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Jankevičiūtė, G., & Geetha, V. (2017). Another history of the children’s picture book: From Soviet Lithuania to India. Chennai: Tara Books. The review article discusses a book by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and V. Geetha, Another History of the Children’s Picture Book: From Soviet Lithuania to India (2017). It describes the content of the monograph in the context of studies on picture books, especially those of Russia, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, on the history of childhood and Russian literature. The main merit of the volume, in the opinion of the reviewer, is the choice of Indian and Lithuanian book art for comparison, which is made from the perspectives of the history of literature, art, societies, and understanding of childhood.
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Justas Paleckis: On the sunny Side of the World // Juozas Baltušis: What no Song is singing about // Petras Cvirka: The Seeds of brotherly Solidarity // Antanas Vienuolis: The Secret of Lake Plateliai // Jonas Šimkus: Brave Heart // Jonas Avyžius: Advanced in Years // Myola Sluckis: Childhood Memories // Konstantin Simonow: The Fourth // POEMS: Davydas Judelevičius: Poets about themselves and their Time // Salomėja Nėris: Greetings // Sing life, heart // Antanas Venclova: I was with you / / Eduardas Mieželaitis: Got in the Storm // Justinas Marcinkevičius: Sun // Vladas Šimkus: My Summer // LITERATURE AND REVIEW: Kostas Korsakas: The Lithuanian Soviet Literature // LITERARY PORTRAIT: Mykolas Sluckis: Ieva Simonaitykolaitis // Jonas Lankutis: Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas // Vytautas Kubilius: A Folk Poet // Vytautas Galinis: Writer, Intelligence and People // Sergej Iwanow: Interview with Eduardas Mieželaitis // Michail Zinowjew: Fighting Poetry // ART: Janina Markulan: Young Lithuanian Theatre-Art // Alexej Gastew: Guest of the Lithuanian graphic artists // Sergej Sergejew: Cameraman and Director at the same time // Stasys Budris: Lithuanian Sculpture // OUR CORRESPONDENTS TELLING: Sergej Larin: Encounters in Vilnius // WHAT BRINGS US CLOSER: E. JULINA: Books about German revolutionaries
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Volume 8 of the series "Works in Baltic Studies. Language – Literature – Culture" features sixteen articles (in Lithuanian, Latvian, English and Polish) devoted to various aspects of the notion of freedom, analysed from the perspectives of Lithuanian and Latvian linguistics, literary studies and cultural studies.
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The restoration of Lithuanian independence affected Poles of Lithuania, with their lives undergoing significant changes. The attitude towards Poles also transformed. Based on journalistic texts from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, the article focuses on the image of Poles of Lithuania painted by selected material, analysing the features which are most frequently mentioned, emphasised, and attributed to them. The structural approach to meaning in the article is combined with a cognitive one, involving the use of appropriate methods of analysis – from the meaning of the word to the meaning of the sentence. The study shows that in the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, Poles of Lithuania are portrayed primarily as the national minority fighting for its rights, suffering a lot of hardships, discriminated, as people who fear a free Lithuania, as a national minority whose leaders, seeking power, have harmed their compatriots and good relations between Lithuanians and Poles. The analysis of the material shows that at the early stages of Lithuanian independence, Lithuanians considered Poles not as others, foreigners, but as one of their own.
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The former traditional Lithuanian proper names in the south of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania used to belong to one geographical unit spanning Voronovo, Lida, Grodno, Suwałki–Białystok and Lithuania Minor. However, the history of this area is very diverse. Various Baltic tribes lived there and belonged to different administrative units, not to one state. The aim of the article is to find the differences in stress, formation, pronunciation, motivation and contacts with other languages in the proper names of this area. The former proper names of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Prussian borders are now found in three states. The article examines 3,950 place names and personal names: 1) 900 (500 place names and 400 personal names) in current Belarus between Voronovo and Grodno; 2) 1,880 (1,170 oikonyms, microtoponyms,110 hydronyms, 600 personal names) in present-day Poland; 3) 1,170 place names from Lithuania Minor in the area of Kaliningrad, now belonging to Russia. These proper names are described in more detail in the following sections, the forthcoming scientific monograph and its appendices.
