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Danutė Kalinauskaitė was born in 1959 in Kaunas. She graduated with a degree in Lithuanian language and literature from Vilnius University. Kalinauskaitė published her first short stories collection Išėjusi šviesa (Departed Light) in 1987. Despite receiving critical acclaim, Kalinauskaitė withdrew from the world of literature. After a long hiatus, her short story “Namo” (“Home”) was published in the literary magazine Metai in 2003, for which she earned the Antanas Vaičiulaitis Prize. She published more short stories in Šiaurės atėnai before putting together a book published by Baltos lankos in 2008, Niekada nežinai (You Never Know). According to poet and essayist Kęstutis Navakas, this book solidified Kalinauskaitė as a the principal contemporary Lithuanian writer. In 2015, she published the fiction collection Skersvėjų namai (The Drafty House, Tyto alba). Kalinauskaitė received The Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts in 2017. Her most recent book Baltieji prieš juoduosius was published in 2023 by Tyto alba. Kalinauskaitė’s works have been translated into English, German, Italian, Russian, Latvian, Croatian, Polish, Swedish, Danish, and Georgian.

Jurga Tumasonytė is a prose author and interviewer whose numerous talks with artists working across a variety of fields have been published in Lithuanian periodicals. Tumasonytė was born in Kaunas in 1988. In 2011, she graduated from Vilnius University with a Bachelor’s degree in philology, and in 2015 – from Vytautas Magnus University with a Master’s degree in philology, having completed a literary studies program. For her debut short prose book Dirbtinė muselė (“Little Artificial Fly,” 2011), which demonstrates an original, ironic perspective on reality and is characterized by an engaging writing style, the author received the Kazimieras Barėnas Literary Award. Tumasonytė participated in poetry slam tournaments during 2010–2013; her writings are included in a set of texts by slam authors known as Slemas Lietuvoje! (“Slam in Lithuania!,” 2012). A fiction piece by Tumasonytė also appeared in Troleibuso istorijos (“Trolleybus Stories”), a 2015 selection of short stories written by Lithuanian authors. Jurga Tumasonytė used to work in eureka!, a small bookstore, and in 2018 the author published a book titled Knygyno istorijos (“Bookstore Stories”), which is made up of odd conversations she has had with the bookstore visitors. Jurga Tumasonytė published Undinės (“Mermaids”), her second collection of short stories, in 2019. The author also has published a novel titled Remontas (“Repair”, 2020) and a short story collection Naujagimiai (The “Newborn”, 2023).
She has received the Jurga Ivanauskaitė and Antanas Vaičiulaitis prizes, while her book Undinės was shortlisted among the Top 12 Most Creative Books of the Year and included in the Book of the Year list.

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reflections on belonging

a palmers chronicle right bw

Graphic Novels

Photo by Irmantas Gelūnas

Translated by Agnieška Leščinska

 

 

 

It’s a coincidence that DANUTĖ KALINAUSKAITĖ’S novel Baltieji prieš juoduosius (Whites Against Blacks, 2023) and JURGA TUMASONYTĖ’S novel Naujagimiai (The Newborn, 2023) were released around the same time, with similar cover designs and themes. Despite representing different generations and styles, critics have compared the two authors’ works with one another. The books have also received widespread praise. With this in mind, we invited them to discuss literature, language, history, memory, and other topics of interest.

 

Jurga: I was intrigued by the acknowledgment’s flyleaf of your novel, where you mention specific people who preferred not to be named, but without whose stories the book wouldn’t exist. What was it like gathering the material for the novel? How did the writing process go?

Danutė: In my previous book, I indulged in fantasy and explored a “world without boundaries.” But in this novel, I focused on “real” events and facts. Although the concept of reality here is conditional because I was relying on people’s memories, and we all know memory is unreliable. It distorts, fades, darkens, and brightens everything. Like the wind, it shifts depending on who’s doing the remembering. Still, I wanted to delve into things that were historically real like food, clothing, real famine and overabundance, and the realities of life before, during, and after the war as well as during the Soviet era. I meticulously pieced together these details from archives, old newspapers, people’s stories, and by visiting the locations I wrote about. I studied restaurant menus and sought out images of wartime railway platforms in silent films. But really, this is just the groundwork that any writer has to do when writing historical fiction, isn’t it?

