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THE LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

VOLUME 57:4, Winter 2011


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Contributing Editors: LAIMONAS BRIEDIS, University of Toronto PATRICK CHURA, University of Akron DARIUS FURMONAVIIUS, Lithuanian Research Fund (UK) DAIVA MARKELIS, Eastern Illinois University ANDRIUS NAVICKAS, Bernardinai.lt VIKTORIJA SKRUPSKELIS, Vytautas Magnus University GIEDRIUS SUBAIUS, University of Illinois at Chicago

LORETA VAICEKAUSKIEN, Vilnius UniversityCopy Editor: BEN (KRIAUPAS) KROUPArt Editor: STASYS GOTAUTASCover Design: VINCAS LUKASTechnical Editor: HENRIETTA VEPTASManaging Editor: ARVYDAS TAMULISRepresentative in Lithuania:DAIVA LITVINSKAIT

Advisory Board: BIRUT CIPLIJAUSKAIT, University of Wisconsin-Madison KSTUTIS GIRNIUS, University of Vilnius ANTANAS KLIMAS, University of Rochester

ALGIS MICKNAS, Ohio University THOMAS REMEIKIS, St. Josephs College ALFRED E. SENN, University of WisconsinMadison SAULIUS SUIEDLIS, Millersville University BRONIUS VAKELIS, Vytautas Magnus University TOMAS VENCLOVA, Yale University AUDRON BARNAITWILLEKE, Miami University (Ohio) K. PAUL YGAS, Arizona State University

Lituanus: The Lithuanian Quarterly(published since 1954) is a multi-disciplina-ry academic journal presenting and examining various aspects of Lithuanian cul-

ture and history. Authors are invited to submit scholarly articles,belles lettres, andart work.Manuscripts will be reviewed. Books are accepted for review purposes.Opinions expressed in signed articles represent the views of their authors and do notnecessarily reect agreement on the part of the editors or the publisher.

For submission guidelines and editorial matters please contact the editors.For subscrip-tions, donations and other business matters contact the administration.Editorial Ofce: [email protected]: [email protected]: Lituanus Foundation, A. Tamulis, PresidentAddress: 47 West Polk Street, Suite 100300,

Chicago, IL 606052000 Phone/Fax 312/945-0697

Articles are archived and accessible at www.lituanus.org and in microform from University Micro-lms (www.proquest.com/brand/umi.shtml) They are indexed in:

MLA International Bibliography;PAIS International;International Political Science Abstracts;Historical Abstracts (EBSCO);Linguistic Bibliography (Netherlands);Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts;RILM Abstracts of Music Literature;Bibliography of the History of Art;OCLC Article First.

Worldwide circulation per issue 2,000 copies.Individual subscriptions $20.00. Institutional subscriptions $30.00Copyright 2010 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc. ISSN 00245089.Printed by M & D Printing, Henry, Illinois


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Editor of this IssuePatrick Chura

CONTENTS

Thomas F. Broden 5 Toward a Biography of AlgirdasJulius Greimas (19171992)

Sonata Paliulyt 41 Birth of an Angel; Waiting for aMiracle; To my Aunt Adel;Tricky Games of Angels; Potato

Meditation

Rolandas Pavilionis 47 Introduction to Thoreaus Walden

Kerry Shawn Keys 60 By The Blue House; The PartisanLike all Creatures Drops Dead asChaste in Ignorance as the MorningDove; The Finest Artwork; LikeChilde Harold Before Him

Antanas Andrijauskas 65 M.K. iurlionis and the East

Laurynas Katkus 79 vrynas in Winter; Aunt Jan;, 1972; October Holidays; Cityof Mercury

Auridas Jocas 84 Sunday the 13th

BOOK REVIEWS

Emily Dickinson:The Banks of Noon (Pusiaudienio krantai).Selected Poems.Translated by Sonata Paliulyt.