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The State Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights afford every person the right to hold their own convictions and express them freely. Moreover, these beliefs do not necessarily have to be politically correct. In fact, this freedom does not extend to criminal actions provided for in the aforementioned documents: “incitement of national, racial, religious, or social hatred, violence and discrimination, with slander and disinformation” (Constitution of the RL, Article 25). The differences and emphases of these aspects are very clear: the primary norm of the law is to ensure freedom of belief and its expression, whereas criminal actions are related to secondary and derivative exceptions and limitations of these norms. The practical incompatibility of these aspects and their misunderstanding have recently posed a threat of turning into censorship of conviction expression, at least in Lithuania, as any pejorative or more emotionally coloured expression inconsistent with official ideological doctrines has been marked without a second thought as hate speech prohibited by the Constitution (hate speech, язык вражды). However, seeking to forestall censorship of thoughts and convictions, it is necessary to clearly draw the line between hate speech and constitutional freedom of expression, even if the convictions one holds are generally not accepted, politically incorrect, impolite, or coming from the margins of society. Two paths can be applied to establish this division: judicial (primary) and pragmatic (expert). Hate speech is not identified by emotional criteria (it is impossible to ban one of the main human emotions). It has to be incorporated into the list of legally prohibited actions, and this inclusion is substantiated with the use of pragmatic linguistic tools because of the linguistic nature of the very activity. Due to this, everything linked to the exceptions (not the norms) to the aforesaid laws can be easily divided into three types: a) “must be restricted” hate speech, b) “may be restricted” hate speech, c) “must be protected” hate speech as a means of ensuring freedom of the individual’s convictions and thoughts.
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The article analyses the relationship between freedom and memories as revealed in Antanas Vaičiulaitis’ (1906–1992) letters to his family and friends. In the memoirs, the connection is conveyed in a distinctive way through the places that were important for the writer. The analysis draws on two theories: Maurice Halbwachs’ memory categories and Edward S. Casey’s link between place and memory. Vaičiulaitis’ individual experience of memories is constructed in the foreground mostly by mentioning his native land and people who were important to him. They are actualised in the letters by a horizontal axis of representation – the landscape and natural objects that are significant to the writer are arranged according to the gaze and become the repositories of his memories. The second plane is related to vertical representation, where memories are used to convey the author’s sensual relationship to the place. The letters constantly recreate his habitus, the places that integrate the writer’s notion of freedom, and the customs that unite Lithuanians around the world. Thus, Vaičiulaitis’s constant nostalgia for freedom in his letters can be seen as a way of remembering, a unique sphere of experience, a world created through imagination, encompassing the feeling of being in a certain place.
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The Krajowcy movement originated at the beginning of the 20th century as a conceptualisation of a multinational, independent, and autonomous state on the territory of the former Grand Lithuanian Duchy. It was to unite three nationalities (Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian) into a federation. Inspired by the Swiss model, the state would be made up of nationality-based cantons which would each be guaranteed ethnic, cultural, and religious equality. The chief Democratic Krajowcy were Ludwik and Witold Abramowicz and Michał Römer. Their Conservative counterparts were Konstancja and Roman Skirmuntt and Czesław Jankowski. They presented their opinions in journalism, publishing their own press, including: "Gazeta Wileńska" (ed. Michał Römer), "Przegląd Wileński" (ed. Ludwik Abramowicz), and "Kurier Litewski" (ed. Czesław Jankowski). The inception and popularity of the Krajowcy movement spanned the years 1905–1914. After the First World War, which established the independent nationstates of Poland and Lithuania, the Krajowcy mentality was largely defeated by burgeoning Polish and Lithuanian nationalisms. The last representative of the Krajowcy in the interwar period was Ludwik Abramowicz, who published the "Przegląd Wileński" until 1938. Up until the beginning of the Second World War, modified versions of the Krajowcy ideal were referenced by Stanisław Swianiewicz and Józef Mackiewicz.
