Lithuanian historiography: a search for national identity from Daukantas to 1904

ENThis is a study of Lithuania’s historiography written in the Lithuanian language, from Simonas Daukantas’s "Darbai senųjų lietuvių ir žemaičių" [Deeds of the old Lithuanians and Samogitians] in 1822 to the lifting of the press ban in 1904. It is also a study of the development of a historical consciousness that played a role in the Lithuanian national rebirth. Mostly amateur historians who used history as a tool to foster nationalism dominated this period. Although Russia ruled Lithuania, Polish culture reigned supreme over the social elites of Lithuania. The Lithuanian intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century had to differentiate themselves from the Polonized Lithuanian szlachta. The intelligentsia did so by writing histories from a Lithuanian viewpoint which had an anti-Polish character. In addition the Lithuanian intelligentsia used the medium of the Lithuanian language, which had been primarily a peasant language, to write their histories of Lithuania. Because the Russian authorities closed the University of Vilnius in 1832, Lithuania had no university to train historians. Between Daukantas and the appearance of the first Lithuanian newspaper Auszra in 1883, amateurs like Dionizas Poska, Simonas Stanevidius, and Ludvikas Jucevicius wrote romanticized unscientific works of ethnology and archeology. The one exception to the romanticized histories written during this time was a critical history of the Samogitian Diocese written by the bishop of Samogitia, Motejus Valancius. However, most Lithuanian activists of the nineteenth century were left to their own devises, whereby they either translated or compiled histories that foreigners had written and then edited these works to fit Lithuanian national biases.With the appearance of the first Lithuanian language newspaper Auszra. Lithuanian history began to take on a clearly nationalist viewpoint, most noted for its anti-Polish stance. Although the Lithuanian intelligentsia had grown in numbers, the first professionally trained historian did not appear until Jonas Totoraitis defended his dissertation at the University of Fribourg, Switerland, in 1904. With the twentieth century, Lithuanian history became more scientific.