I sought out the people you mentioned, mainly the elderly, and asked them questions. I pestered them, digging into their old photographs and the events of their lives. It was all so fascinating, so precious, like tarnished silver waiting to be polished and brought back to life. Some didn’t want their stories made public. One woman, who had endured terrible post-war experiences, told me, “Child, Siberia is vast; there’s enough room for everyone.” I thought, what nonsense? Exile? Siberia? What was she on about? Then, as I was finishing the novel, war broke out and Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, it all made sense. Everything she’d said felt all too possible again.

Writing this book felt like filling a honeycomb, layer by layer. But that’s only part of it. As you know, writing is an alchemical process where facts and imagination blend, and it’s hard to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins.

Now, I’d like to ask you something. You’re also an accomplished short story writer, though we’re mainly discussing our latest novels here. Would you agree that the structure of a short story feels different, maybe denser, more nuanced? Do you find it frustrating that your novel seems to have short story elements? It’s as if what works in a short story doesn’t always translate as well into a novel, making it harder to weave together a grand narrative? After all, modern novels rarely follow a straightforward chronological storyline because today they’re often fragmented. Did your experience as a short story writer help you in writing your novel, or did it present any challenges?

Jurga: Honestly, I didn’t think about it too much. I just felt that one short story about poor Jacek, who was killed by his teenage neighbor in what seemed to be the post-war period, wasn’t enough. I wanted to share more stories as well as history. Though it’s funny when one literary critic claimed my book didn’t follow the structure of a “true novel” and therefore couldn’t be called one, while another critic disagreed with the term “a novel-in-stories,” insisting that it was a novel. In Lithuania, there seems to be a bit too much debate over genre purity, and those who don’t neatly fit into a specific genre tend to get criticized or dismissed.

Well, when I was writing Naujagimiai (The Newborn), I actually found that my experience writing my earlier novel Remontas (Repair) was more helpful than my work on novellas. Writing my first novel taught me the discipline of creating a long text. You must write every day, avoid taking long breaks, and avoid reading good books that are unrelated to your piece of writing.

One writer once told me that when he was writing about Vilnius during his youth, he’d get hassled by readers over trivial details, for example, that punks shaved their sidelocks measuring with three fingers, not two, or that the described bench wasn’t on the right side, but on the left. Have you ever received such feedback from readers or experts nitpicking historical or any other details in your work? I took a safer approach in my book. I mixed historical elements with magical ones, which makes it harder for people to get too caught up in what’s “authentic” or “true.”

Danutė: Oh, definitely. There will always be those sharp-eyed readers who point out inaccuracies or any slips in factual truth. We must respect historical facts. If you have committed to the path of historical accuracy, as I have, then you should tread it carefully, dragging all the weight that comes with it. It means spending countless hours verifying facts, digging through archives, comparing information from multiple sources. For example, I needed to know the exact price of jellied pigs’ feet in an interwar restaurant menu. I found out it cost three litai, quite pricy for that time. I had to know whether Russian soldiers actually picked cherries while passing through Lithuania at the end of the war in August. A Latvian translator doubted it, saying cherries weren’t in season then. But some species ripen even into September. So on and so on. While your characters’ actions and fates are shaped by your creativity, for me, the historical settings and circumstances had to be grounded in factual truth. You took a liberating approach in your novel, which worked beautifully. While I’m here waiting for the “critics” to whom I’ve “lied.”

Now, I have a question to ask you. I have to admit that when I was reading The Newborn, I was astounded by your boldness. The novel is full of different expressions of love, sex, and fertility, and you present them in such a fearless, open, and confident way! Did you have to “break” any internal barriers to be able to talk about these taboos? In our literary tradition, when it comes to sexuality, we tend to be more reserved, we often hesitate to talk about it, and God forbid we talk more about it. The classics avoid any explicit scenes. What does courage in literature mean to you?

Jurga: Honestly, the erotic elements in The Newborn just came naturally. I didn’t give it much though. After all, if you want to have babies, you need to start somewhere, right? Though I’ll mention that I enjoyed pushing the boundaries by including explicit sex scenes in a fictional 19th-century “rustic literature” context, breaking away from the usual modesty in such texts.

Today, sex scenes in literature aren’t that shocking. What I find truly courageous is when people are honest about personal matters, in other words – confessional writing, where writers confront real people and their own pasts. I’m not sure if I’d ever go that far, dragging skeletons out of the closet and reaching out to people I haven’t heard from in a while. I won’t deny that it’s often fascinating to read when other authors do it, as long as it’s done with skill and talent.