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"The Conspectus of Lithuanian Literature" (1946), edited by Petronėlė Janutienė, "The History of Lithuanian Literature" (1947), edited by Juozas Masilionis, and "The Lithuanian Literature" (1948), edited by Pranas Naujokaitis, are three textbooks originally prepared and published in DP camps. The authors of these textbooks point out that due to the lack of resources and living literary examples, they often had to be guided by memory alone. This raises a question how, in the postwar era, consciousness, guided mostly by memory, tells the history of literature and speaks about freedom to a child who lives in exile; what it says about a free human being. A textual analysis offers an answer that the textbooks coveyed an understanding of freedom as a power uniting a community into a nation. At the same time, freedom is not a gift to the community but a task. The community lives in between two states: freedom is what community has, defends, and maintains, or loses and regains. Both are impossible without a fight. In addition to this, a refugee camp student using the textbook is taught that personal freedom is defined by choices which bring a person closer to the nation.
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The article deals with the Latvian writer and translator Dzintars Sodums’s (1922–2008) opinions about the state and development of the Latvian language, his perception of language as a prerequisite for freedom and development of democracy and political thought. Sodums saw the development of the Latvian language as the mission of his life, but his professional opportunities were restricted by his status as an émigré in Sweden and the USA. Sodums felt like an outsider in the Latvian émigré society, and this feeling influenced his views on the Latvian language and its use in his poetry, novels, and other writings.
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As contemporary society puts more emphasis on the individual’s right to live freely, the topic of values and moral responsibility becomes more relevant. This tendency is reflected in contemporary Lithuanian dramatic texts. Playwrights combine opposing messages, quotes, and meanings of dramatic discourse produced by the mass media in order to create multi-layered texts. These, in turn, question or revise the notion of the modern human freedom. The paper focuses on the plays written in the last decade by Herkus Kunčius, Dovilė Zavedskaitė, and Paulina Pukytė. The texts in question often demean the concept of “freedom” using the code of mass culture, thus not only revealing some “moral” dilemmas of the post-Soviet era but also offering a critical evaluation of the new reality created by mediacracy.
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The article aims to describe the fate of three repressed poets in the context of complex historical and socio-political events and evaluate the reception of traumatic personal experiences in two periods of their creative process: 1) the period of losing their voices after the exiles (end of the 1950s – 1980s); 2) the period of regaining their voices in post-Soviet Latvia (after 1990). The poets’ traumatic experience caused by the repressive mechanism of the Soviet totalitarian regime has influenced the development directions of their work and opportunities for it, which, from the point of view of postcolonial criticism, raises the issue of representation. In the 1980s and 1990s, Latvian literature actualises and evaluates the traumatism of historical experience in the autobiographical and biographical genre. An active and productive process of recovering the muted voice begins, overcoming the problems of representation previously established by official censorship. The kinship of the destinies of the three poets reveals the aspirations and difficult paths of individual and national freedom throughout the 20th century, forming an overview of historical memory. The article highlights the importance of memory and remembrance in over coming individual and collective trauma.
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The article focuses on four stories of partisan children produced in the years 2019–2021. Lying at the heart of the deliberations is the memory of the partisan war in families. It is believed that involvement in the partisan war has directly affected the fate of members of the fighters’ families and their attitudes towards occupation and resistance. The challenges faced by families during the struggles for freedom and the repressive experience that followed were severed or completely broken ties, dilemmas of the formation and maintenance of identity, and difficulties in communicating the lived-through experiences. The conclusions formulated in the article allow us to look in some detail at the difficult situation of partisan families both in the occupied country and after the restoration of independence.
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The article is devoted to the cinematic depiction of the Soviet gender contract and its implementation exemplified by the heroine of the film "Stebuklas". The aim of the article is to analyse the female character in the times of the fall of communism and her adherence to the rules that were set by the communist authorities.