Reviewed by Patrick Chura90

ABSTRACTS93

2011 INDEX94

The Board of Directors of LITUANUS regretfully announce the retirement ofDr. Violeta Kelertas and Dr. Graina Slavnas from their respective positions asChief Editor and Associate Editor of the journal. Dr. Kelertas began her contributionto LITUANUS with her rst article in 1977. She joined the Editorial Board in 1990and became Chief Editor in 2000. Dr. Slavnas began writing for the journal in1979 and later became a member of the Editorial Board and Associate Editor.We are very grateful for their contributions to LITUANUS and their eorts tomake LITUANUS interesting and relevant to a diverse audience. We wishthem success in their future endeavors and count on their continued support.


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Toward a Biography of Algirdas JuliusGreimas (1917-1992)

THOMAS F. BRODEN

Algirdas Julius Greimas was a member of the Lithuanian equiva-lent of the Greatest Generation, men and women called upon

to exert decisive eorts during the Second World War.1The yearswere all the more challenging in Lithuania in that, along withLatvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Poland and West-ern Russia, the country lay in the swath of East Central Europethat Timothy Snyder has dubbed the bloodlands, subjectedto mass violence engineered by both Stalin and Hitler duringthe war years.2Whereas the spirit of the USAs Greatest Gen-eration was marked by the preceding hardships of the GreatDepression, the social event that made the greatest impact onits Lithuanian counterparts was perhaps the Act of February 16.Greimas and his contemporaries formed part of the rst genera-tion to grow up in an independent Lithuania since the MiddleAgesand the last such generation until the end of the Twen-tieth Century.

For Lithuanians of his day, A. J. Greimas was an interna-

tionally celebrated scholar and an active participant in Lithu-anian public life. The renown earned by his research in Frenchlinguistics and the prestigious academic position he held in

1 Brokaw, The Greatest Generation, 1998.2 Snyder, Bloodlands, 2010.

THOMAS F. BRODEN, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of French andComparative Literature at Purdue University. The author of numer-

ous scholarly articles on semiotics and French literature and culture,he edited Greimas previously unpublished Sorbonne dissertations in2000 with the Presses Universitaires de France. In 1981-82 he studiedwith Greimas and his research group in Paris.


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Paris put him in an elite category among intellectuals from hiscountry. Greimas is one of only three individuals born in thelast century to which a 2000 collective work on modern Lithu-

anian philosophy devotes an entire chapter.3

His twelve mono-graphs on semantics and semiotics investigate the foundationsof meaning, especially in language and texts, and have comeout in translation in many languages. To date, his landmarkrst book, Smantique structurale(Structural Semantics) has beentranslated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish,English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Lithuanian. He taughtfor twenty years at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences So-

ciales, the most illustrious and dynamic degree-granting insti-tution of higher learning in France. Even Lithuanian Commu-nist Party apparatchiks tacitly considered him and his scholar-ship a national treasure to be conserved and championed.4

Virtually unbeknownst to those of us who worked withhim in French semiotics, Greimas also took an active role inLithuanian public aairs. He held leadership positions in theanti-Nazi and anti-Soviet resistance, published extensively in

the liberal migr press throughout his life, participated inSantara-viesa, and produced important scholarship on Lithu-anian heritage that played a prominent role in the revival ofthe countrys culture during the latter part of the Soviet period.In the mold of Lithuanian liberalism, Greimass delity to hisnative land did not countenance complacency, parochialism, orxenophobia, but demanded critical thinking, excellence, andgoals valid for all of humankind. Upon his death, the Lithu-

anian embassy in France published an ocial announcementregretting the loss of a man Faithful to his native countryslanguage and actively supportive of its Renaissance,5and thenewly independent Lithuanian Republic commemorated thereturn of his ashes with an ocial state ceremony addressedby President Vytautas Landsbergis.

In France and other Romance countries, Greimas and his

3 Baranova, ed. Lithuanian Philosophy; the other two are VytautasKavolis and Arvydas liogeris.

4 Tomas Venclova, letter to the author 24 August 2010.5 Le Monde, Thursday 5 March 1992, 18.


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scholarship remain well known today. But younger generationsof Lithuanians are not necessarily familiar with his work or hisperson. As one of his Lithuanian friends and contemporaries

put it in 2011, Everybody that was anybody in my genera-tion knew Greimas personally or heard of his work. But thereare not many of us left. The generation of our children or evengrandchildren may not be informed.6

The author was fortunate enough to study with Greimasand his research group for a year in Paris and to collaboratewith them ever since. The present article represents a draft ofthe rst chapter in an intellectual biography in preparation onGreimas. To the extent feasible, the book project endeavors tocommunicate faithfully both events and what it was like to livethrough them, both history and experience. History requires anobjective account grounded in documents recognized as au-thoritative. Experience demands a subjective contact foundin personal witness, such as one may encounter in direct ex-changes, interviews, and letters.

