Topic
Irritative, resilient and slow: home museums in Lithuanian mnemo-political battles and memory of the city
The conference paper focuses on the Lithuanian capital's home museums of the Soviet past's humanitarian elites as gatekeepers of prompt memory policies fueled by the region's geopolitical tensions. The following concepts of slowness (Wüstenberg 2023), resilience, and irritation apply to provide a better understanding of the post-February 2022 urges to close down or severely repurpose several literary home museums, including Venclovos' memorial museum (now Pamėnkalnio vila) as well as Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas and Vincas Krėvė memorial apartments (now part of the Professors‘ House). Despite being (in)direct targets of the so-called Desovietization law (May 2023) due to the biographical complexities of their former inhabitants, home museums stood as resilient and, to some extent, irritating memory institutions. The analysis of discourse surrounding the idea of closure and its contradictions during 2021-2025 yielded the following insights. First, home museums‘ resistance to change stems from a rather specific embeddedness in the urban landscape as actual homes, or, in Potvin's (2010) terms, from their representation of permanence. Secondly, they add to and narrate the city's (rather than the nation-state's) memory in more diverse ways, especially through the biographies of their inhabitants who did not resist the Soviet regime. Home museums offer a rather slow process of coming to terms with the complicated, conflicted past.
Liucija Vervečkienė (Vilnius University)
Liucija Vervečkienė is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History and an assistant professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. Her research interests include interdisciplinary memory studies, the memory of XX-century occupations of Lithuania, memory politics, interpretive research methods and conceptual history. Liucija's international and local publications cover issues of collective and generational memory within the family, and the entanglements of remembrance of the Lithuanian Anti-Soviet partisan war (1944-1953).