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In this article, the author attempts to conduct a film analysis through the prism of the original concept of film identity narratives. The concept is based on the hermeneutic reasoning of narrative identity by Paul Ricoeur combined with metahistoric and historiophotic reflection by Hayden White and the amplification of Mieke Bal’s focalisation theory accomplished by Robert Birkholc. The analysis pertains to Dzintars Dreibergs’ full-length feature film "Blizzard of Souls" (Dvēseļu putenis, 2019), which is based on Aleksandrs Grīns’ novel and commemorates the 100th anniversary of Latvian independence. Dreibergs’ film is a war drama which concentrates on the fate of young Artūrs Vanags, who joins the ranks of Latvian Riflemen and fights for his own and, consequently, his homeland’s freedom. The film shows the time of the First World War and the period of the Latvian struggle for independence. The article consists of two significant parts – a methodological and an analytic one.
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In folk worldview, disease is presented as a phenomenon that disturbs the balance in the body, mind, consciousness, or subconsciousness of a person, as well as a hostile being. Since the disease interferes with the correct order of life and disturbs the human functioning system, the only solution is to combat it and effectively free oneself from its presence. There are many treatments and ways to get rid of disease, among which zagovory constitute a separate group. In Lithuanian zagovory, as well as in all others, we can indicate a system of disease control strategies, which presents ways of influencing the disease in order to combat it (M. Marczewska). These models of behaviour are perfectly reflected in the texts of Lithuanian zagovory. Disease is expelled by the use of correct strategies. In this case, the issue of determining the location of the expulsion becomes an important element of the zagovor. The main principle here is to refer the disease to a place from which there is no return or to the place of its origin. That is why it is supposed to be a distant, foreign, untamed, closed, or dead space which belongs to a dimension other than that of a human being. In Lithuanian zagovory, we can indicate several “directions” of disease referral, which are related to the basic spaces of the world – earth, water, and air spheres. – EARTH – a binary space combining the world of life and fertility as well as the chthonic world, the sphere of dying and death. The disease is assigned to this dimension and sent to it during treatment. – WATER – mythological and media space; the surface of water is a natural border between the human world and another dimension – the underworld or a parallel world which is inaccessible to humans. This means that it is a suitable place for an expelled disease. What is more, water acts as a substance that cleanses the body physically and mentally, soaks up the disease, and overcomes it (immersion, melting the disease). – DRY TREES – they belong to the air space because the disease is directed “up”, “high” on dry trees which are no longer alive, to a zone that is already closed and belongs to a different chthonic dimension.
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The article aims to explore how the identity of an eating person is expressed and constructed in literary works through certain food choices and various culinary practices. It is assumed that studying food is a handy tool for researching the Soviet era as the historical episode that has most affected the 20th-century Lithuanian and Latvian identity and the epoch of perestroika as an attempt to get rid of the foreign power. Three representative novels are chosen for the study: Mātes piens (Soviet Milk, 2015) by Nora Ikstena, Istaba (Room, 2016) by Laima Kota, and Lizos butas (Lisa’s Apartment, 2020) by Lithuanian author Vaiva Rykštaitė. These are not gastrotexts in the literal sense of the word but are all directly related to the transmission of political, ideological or cultural identity through situations of food acquisition, cooking and consumption (the role of the kitchen as a place of communication, food-related metaphors, etc.). The approach of literary imagology helps to research food by highlighting manifestations of ethnic loyalty as a contrast to the behavioral models imposed by foreign ideology.
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W artykule dokonano analizy pojęcia ojczyzny w przekładach biblijnych z XVI wieku, powstałych na terenie Rzeczypospolitej i Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego na język polski – katolicka Biblia Leopolity (1561) i Jakuba Wujka (1599), protestancka Biblia Radziwiłłowska czyli Brzeska (1563), ariański przekład Szymona Budnego (Biblia Nieświeska, 1572) i cerkiewno-słowiański (Biblia Ostrogska, 1580–1581), a także w przekładzie hybrydowym Franciszka Skaryny (1517–1519). Twierdzi się, że pomimo różnic wyznaniowych i językowych tłumaczenia biblijne ujawniają dużą liczbę podobieństw. Podobieństwa te dają podstawy, by sądzić, że w XVI w. stanowił punkt zwrotny w rozwoju pojęcia ojczyzny, natomiast na jego kształtowanie się we współczesnym rozumieniu miały wpływ zarówno teksty Nowego, jak Starego Testamentu, lecz oddziaływały one w różny sposób.
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