Współczesna historiografia litewska. Stan aktualny oraz perspektywy badań historii Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego i dziewiętnastowiecznej Litwy

ENThe situation in contemporary Lithuanian historiography is inseparably linked with the political changes that took place after World War II. The Lithuanian environment of historical scientists was severely weakened by to the Russian occupation of 1944. The most outstanding figures of the new Lithuanian generation of historians, who were involved in creating the basis for scientific study of history in the pre-war Lithuania, emigrated. The impossibility to reach the indispensable sources made them change their interests and research goals. Only those who stayed in Europe had relatively good chances to study the sources concerning Lithuania collected in European archives. They prepared source publications and researched a variety of issues connected with the broad conception of the history of culture and Church in Lithuania. The situation of those researchers who moved to the United States or Canada was worse. They had no contact with sources or Lithuanian departments. They managed to create new research centres committed to study of Lithuanian history, including Center for Lithuanian Studies in Chicago. They also launched many periodicals concerning the history of Lithuania. At the same time, the Soviet occupants did not allow any access of Lithuanian scientists to most of the twentieth-century source materials. Instead, they employed numerous Lithuanian Communist collaborators to prepare their own conception of Lithuanian history, which was in complete opposition to the works of the emigrant historians.Unlike the researchers of the contemporary history, those dealing with the history of Lithuania till the nineteenth century did not differ in their interpretations of most of the key issues, despite the fact that some of them worked abroad. The traditional historiographical conception of the Lithuanian statehood, originally formulated in the first half of the nineteenth century and supported by the emigrant scholars, was also adopted by the Soviet Lithuanian historians. However, the latter group of researchers had to conform to the requirements of the obligatory ideology. Thus they were forced to make use of the Marxist model of socio-economic formations, and to accept the constraints imposed on the selection of the subject matters of their studies. What is more, their work had to go through the restrictive procedures of censorship. Only a limited number of historians complied, which led to the publication of propaganda historical works, possessing no scientific value. The majority chose a different way. They reached for new, until then unavailable, sources in the archives of the USSR and Poland. The circumstances - the ideological pressure and the availability of the reservoirs of unused sources - strongly influenced their works, among which the fact-finding and the empirical ones prevailed. The output of the Lithuanian historians working in the country is not known to the Western historiography. This situation was caused by several factors: the West distrusted the researchers of the Eastern bloc; the Soviet governments refused any support for the research and for the spread of its results. Instead, they tried to isolate the Lithuanian historians and to cut them off from the possibility to exchange ideas during international conferences and workshops. The straightforward result of this policy is that the European historiography of today is dominated by the outdated Polish conceptions of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.