We are living in a time marked by a pervasive sense of looming catastrophe – of an approaching end of the world. Yet this feeling is hardly new in Lithuanian literature. From the interwar poetry of Jonas Aistis, who evoked the image of a “dying Europe,” to Tomas Venclova’s visions of forgotten utopian enclaves in Eastern‑Central Europe during the Soviet occupation or Ričardas Gavelis’s Vilniaus pokeris (Vilnius Poker, 1989), which exposes the grotesque absurdities of the Soviet system, Lithuanian writers have long been preoccupied with cultural, political, and existential collapse. More recent works continue this exploration with some of modifications: Gediminas Kulikauskas’s Pamatyti baltąjį šermukšnį (To See the White Sorbus, 2002) portrays a society paralyzed by a mental‑health crisis, while Marijus Gailius’s Oro (Air, 2018) situates Lithuania within the slow violence of global warming and ecological breakdown.
In 2025, several novels continued this trajectory, portraying never‑ending catastrophes in which cities or states become prisons for their inhabitants. In Valdas Bartas’s Mieste anapus (In the City Beyond), a pandemic continues not due to biological reasons but to the city government’s desire to maintain control. Marijus Gailius’s Augustė Gilytė (A Novel of What Could Have Been) imagines a Lithuania that ultimately fails to safeguard its independence: the imperial force – presumably the Soviet Union, referred to in the novel as the empire of rujai – never truly recedes, leaving the country ensnared in perpetual repression. And in Dovydas Pancerovas’s Pragaro vartai (The Gates of Hell), the protagonist is trapped both inwardly and outwardly; while trying to escape, he eventually becomes a spy alongside his mom in war‑torn Kaliningrad.
This atmosphere of unending catastrophe and urban imprisonment is also an important aspect of Motinos (Mothers), Gražina Kelmelytė’s debut novel, published through the Lithuanian Writers’ Union Publishing House’s “Pirmoji knyga” (First Book) series. Set in an isolated city called Western – an island‑like enclave rebuilt after the Last War and largely populated by women – the novel attempts to subvert a familiar narrative, particularly common in American cinema, in which a male superhero rescues the world during or after disaster. Here, women rule the city, control male birth and male place in the community, and preside over an era in which peace, tranquility, and prosperity seem finally to have taken hold.
What is refreshing is that the protagonist, Fausta, along with most of the novel’s other female characters, most times acts as a genuinely independent agent – something still rare in Lithuanian dystopian fiction, where female characters often function merely as extensions of male protagonists or just as objects of desire. In Motinos, women take on roles traditionally coded as masculine: they are engineers, firefighters, specialists of infrastructure, managers, leaders, surgeons, and geneticists. They resemble the mythic foremothers of Marija Gimbutas’s1Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) was a Lithuanian-American archaeologist, widely recognized for her research on the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of “Old Europe” as well as the Kurgan hypothesis. Her interpretation of ancient Paleolithic female figurines transformed the prevailing view, shifting them from being seen as fertility symbols or erotic objects to sacred artifacts representing a female-centered religious system. matriarchal world-building, constructing a state run by women.
Yet this is also where the novel’s weakness lies. Instead of dismantling stereotypes, it risks simply inverting them. Traditionally “masculine” occupations are reassigned to women wholesale, while men are stripped of all rights. Relationships with men are seen as less acceptable; heterosexual families are discouraged; and men are relegated to heavy physical labor – laying sidewalk tiles, welding metal, working outdoors, painting fences, pruning trees or, when required, providing semen according to a strict schedule. Such social engineering is not particularly new in the world literature or dystopian fiction – Naomi Alderman’s The Power offers a similar premise (thanks to Rima Bertaševičiūtė for the reference) – but it has now found its way into Lithuanian writing.
The novel also leaves a little bit unclear why Fausta develops a friendship, and later a romantic relationship, with the brother of her friend called Jonas – the only male character afforded a more narrative depth. Through Jonas, the novel attempts to reveal what is publicly silenced – why the post‑war world has become what it is and what kind of a city Western was before the second collapse.
Structurally, the narrative oscillates between utopia and dystopia. On one hand, women build an ideal, prosperous city after the Last War: small, picturesque houses, gardens for growing food and a town hall in the center, few cars, with an emphasis on craftsmanship and individuals and communal well‑being. Yet the city knows little of other settlements and their customs. On the other, this utopia is soon shattered by new waves of violence and massacres carried out by mysterious figures, likely exiles (mostly men) banished for their behavior. Survivors flee Western and resettle in the city known as Glass, forced again to rebuild their lives. This is a classic state of utopias – a constant liminal state of belonging neither here nor there, always in between.
The novel is rich with themes: the meaning of motherhood, who may claim it, gender relations, communal life, prosperity and collapse, male violence, beauty, well‑being, and questions of creativity. Yet memory, I believe, stands at its center:
From my backpack, I pulled out Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We often spent time like that, and afterwards we would discuss what we had read. I longed, someday, to see Aurelija’s library, for I had heard it contained rare books. They were not forbidden. Things were not forbidden, only forgotten. Later, Aurelija would tell me that this was far more effective (p. 9) (https://vilniusreview.com/fiction/grazina-kelmelyte/)
What does it mean to live in a community without history, one that has erased or forgotten its past? Perhaps it is precisely the inability to remember that seals the city’s fate – even though Western preserves old books as a “library of horror and pain” (p. 38), including the so‑called “man‑book” – the Bible – kept, as the council leader Aurelija says, “so we do not forget why we live the way we live” (p. 34).
After the fall of Western, Fausta attempts to write its history, even as she herself drifts toward a borderline, almost delirious state. She becomes a kind of prophetess – telling strange stories, reading tarot cards – and, eventually, a guide leading visitor through the ruins of the once‑utopian settlement. And maybe this is what destroys a city (which sounds a little bit of naïve or cliché) – you can’t create any future without remembering and accepting the past. Perhaps this is why catastrophes never really end – and why we always find ourselves caught in their vortex once again. Thus, it is not surprising that the text we are reading eventually reveals itself to be Fausta’s own creation.
