Trys dvarininko Rapolo Slizienio gyvenimo kontekstai

ENQuite a few texts have appeared recently, describing the so-called intellectual islands in provincial Lithuania of the 19th century; the biographies of several landlords, a.k.a. provincial intellectuals, have been reconstructed as well. Yet most of them were the so-called writing manors, or manors where texts - scientific and fictional alike - would be written. There have been so far few attempts to analyse the so-called painting manors of the 19th century. One exception is the monograph dedicated to Liubavas Manor, one its most beautiful fragments covering the ‘artistic’ period of the manor when sculptor Rapolas Slizienis (Rafał Ślizień, 1804-1881) lived and worked there (see Gintaras Karosas, Liubavas, Vilnius: Europos parkas, 2010). The author of this book had picked from Lithuanian and Polish memory institutions the key details of the life and creative work of Rapolas Slizienis. Therefore, the purpose of this article is merely to ‘frame’ the biography of the Liubavas landlord, to discuss the underlying contexts in which the biography of this man, and of his last manor and burial place, unfolds. However fragmented the sources that have survived to this day might be, they first of all show the enormous influence that the Philomath ideology had on Rapolas Slizienis’s biography. Yet this material, too, bears witness to the fears of young people arrested and imprisoned - fears not of their physical and moral humiliation, but rather for the fate of the manors owned by their parents or even themselves.To some extent, the emotions felt during his student days can be drawn upon in an effort to interpret Rapolas Slizienis’s attitude towards the Antiquity Museum of Vilnius. Even though he was drawn by the movement’s ideas and he supported the museum with donations, he did not want to share an official bond with it. Because he was obligated by his manor. Because the manor was the key context of Rapolas Slizicnis’s life. First and foremost, he was a nobleman and a landlord, and his career of a sculptor and architect was secondary to that. However, it was the latter circumstance that made him a special landlord. These intellectual noblemen with their university and secret-society background ended up as lords of their manors and formed a unique social layer with its own unique lifestyle. That was what made these manors - and Lithuania in general - special. The efforts to define these few biographical contexts of Rapolas Slizienis (and there are more of them to be found, including his school, or rather Jesuitical, context) have relied not on written resources but rather on the creative work of the lord of Liubavas manor that has survived to this day or has been adequately documented. No matter how fragmented, it is this work that delineates the essential motions of the landlord Rapolas Slizienis’s thought, the underlying accents of his life, and, quite possibly, his priorities better than any written text.