Between pain and care: once more on Gabrielė Petkevičaitė war experience

ENIn this paper, I will briefly analyze the experience as an informal medicine worker of the Lithuanian writer Gabriele Petkevičaitė. The daughter of a physician, Petkevičaitė used the previously accumulated knowledge about medicine in order to bring aid to villagers. I will explore how the image of a nurse as a nation- builder dealing with illnesses and superstitions got impressed and interpreted in her own self-narrative. Moreover, I will investigate how the writer represented and argued illness and hygiene, and how her activity as a nurse in Ober Ost reflected and modified her own identity. My argument is that illness became a rhetoric tool used to point out both the domains of the self and otherness. If, on the one hand, nervous discomfort traced the borders of identity, on the other hand, medical irresponsibility and unhygienic/superstitious attitudes symbolized the domain of otherness. My contribution will concentrate on this very aspect of Petkevičaitė's experience through the focus of her three-volume Wartime Diary. Other aspects of her wartime experience which 1 dealt with in an earlier text will not be considered here.