Last summer, the National Museum of Lithuania opened an exhibition called “Trapped (with Central Heating)” which reflected on the Soviet past. One well-known writer was upset, saying the exhibition made it seem like he’d lived a shitty life, and he couldn’t accept that. He argued that a few poor exhibits from that time can’t define an entire personal experience. What did the Soviet era mean to you?

Danutė: I completely agree with that famous writer. I’m often saddened by today’s attitude toward the Soviet era, especially from young people who never experienced it firsthand. Yes, living under occupation was undeniably awful: Russification, empty shops, cow hooves in the butcher’s section, under-the-counter goods for friends and family, censorship, and the fear of taking any initiative because if you stood out, you’d be knocked back down. Churches were turned into warehouses or stables, and people had to constantly juggle two realities: what they were “supposed” to say in public and what they “could” say at home. There was the constant presence of the KGB, the erasure of our history and national identity. The list goes on. But, as another famous writer (or maybe it was the same one? :)) once said, it’s a huge mistake to view the Soviet past solely through the lens of ideology or blame everything on the system. There were people who lived, dreamed, worked, studied, had children, and created beautiful things. For them, that life was real. You didn’t wake up every morning thinking: “our country is occupied.” You simply lived. It’s crucial to write not just the political history of that era, but also the psychological history of the people. That’s where you’ll uncover the most interesting aspects of that time. Of course, your generation, Jurga, was more fortunate.

Now, I’d like to get back to the discussion about writing.

What do you think about style in literature today? Marina Stepnova once said that a writer’s style is like a fingerprint – an utterly unique mark. You can recognize a real writer’s style from a single page, or even just a paragraph! I’ve always believed that having a distinctive style is every writer’s goal, something that must be discovered and cultivated. I used to think that without a style, a writer wasn’t really a writer. But today, with literature becoming more about the plot and the story, and with writers even starting to turn to artificial intelligence, does style still matter?

Jurga: Over the past few years, I’ve taken many writing courses. I’ve read and commented on the work of beginner writers. It was such a joy when you could already sense that someone had a style, albeit rough and needing refining, but it was “there.” Many, though, started with just a story or personal experience they wanted to share. Some even thought they could write an entire novel in a couple of months and send it off to a publisher, only to be disappointed when they realized it’s not that easy. I think a distinctive style is incredibly important, not just in literature, but in cinema, theater, and contemporary art as well. Without it, no matter how good the story is, it simply won’t resonate with today’s sophisticated audience.

I’d like to ask about your relationship with the era you lived through. The era that still appears in my work, whether I like it or not, probably because it’s the era during which I grew up. In art and literature, especially in post-Soviet countries, there’s a growing trend of looking back at the 1990s. Many of those who write or talk about that era were very young or even children at the time. From a writer’s perspective, could you share some key moments or highlights from the first decade of independence?

Danutė: Oh, that first decade of independence was wild. A true turning point! I debuted in 1987, then again in 2008, and it was like stepping into two completely different worlds. So much changed in that time. Society went from being Soviet to free, but at first, it was only free in name. In reality, we had to go through everything that came with that period: the Gariūnai market years, the Russian blockade, banditry, the rise of the mafia, shootings (the cemeteries in Panevėžys are full of young men who were gunned down during that time), the beheadings of businessmen who refused to pay “tribute” to criminal gangs, privatization, switching back and forth between ideologies (yesterday a teacher of atheism, today a teacher of religion), soul-searching, repentance, and a barricading of yourself in the past. As for writers… it was a strange time. In the Soviet era, they were treated like cultural ornaments, sitting at nice, privileged writing tables, invited to collective farm banquets with roast piglets, enjoying large print runs. After independence, they fell into obscurity. Many writers had to take up proofreading just to make a living. Literature itself was thrust from the Soviet era into independence, and few cared about the books that were published during that transitional period. This is because the colorful chaos of the new reality overshadowed literature. Eventually, literature fell from the grip of Glavlit straight into the jaws of the market economy, which was a completely new experience for writers. They had to learn how to survive.

But literature isn’t just about the era or the themes – it’s first and foremost about language. If we’re talking about upheavals, would you agree that literature today is going through its own tectonic shift? Mostly because of the constant time rushing, everything changing rapidly, image triumphing over word, and the rise of smart technology. All of this is forcing literature to change its rules just to stay relevant. This means lowering the bar and becoming simpler by giving up on metaphors, complex artistic techniques, dense language, and layered meanings. That’s because all those things are too complicated for today’s internet-age reader. It requires more time, and there’s no time. Do you think the language of literature, the sentence itself, is changing? Or am I being too dramatic?

