Vilnius and Riga: reflections by Lithuanian and Latvian emigrants in the cultural press of 1987-1993

ENIn Lithuania and Latvia, as in the rest of the region, the late 1980s and early 1990s were times of intense, multidirectional change and disruption. At that time, the actualization of the city’s cultural and urban heritage was one of the elements of change. The headlines of Lithuanian periodicals of that time read: “The City is Arriving” (1987), “The Enchanted City” (1988), and “A Man Needs the City” (1989). In Latvia, the Riga-based cultural and social current-affairs magazines Pilsēta (City) and Rīgas laiks (The Riga Times) were launched. Although ethnocentric narratives dominated the transition period, the capitals of Latvia and Lithuania were portrayed as “depositories of memories,” where different communities of memory that had experienced changes in political systems and lived through existential dramas were intertwined: not only the emigrated Lithuanians and Latvians, but also Litvaks, Baltic Germans, and Poles. Even though they felt like displaced outsiders, the symbolic cultural identities of the cities have been (re)constructed: Vilnius as the Athens of the North, the Jerusalem of the North, and the Florence of Poland; Riga as the little Paris, the Rome and Mecca of Latvians, or the birthplace of Baltic Germans. The reflections include various motifs of memory and forgetting. Various particular details of a former home emerged: romanticized, idealized childhood stories, reminiscent of postcards, tourist landscapes, cities dreamt of, or cities emerging from “oppressive silence and fog.” This paper discusses and compares the images of Vilnius and Riga in the Lithuanian and Latvian cultural press of 1987–1993.The main references include cultural periodicals published in Lithuania and Latvia: the Lithuanian Literatūra ir menas, Pergalė (since 1991 published as Metai), Nemunas, and Šiaurės Atėnai; the Latvian Literatūra un Māksla, Karogs, Avots, and others. They actualize the works of Latvian diaspora authors such as Mariss Vētra, Gunars Janovskis, Juris Kronbergs, and Linards Tauns, as well as Lithuanians Sergejus and Grigorijus Kanovičius, Tomas Venclova, Henrikas Nagys, and others. Keywords: city; Riga; Vilnius; memory; press; literature; urban; topography; past.