Violeta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War” (Routledge, 2013)

episode

New Books in Eastern European Studies not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from New Books in Eastern European Studies

Daniela Gerson, "The Wanderers: A Story of Exile, Survival, and Unexpected Love in the Shadow of World War II" (Grand Central Publishing, 2026) 1h 2m · 08 Sep 2026

All episodes from New Books in Eastern European Studies →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded04 Jan 2017

Publisherfeeds.megaphone.fm

Handlerec:5359498

Show notes

In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World War II Lithuania, Davoliute demonstrates how cultural elites wove together nationalist and communist ideologies to shape the emerging Soviet Lithuania. She argues that writers Petras Vaiciunas and Justis Paleckis used a poetics of reconstruction to integrate Lithuania’s medieval past into a broader Soviet narrative of the future and that this engagement the development of indigenous pro-Soviet cultural elites. Davoliute then looks at the rustic turn in the 1970s and makes the case that cultural conservatives were able to provide an alternative aesthetic of authentic identity, not based on Soviet Lithuanian modernity but on a discourse of trauma and deracination. Her analysis ends with a look at the relationship between establishment intellectuals and deportees as exemplified by role of Justinas Marcinkevicius in the publication of Dalia Grinkeviciutes memoirs of deportation to Siberia at age 14. Violeta Davoliute is a Senior Researcher in the Faculty of History at Vilnius University and the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute. She was the 2015-2016 Joseph P. Kazickas Associate Research Scholar at Yale University. Davoliute has also been a Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Ethnography, where she worked on mass population displacements and deportations from Lithuania to the Soviet gulag. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2004. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.