Topic
Beyond Vilnius: the Departure from Things Human
From the vantage point of optics, Vilnius is a territory of horizons, with the fata morgana as its most defining feature. Plotted through a centuries-long tradition of multilingual narration, and shaped and malformed by a history of violent cartographies and blunt demographics, the city can only be grasped as an erroneous translation: a fractional movement from one language to another, a shift from well-mapped territory into unrecognised country, a departure from things remembered into limbo. Hence, to pry into the geography of the city - to borrow an expression from one of the city's renowned photographers - is to put one’s perception to the test. To seek its presence in the world is to formulate a map based on divination. Taken together, Vilnius is a narrative perhaps best interpreted as a heterotopia, following the Foucauldian notion of it as a series of places that are foreign yet not necessarily in opposition to one another; a space of multiple openings and closures generating widely different but also potentially misunderstood readings of the place. The city, in the words of one of its Yiddish-language poets, is not unlike “the dream of a kabbalist” with “a thousand narrow doors into the universe.” Getting entangled in it is part of seeing through it.
My talk suggests a cosmographic rendering of Vilnius as a stranger among strangers - a phantasmagoria, a kind of stage on which shades become perceptible, if not entirely transparent. It is a (contemporary) Baroque take on a largely Romantic idea of place - or a glacial retreat from the actual city into the realm of distant associations as its solid geography melts into water. The talk is complemented by a two-hour walking tour of the old town Vilnius scheduled for Saturday, September 26.
Laimonas Briedis (Independent researcher, cultural geographer, writer)
Laimonas Briedis is a writer and scholar whose work engages history, literature, and the geographical imagination of Lithuania. A native of Vilnius, he has spent most of his adult life in Vancouver, Canada, where he earned a doctorate in cultural geography at the University of British Columbia. He completed his postdoctoral research in history at the University of Toronto. His scholarship and literary practice probe the deepest cultural strata of Vilnius in relation to diverse global contexts, while his creative work ranges from developing a digital map of the city’s multilingual literary heritage to examining the cultural and intellectual implications of bi-local life.
Laimonas is the author of the bestselling Vilnius: City of Strangers (New York and Budapest: CEU Press, 2009; Lithuanian edition: Vilnius: baltos lankos, 2012), a non-fiction narrative that surveys the intellectual history of European culture through the city’s shifting political and linguistic landscapes. The Economist described the book as “subtle and evocative,” noting how “vanished civilizations and lost empires leave a city stalked by horror and steeped in wonder.” The book has been translated into several languages, including Lithuanian, German, Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese; each translated edition includes an additional chapter written by the author that explores Vilnius’s relationship to the cultural milieu of the respective language of translation. Both the English and Lithuanian editions have been republished multiple times. He is also the author of Poetic Cartography: Bobrowski, Miłosz, Sutzkever (Vilnius University, 2015), which examines the experience and imagination of wartime Vilnius through the bio-narrative perspectives of three poets writing in German, Polish, and Yiddish. In addition, he has published numerous articles and book chapters with academic and trade presses in Canada, France, the United States, and Italy.