Apie istorinio regiono virsmą vaizduotės regionu. Mažosios Lietuvos pavyzdys
On the Turning of a Historical Region into a Region of Imagination. The Case of Lithuania Minor

Summary/Abstract: A tradition to refer to the eastern part of East Prussia as Lithuania was maintained during the period of the 16th to the early 20th century. The alternative names Prussian Lithuania and Little Lithuania at that time were used only in those cases which required to distinguish the region from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (or, in the 19th century, from a part of Russia inhabited by the Lithuanians). The confines of the ‘Lithuanian’ region in East Prussia were fixed and consolidated in the early 18th century when the name Lithuania started to be used in defining an administrative unit, while in the late 19th century the so-called Deime- Alle line was started to be treated as an ethnographic boundary of Lithuania. The term Lithuania Minor which started to circulate in the Lithuanian literature around 1910 implied the idea of irrendenta based on the assumption that the once existed unity of two Lithuanias should be restored in the present. With the emergence of Klaipėda Region in 1919 and of Kaliningrad Oblast in 1946, the irredentist discourse as well as the name of Lithuania Minor associated with it was ‘shifted’ in Lithuanian imagination to define these areas. In the interwar period such a movement was motivated by the difficulties of Lithuania to integrate the Klaipėda region annexed in 1923, while after WWII the treatment of Kaliningrad Oblast as an anomaly emerged, meeting the unjustified territorial claims of the USSR. In contemporary Lithuania an attitude that equates Lithuania Minor with Klaipėda region and Kaliningrad Oblast was made an encyclopaedic statement. This shows that the percepts about Lithuania Minor increasingly becoming the outgrowths of imagination are still relevant in the discourse of Kaliningrad Oblast that prevails in the Lithuanian humanities.

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