Articles range from the legacies of occupation and exile to contemporary art, poetry, urban history, and anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence. Kurtulos Barai (Lithuania) reminds us that art and culture do not simply withstand political, technological and historical upheavals, but help societies understand them and sometimes become catalysts for change.
AI aesthetics
As AI advances at breakneck speed and humanity follows suit, how can we be sure we’re moving in the right direction?Evalina Biliunait offers a fresh perspective on the impact of AI on art and the human mind. Rather than impoverishing our thinking, she argues, AI will simply amplify what is already present in us: “superficiality or depth, carelessness or precision, the desire to impress or true intellectual discipline.”
Billiunite, who designed the issue’s striking cover, argues that AI prompts are not a replacement for artistic creation, but just a step in the creative process, because “all true creative acts begin in the human mind,” and technology can only help realize that vision.
urban heritage
Based on three letters from his dissertation, Virgil Chepaitis tells the story of Vilnius’ long struggle against the erasure of its urban heritage during the twilight years of Soviet Lithuania. At the time, the Soviet Union was sliding toward bankruptcy and the first steps of perestroika were underway. In Moscow, protection of cultural heritage was widely declared. However, in Vilnius the reality was very different.
The first letter denounces the “destruction of the unique urban complex of Tilt Street” and demands the punishment of those responsible and the restoration of the building. Soon, newspapers were flooded with letters from Vilnius residents defending the Old Town, forcing the authorities, if only for a short time, to respect the much-touted principles of openness and tradition.
Fresh protests against further demolition were met by excavators rather than dialogue, and a sense of despair soon set in. “The ‘Dobzynskis House’ was saved,” Chepaitis writes, “but the overall attitude towards cultural heritage remained unchanged.”
Still, something had changed. As citizens scrambled for every scrap of urban heritage, a brick, a broader movement for national revival began to gain momentum. “No one in Lithuania talked about preserving Soviet culture… because Lithuanians were starting to fight for their right to be themselves, for their national identity.”
Chepaitis, who moved to independent Lithuania, insists that the struggle has not disappeared, only changed. Although Lithuania is no longer ruled by a faceless occupation force, heritage now faces a variety of pressures, from institutional diversion to the influence of private capital. Now more than ever, he argues, it is the people’s responsibility to expose injustice and hold those in power accountable.
traces of the past
Martinas Pluvinas also considers Lithuania through the lens of urbanity, presenting a comprehensive historical panorama of the country’s urban landscape, showing how centuries of border shifting, military occupation, and political turmoil have shaped (and often suppressed) the development of its urban culture.
Throughout its history, Lithuania has stood at the crossroads of East and West. Its location is reflected in the city’s DNA. “For a long time, the territory of present-day Lithuania was located between East and West and never became the center of its own independent urban civilization.”
Pluvinas provides an inside tour of Lithuania’s turbulent past, from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Union to independence, 20th-century occupation, and the post-Soviet war, revealing how successive regimes rebuilt not only the city but the communities that animated it.
His tone is often wistful as he reflects on what Lithuania’s urban culture might have been like had successive occupations, partitions, and forced migrations not hampered Lithuania’s development. In early 1941, people of German descent were repatriated from Lithuania to Germany. On June 14, the first mass deportation by the Soviet Union to Siberia began. Entire urban communities disappeared.
But memory turns out to be more resilient than ideology. Soviet authorities could nationalize buildings, rename streets, and try to remake cities in their own image, but they could not completely eradicate the country’s heritage. “Long-time city residents recalled the shops of the Smetona era, filled with all kinds of products. The occupiers could not erase the traces of the life that existed before.”
father’s fragment
In her personal essay, Daria Vabarine presents “fragments” of postwar Lithuania, weaving together her mother’s reminiscences, excerpts of letters, official documents, and her own memories, to reconstruct her father’s “path of suffering.”
Her father, one of the organizers of the 1941 June Uprising and a member of the military staff of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), was arrested, deported, tortured, and eventually executed by the NKVD when she was still a baby. Determined to find out what happened to him after his arrest, Vabarine began compiling his own “archive,” including addresses, letters, photographs, testimonies from relatives and fellow prisoners, and testimony from historians.
The essay concludes with a warning against nostalgia for the Soviet past. Vavarienne tells an old joke. When asked which regime in Lithuania was the best under which he lived, a centenarian replied: “Under the Tsar, my son, under the Tsar.” I was young then and the girls were cute…
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
