happen. Only, the sculptor could not understand how someone could growl in such a manner that would entice a young girl to enter into a life of wandering and homelessness with a stranger.

After a while, no one ever saw Magė or Eduardas again.

Ten years passed. The poet V. S. in his youth had begun taking medicine for insomnia. His prescription became stronger and stronger. At the time, he was going through a difficult period. He had lost all his joy in life. His heart sensed more and more that the words that came into his head did not fit his poetry. V. S. killed time, disappointed with himself and with his work.

One evening, the forgotten poet got an idea into his head to go out and visit the café where in his youth his friends would read his sonnets and elegies out loud. The large chair beside the oleander bush was V. S.’s chair, Petrarch’s chair. His friends never sat in it. Only he did, their Petrarch.

V. S. was somewhat surprised by the doorman, who looked him up and down, took in his ragged clothing, but nonetheless allowed him inside. He might not have allowed him in. After all, he hadn’t shaved or washed his hair. His frightened eyes darted around the café.

He saw that the table beside the oleander was unoccupied. The place looked as enticing as it ever had back in the days when V. S. would sit in Petrarch’s chair, and with a fresh face would sip wine and talk passionately about poetry and women.

V. S. stood there in the doorway, not quite sure whether he should go and sit down, or turn around and leave.

“I don’t need anything,” he said to the waitress, who walked up to him. “I’d only like to sit a while in the chair beside the oleander. Let me know when I begin to take up too much space, and I will leave.”

There were only a few people in the café. The music playing on the CD player was out of date.

Some music can be played for ages, thought V. S., while other music is tiresome after two weeks. My poetry is neither one nor the other. I’ll never know the fate of my poetry.

He heard the click of high heel shoes on the wooden floor.

The parquet is old, but it still creates an echo, thought V. S. to himself. Instinctively sensing an adventure about to unwind, he turned around and saw a young woman walking off the dance floor. Click, click, click went her heels. Her long black skirt swung around her legs. The lapels on her red jacket flapped as she walked.

The young woman sat down beside the poet’s table. She placed an ashberry stalk covered in small red berries in the thin bottleneck of the vase on his table.  The elegant young woman crossed her hands in front of her, and jutted her sweet little chin out towards him, watching him.

“I am Raminta Jundzilaitė,” she said in a clear voice. “And, who are you? Petrarch?”

“I was Petrarch.”

“And you shall be him again. Do you remember my parents? They used to come here with you?”

“Where are they? Your parents? I haven’t run into them for years.”

“My father was too much of a dreamer. She behaved rashly and that killed him. Once, my mother could not believe that the prototype of Giovanni Boccaccio’s “L’elegia di madonna Fiammetta” was Maria d’Aquino, the daughter of Napoleon’s bastard son Robert. My father insisted that he was right, and to prove it he would swim the great fjord between Sweden and Norway. He didn’t make it. They never found his body.”

“Your mother is now a widow?”

“Yes. Perhaps even twice. I haven’t heard from her in three years. What can you know? She’s a eucharistical woman.”

“A what?”

“She is doomed to love dreamers and artists. Afterwards, the grim reaper comes for them. Would you like some wine?”

“If I had some …”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Anything is possible. This evening I’ll have some wine and you shall eat. You can read your poems next time.”

“Will we meet here again?”

“Yes. I’ve inherited a lot from my mother. Don’t worry. Lean on me, and once again you’ll climb to poetry’s pinnacle.”

V. S. sat there on his mythological chair and felt as though he were dreaming. He saw flashes of his youth before his eyes. If I were to growl, he thought, I wonder how she would react? I live alone. But then again, wasn’t it solitude that I was looking for? I couldn’t bring this young girl to any Norway or anywhere else.

You are still too young, V. S. thought sadly. He no longer believed that he could climb to any poetic pinnacle, nor did he want to.

For a few months he could not shake off the sadness. And on one dark autumn evening the sadness became too much for him. The poet climbed out of bed, ­impatiently lit a candle, and in the light of the candle’s flame, wrote on a sheet of paper in Italian in the manner of Boccaccio: “L’elegia di madonna Jundzilaitė”.

The elegy was published in two languages, in Italian and in Lithuanian, and was published by a cultural weekly. The sculptor who had once created a few artistic cemetery memorials, and then was overcome by alcoholism and lost everything, read it. He was very sick and was practically on his deathbed when he read it. The poor old man, lying there on his plank bed in a shack, not far from the dump, invited the poet V. S. and three of his alcoholic friends, so that he could bid them farewell. The poet went to the shack, and there beside the sculptor’s sick bed, he saw the madonna Jundzilaitė. The young woman was pregnant. In her hand she was holding an ashberry branch covered in red berries. The sculptor lay in a pile of rags, coughing.

“Daughter,” he said to Raminta, heaving a deep breath, “when I die your mother will be a widow. Tell her that, from the hour of my death, she will be a widow.”

The people who’d been invited to give their final farewells got in the way. He could not look Raminta in the eye. She gazed at him with her large blue eyes, full of understanding and peacefulness.