Jurga: You’d think that literary works should be getting shorter and more fragmented because of those trends. But recently, the best Lithuanian book was a novel over five hundred pages long. Danutė, your novel is full of metaphors, it’s multilayered, and modern readers are reading it, discussing it, and sharing it with others. Of course, it’s true that, thanks to smart technology, our attention span is shrinking, which will probably affect literature more in the future. Writers will be filtered out; we’re already seeing a reevaluation of past authors because some streets and schools are being renamed. This is because they were originally named after writers who once collaborated with the communists. What’s your take on the divide between a person and a literary work? Can we still appreciate great art created by someone who has committed terrible acts, by betraying or torturing others?

Danutė: I always like to refer to Jung here. He states that the writer is a creature split into two: the creator and the ordinary person. The creator, even when they’re not actively creating, tends to “consume” the ordinary, good person. Creativity demands a large amount of his energy so that there’s often nothing left of the other side. We can’t expect creators, especially brilliant ones, to be soft and gentle. They’re often drunks or abusers. So, to answer your question – I try to separate the great work from the asshole who wrote it. If we didn’t, we’d be erasing a large part of our literary heritage. If the Norwegians have come to terms with the Knut Hamsun issue, perhaps we shouldn't dismiss figures like Salomėja Nėris or Justinas Marcinkevičius from our study programs. The key is critical reflection. We don’t need to put them on a pedestal or idolize them, like in the Soviet era (where a poet was too good even for a cigarette). Instead, we need to critically reassess, re-read, and openly acknowledge any compromises or collaborations they made.

I’d like to ask you something relevant to today’s writers – translations. Some of our translators have noticed that younger writers are trying to write as simply and globally as possible, avoiding any signs of nationality, to make their works easier to translate, even expecting AI to do some work. But translators argue: “Don’t do this! We don’t want simplistic books; we want good quality literature.” I think this situation exposes a deeper issue for writers from small countries, one that isn’t as sensitive for writers from larger countries. The issue is that it’s incredibly difficult for literature from small countries to break into the global market. Did you experience anything like this? When you write, do you consider how your work might be translated, and do you make any linguistic or any other adjustments with that in mind?

Jurga: No, when I’m writing I consciously don’t think about future translations, because, unfortunately, in our small country, there’s one agent working with children’s literature, and no one working with the creators of adult literature. Often, passages from my work get translated into various languages, and individual stories make it into anthologies, but things rarely go further. This is mostly due to a lack of active engagement with publishers. Something like that would normally be driven by a literary agent, a role that is perhaps supported by the Lithuanian Cultural Institute or the translators themselves. But we’re short on translators as well as those literary agents. What about you? What is your relationship with translators, translations, and foreign readers?

Danutė: It’s pretty similar for me. My short stories and other passages are published in anthologies and literary magazines. After that, it’s mostly a matter of luck. Our language is huge; however, the country is small. Unfortunately, I remember how a translator (into the Polish language) of my book once said, “Sometimes publishers fear publishing a book even if it’s good. This is because Polish readers aren’t very interested in Lithuanian literature unless the topic is really sensational. It’s sad, but it’s true. The same applies to other ‘smaller’ literatures, not just in Poland.” That said, my novel is being translated into Polish and a couple of other languages, and it looks like we’ve reached an agreement with publishers. It’ll be really interesting to see how it’s received, but until I’m holding the physical book in my hands, I won’t be sure of anything. On that note, if we think about the future, let’s say, 30 years from now, how do you imagine literature will evolve? Will the standards of artistic quality disappear? Will some genres vanish entirely? Or when the visual culture takes over, will the written creations turn into icons or emojis?

Jurga: I think there’ll be more content created for people with intellectual disabilities and there’ll be more efforts to make texts accessible for people with other disabilities. That’d be a positive change, since at the moment there’s a shortage of such work. More people might start choosing audiobooks, and younger readers will probably have a wide range of high-quality graphic novels and comics to choose from. When I try to picture such a future, one question keeps popping up: if war were to erupt, would literature be different in wartime than in peacetime? What do you think?

Danutė: I think so, judging by how Ukrainian writers talk about such an issue. They say writing about war is like swallowing barbed wire. If we find ourselves in such a situation, we’ll be swallowing that barbed wire too, because there will be no normal world left. Of course, I hope and pray every night that this fate doesn’t fall upon us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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