„Pamiętnik Mieczysłowasa Dławidudauskasa organisty z Koźliszek i delegata na konferencję litewską w Wilnie w Septembrze R.P. 1917 spisany 3 XI 1917”
“Diary of Mieczysłowas Dławidudauskas an Organist from Koźliszki and a Delegate to the Lithuanian Conference in Vilnius in September of AD 1917 Written Down on 3 November 1917”

Summary/Abstract: The presented satirical text was probably authored in circles close to the reactivated Vilnius ‘Society of Scoundrels’ (Pol. Towarzystwo Szubrawców). It was written in Vilnius after the promulgation of two very important documents: the Act of 5th November 1916 and Leopold of Bavaria’s September Acts of 1917, which divided the Crown and Lithuania into two coun- tries: ethnic Poland and Lithuania. The occupation authorities’ consent to convening a Lith- uanian national Congress in Vilnius – the city dominated by Poles and Jews – to decide the future of all ethnicities living in the part of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania remaining under the Ober-Ost administration came as a shock to Poles, who had been consistently (until November 1918) denied permission by the occupation authorities to convene a Polish national convention. Lithuanian politicians, not looking at their remaining “former fellow citizens”, decided to seize the opportunity offered to them by the Germans to build the foundations of a Lithuanian nation-state with its capital in Vilnius. The agitation of the powerless Poles gave vent, among other things, in a text mocking a nationality – from their perspective – artificially created in a city devoid of traces of Lithuanian culture. The text includes news about the socio-political mood of the Polish community in a situation when the future of the occupied lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had already been officially decided. Escalating emotions in Vilnius did not augur well for harmonious cooperation between Poles and Lithuanians in the future.

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