“I don’t know if you are my father,” the young woman said, “but I also don’t know who the father of my baby is. That night I danced holding an ashberry branch in my hands …”

“There is no point in you carrying that ashberry branch around,” the old alcoholic said. “Whoever it was won’t remember the ashberry branch. But they will recognise their son or daughter.”

Then he called out to the bums gathered around him: “Have you seen her! This is my daughter! I’ve said goodbye to my daughter. Take all my savings and go out and buy us some wine!”

The alcoholics grabbed a few wrinkled bills and hurried out of the shack.

“Just think, the old man met his daughter,” they said to each other as they hurried through the darkness.

“What’s so good about that? In the poems, his daughter’s surname will remain Jundzilaitė.”

“It’s the same to me.”

Later, when the alcoholics returned to the shack, they continued talking about the old man’s daughter.

“I’ve thought it over, and I realised that the old bum tricked us. He doesn’t have a daughter. This beauty was Jundzilaitė for real.”

“What are you saying? The old man can fool a shopkeeper or a cashier, but not us!”

They argued, they fought, but they still didn’t resolve a thing.

I often remembered this story that V. S. had told me. Every time I thought of it, I came up with a different interpretation. I’d talk about it, and then I finally came to believe that we live in a gray, bitter world and that we are likely to spin a tale out of any golden speck of dust that flies past. There is no life out there worthy of any of us. There is no life where we couldn’t find the seed of legend.

Just like the legend about Fiammetta-Maria d’Aquino. For six hundred years this legend has been worked on, and still nothing convincing has come of it. Perhaps people will construct legends about Raminta Jundzilaitė for several hundred years. There just have to be crazy girls and wild women. We cannot live without them.

Translated by Laima Vincė

“The Vilnius Review  publishes the best new writing from Lithuania translated into English.  Each issue contains translated extracts from the most interesting recently published works of prose, and verse by the country?s best poets.

The magazine also publishes book reviews, criticism and in-depth articles on current issues relevant to the Lithuanian literary world.

The Vilnius Review comes out twice a year. An annual subscription costs 15 Euros.

It can be ordered from:
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Mėsinių g. 4, LT-01133,
Vilnius,
Lithuania

In Tbilisi, Clinton announced the United States supported Georgia’s territorial integrity, urged the Kremlin to withdraw its troops from South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and said the deployment of the Russian armed forces in these Georgian regions was “occupation.” In this case words can be equated with actions. Not many in the world are brave enough to call the situation in Georgia the way that Clinton did. At the same time, Clinton urged Tbilisi and Moscow to look for ways to solve the conflict peacefully.

Mite continues saying that finding them will not be easy, but Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili hopes that better relations between Russia and the United States can perhaps alleviate Georgia’s situation as well. We recall that for a few years now Russia has occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia and Russian tanks are stationed a few dozen kilometres from Tbilisi. In addition to Russia, the statehood of these creations was recognized by Venezuela and Nicaragua. After Barack Obama came to power, the United States’ attention and support for Georgia was almost zero, but it looks like the recent trip by Clinton has changed the situation.

The US secretary of state also visited Azerbaijan, Poland and Ukraine, in an attempt to demonstrate that America’s attention to these countries has not been reduced and that their interests are not sacrificed for the sake of improved relations with the Kremlin.

During her visit in Kiev, Mite writes, Clinton emphasized that NATO remains open to Ukraine’s membership. Currently, such a statement has a mere political significance, because the people who came to power after the presidential election adhere to the position of not joining any military structures and adhere to the policy of neutrality.

For the sake of truth, one has to admit that the majority of Ukrainian people have never supported the country’s membership in the alliance. However, the public’s opinions change with time, and perhaps the membership issue will become important for Ukraine sometime in the future. Whatever the case may be, Clinton hinted to Russia that the United States did not recognize any zones of influence, on which the current Russian foreign policy is based.

During the visit in Azerbaijan, Clinton called for a solution to the Nagorny Karabakh problem and promised America’s support on this issue. She also calmed the leaders of Azerbaijan, which is rich in natural resources, by saying the United States was not indifferent to the fate of Azerbaijan.

During her visit in Cracow, Clinton signed two important agreements. One of them was the agreement on deploying components of the antimissile defence system in Poland. The other one was on US assistance in searching for and in utilizing shale natural gas. The United States is the world leader in the shale natural gas technology. Due to the shale natural gas extraction, the United States has recently become the world’s number one producer of natural gas. Surveys show that Poland possibly has enough shale natural gas to increase the overall natural gas extraction in the EU by almost 50 per cent. If the estimates are correct, the influence of Russia’s Gazprom in Europe will greatly diminish. At the same time, the chances of applying energy pressure on EU countries, including Lithuania, will diminish as well.

If nothing else, Mite concludes in his article, Clinton’s visit was important, because for the first time Barack Obama’s administration clearly demonstrated that countries of Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics remain important to the United States. She somewhat dispelled the fears that for the sake of improved relations with Russia the United States was prepared to sacrifice its allies and countries that are friendly towards the United States. However, it is hard to say how successful will be the attempt at the same time to improve relations with Russia and to make sure the Kremlin withdraws its troops from Georgia, for example.