Topic
Multilingual Literature in Vilnius: Alien Worlds or Intertwined Urban Networks?
The multilingualism of Vilnius can be described as a repeatedly reconfigured polysystem. Historically, the relationships between the city’s languages and cultures have never been stable: their status, hierarchies, influence, mutual relations, and contexts of interaction have repeatedly changed as a result of the historical upheavals that have profoundly shaped the city. The rapid modernisation of Vilnius’s urban literature began during the final decades of Russian imperial rule before the First World War, when relations between the city’s languages underwent another transformation under the impact of modern nationalisms. At that time, Vilnius emerged as a centre of four major national literatures – Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Belarusian – which developed in parallel cultural spheres while simultaneously competing and interacting with one another.
During the interwar period, particularly in the 1930s, amid intensifying nationalist tensions and the approaching Second World War, Vilnius and its cultural milieu became an important centre of literary modernism. The three most significant modernist literary groups to emerge in the city were the Polish Żagary (Tinder), the Yiddish Yung Vilne (Young Vilnius), and the Lithuanian Žemininkai (Earthlings). Due to interwar national antagonisms and various forms of cultural and social segregation, these groups appear to have inhabited physically proximate, and sometimes identical, urban spaces while remaining largely isolated from one another.
Yet a comparative examination of the development of Żagary, Yung Vilne, and Žemininkai reveals recurring parallels that complicate this image of cultural separation. This paper asks whether these parallels can be understood as manifestations of informal networks of urban exchange that crossed linguistic, political, and institutional boundaries. By tracing the groups’ relationships with Vilnius University, literary institutions, bohemian spaces, and other sites of cultural interaction, it explores how seemingly separate literary worlds participated in a shared urban dynamics of modernist innovation.
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas is Professor of Lithuanian Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University. A literary scholar, poet, and translator, he served as Lithuania’s Minister of Culture in 2019–2020. His research focuses on multilingual literary modernism and urban culture in Lithuania and East-Central Europe. He is the author and co-author of studies on multilingual modernism in Vilnius and the Lithuanian contexts of Czesław Miłosz. Kvietkauskas has translated works by Czesław Miłosz, Abraham Sutzkever, and Moyshe Kulbak from Polish and Yiddish. His research also encompasses Lithuanian Jewish literature and Holocaust diaries, including those of Yitskhok Rudashevski and Matilda Olkin. His latest poetry collection, Groundwaters, was shortlisted for the 2025 Lithuanian Book of the Year Award.