THE VISIONARIES OF VILNIUS AND THE LITHUANIAN VERSION OF METAMODERNISM
Authors: Landsbergytė Becher Jūratė 
Published: December 2023

Contemporary Lithuanian culture uses a unique source of creative spirit, which gives birth to visions of Lithuanian Statehood and sacred architecture. It is Vilnius, and authors related to Vilnius focused on its visual, poetic, and historical meanings. Such creators periodically appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries (M. K. Čiurlionis, A. Mickewicz, O. Miłosz, Cz. Miłosz, M. Kulbak), and when Poland occupied Vilnius, the spiritual connection between the city and Lithuania painfully and vividly intensified. Furthermore, Vilnius’ significance highly increased during the Soviet occupation (1940, 1945–1990). It symbolised the enslaved Statehood of Lithuania at that time and remained an invincible architectural vision of European continuity. Composers (E. Balsys, V. Barkauskas), film directors (A. Grikevičius), and painters (A. Stasiulevičius) created the paradigm of the eternal city, deeply rooted in the self-consciousness of Lithuanian Statehood. In the 21st century, this paradigm flourished incredibly powerfully in literature and music. Composer Onutė Narbutaitė (*1956) seemed to awaken Vilnius’ importance in global Western civilisation. In her oratorio “Centones meae urbi” (1997), she brought several eras of Vilnius history back to the present, raising the concept of the seasons as parts of the oratorio: “Spring” — Baroque, cultural flourishing, “Summer” — 20th century, Holocaust catastrophe, the fate of Vilnius Jews, “Autumn” — 19th century Romanticism, A. Mickiewicz’s poetry, the deep patriotism of Polish-Lithuanian people, “Winter” — the tragic 1991 January events in Vilnius, Lithuania’s walk toward the West and the restoration of independence. This musical-poetic-documentary concept of oratorio, recreating the turning points of Eastern European epochs, brought Narbutaitė’s work, the winner of the National Prize award, into the global spotlight.It is even more important to emphasise the role of literature, returning Vilnius to the civic historical self-awareness of the European present, which is especially relevant after the beginning of the Russian imperial aggression in 2022 against Ukraine. It is the four-volume work Silva rerum (2008–2016) by the writer and doctor of art studies Kristina Sabaliauskaitė (*1974). Because of its artistic and geopolitical incisiveness, it was translated into the languages of neighbouring European nations (Polish, Latvian, Estonian). Here, the depth of Vilnius’ historical memory grows into the restoration of the meaning of Statehood and acquires an exclusive expression of literary value, the sound of multicultural rumble with a unique penetration of antiquity into the present.The coverage of Sabaliauskaitė’s literary style is a powerful showcase of linguistic memory and existential and state life events, which, in her unique narrative, transforms into an endless melody of musical expression, enriched with the brutal reality of images and actions. Through Vilnius’ idea, not in a vague visionary sense but in a concrete historicism revision sense, Sabaliauskaitė brings back the deep state of the 16th–18th-century Republic of Two Nations (Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) into modern Lithuania, unveiling its relevance. Most importantly, the works of both women creators place them in the category of Vilnius visionaries. Here, historicism is integrated into metamodernism — through an endless melody, the transformation of a musicalform, and a literary sentence into the will of the world, the step into the present. Semantics becomes the bearer of the idea of an astute gathering of nations (in Vilnius as well), the inspirer, and the assessor of Europe’s weakened citizenship genesis in the sense of the Statehood of Eastern Europe. A melody emerges as a line of historical memory in the vault of metamodernism, reviving and enriching the myths of emptiness and the end of history spread by postmodernism. It also synchronises in the present time when an experience of a new challenge of the “falling-behind history” caused by war.