This liminal text recounts the years that Greimas lived inLithuania, before eeing the second Soviet occupation in 1944and pursuing his career in the Francophone world. This part ofhis life remains a work in progress at the moment, since a num-ber of important points await further conrmation and devel-opment by historical sources. The main lines already stand outclearly, however. The author, a French professor, would like torecognize the members of the Lithuanian community whoseresearch and whose generous collaboration provided much

of the information on Lithuanian Greimas for the project,7

6 Aleksandra Kauba e-mail to the author 3 September 2011.7 Prof. arolis imtautas aponis has researched Greimass childProf. arolis imtautas aponis has researched Greimass child-

hood and his parents, and Leonas Peleckisaktaviius inter-viewed fellow iauliai residents who knew him in the early 1940s.For other biographical and bibliographical information used inthis article and for invaluable translations, I especially thank Vy-tas Virkau,Julija Korostenskaja andRaymond Viskanta, as well as

Asta Balkut, Irena riauinien, Aldas riauinas, Aleksandraauba, stutis Nastopka, Enata Skrupskelis, Julija ukys, Hen-rietta Veptas, and Purdue colleagues Rebekah Klein-Pejov, Mi-chael G. Smith, and Whitney Walton.


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and welcomes any additional comments or information. Theproject would like to contribute to the task of composing andpassing on the story of a signicant gure from the last century

for the benet of his compatriots, kindred human spirits, andhistorical memory.vvv

Algirdas Julius Greimas was born on 9 March 1917, the sec-ond child of Julius Greimas (1882-1942), a teacher and publicschool inspector, and of onstancija MickeviitGreimien(1886-1956), a secretary. Both of his parents were ethnic Lithu-anians and spoke Lithuanian. His father came from a villagenear Marijampol in Suvalkija, not far from the current borderwith Poland.8Algirdass mother and her family had lived fora number of years in Suvalkija as well, in Kalvarija, althoughthey were originally from sizable towns in the area south ofpresent-day Lithuania, in the region historically under Polishcontrol.

Algirdas came into the world in the industrial city of Tulain ussia, where his parents had ed as refugees during WorldWar I. After the armistice, the family returned to newly inde-pendent Lithuania, to the hamlet in Auktaitija where Julius hadbeen teaching before the war. In 1919, they moved to the nearbyvillage of Kupikis, where they would live for eight years, untilAlgirdas was ten years old. Algirdas and his sister Graina gota younger brother Romualdas. In addition to his classroom du-ties, Julius Greimas formed a local Aurininkai group to fosterLithuanian identity and autonomy and was elected secretaryof the town council.9Algirdas always harbored fond memo-ries of growing up in the bucolic, forested Auktaitian regionand working on a farm during the summer months: Kupikismeans a lot to me my beautiful walks, my contact with thepeople in our villageand my love of folklore.10Algirdas began

8 This and most of the following specics about Greimas parentsand childhood are found in Kaponis,Algirdas Julius Greimas ir jo

semiotika.9 Peleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos, 10.10 Greimas, letter to Kupikis elementary school classmate Povilas

Zulonas, 1971, quoted in Kaponis,Algirdo Greimo vaikyst.


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elementary school when he was seven, skipped a couple ofgrades, and entered secondary school (vidurin mokykla) at theage of nine. He and his siblings were part of the rst generation

to be schooled in Lithuanian. Like other children of parents inthe liberal professions, they followed a traditional humanisticcurriculum taught by university-trained instructors; Algirdasrecalls studying Latin, Greek, and German.

In those days, a family like the Greimases, including thechildren, would have been bilingual, speaking both the culti-vated language Polish, and Lithuanian, traditionally the lan-guage of peasants. Algirdas recalls that my mother forbadeher daughter to speak Lithuanian, just as his mother had beenforbidden to speak Lithuanian by her own mother:11educatedwomen who wanted their daughters to enjoy good marriageprospects trained them to imitate the landed gentry in the areaand not the rural commoners. On the other hand, Greimas hada photo, which was taken in 1905, that shows a young Konstan-cija Mickeviit and her girlfriends dressed in the traditional

national costume and standing in front of an inscription in Lith-uanian that says theyre going to an evening dance at a neigh-bors.12 Algirdas himself never acknowledged competence inPolish on his curricula vitae, and like many of his compatriots,considered Poland to be Lithuanias rival and adversary.13

Algirdas felt particularly close to his father, was thankfulto him for opportunities he made available, and saw himself

as following in his footsteps in signicant ways. He later remi-nisced about moments they shared: My father practiced instruc-tion by silence. We would take walks in the forest, just the twoof us. It was a great lesson: two people together, without having

11 Greimas, 5 January and 15 January 1991 letters to ibuntas Mikys,who translated the passages into French and quoted them in a let-ter to the author 23 August 2010. Cf. Balkelis, The Making of Modern

Lithuania,6-7.12 Greimas letter to ibuntas Mikys 15 January 1991.13 ibuntas Mikys telephone conversation with the author 1 Noibuntas Mikys telephone conversation with the author 1 No-

vember 2010.


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to say anything.14Extended family members recall that, as ayoung man, Algirdas physically resembled Julius and wore amoustache trimmed in similar fashion.15

In 1927, Julius was transferred to iauliai, an industrialcenter and Lithuanias fourth largest city. Four years later, thefamily moved to Marijampol, to Juliuss native area. The re-location allowed Algirdas to nish his secondary education inone of the nest high schools in the country, the Germanstylegymnasium ygiki Jonas, celebrated for educating leaders ofthe Lithuanian national rebirth, including Jonas Basanaviius,Kazys Grinius, Vincas Kudirka, and Jonas Jablonskis. Greimastook a wide array of mathematics courses and studied history,religion, philosophy, and literature from teachers whose prin-cipal references were Germanic. He met and became life-longfriends with schoolmate Aleksys Churginas, who would goon to publish poetry and authoritative translations. He recallsmaking many intellectual discoveries thanks to a reading groupthat he and classmates formed in order to teach themselves

foreign languages and gain access to world literature unavail-able in translation: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Ilya Ehrenburg;Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe; the French poets CharlesBaudelaire and Paul Verlaine.16In charge of German, Algirdaspicked selections from the philosophers Friedrich Nietzscheand Arthur Schopenhauer. He later summarized these years,Looking back it seems now that I was a normal youth and

high school student of my Lithuanian-speaking generation.Like everyone else, I wanted to overthrow Smetona and liberateVilnius. I dreamed about and looked for the love which doesnot exist.17Later in life, Greimas identied himself specicallyas a Suvalkian, a native of Suvalkai, where he graduated highschool and where his father was from.

14 Greimas radio interview with Francesca Piolot broadcast on

France Culture 14 February 1989.15 OkinaitBtnien, Dialogo monologai, 59.16 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 1.17 Ibid., 11.


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Greimas joined the Boys Scouts and became a group lead-er, opting to work with sons of workers in the sugar factory andstudents in the trade school. He became friends with Vytautas

Kauba, a member of the troop who would gain internationalrecognition as a sculptor. Decades later, Vytautas rememberedAlgirdas as a leader with dictatorial discipline, a character-ization which Greimas accepted, allowing that at the time, Iwas somewhat fascistically and socialistically inclined.18 Inthe 1930s, far-right and far-left movements throughout Europecalled for dramatic action and radical social reform, with theextremes meeting and overlapping in curious ways.19Greimas

later recalled the sociopolitical atmosphere of his high schooland college days:

Today, it is impossible to grasp that intoxication, that crazewhich in the third decade of the Twentieth Century embraced allthe youth of Europe. It was as if they were responding to anunholy need to take action, which haunted everyone and urgedthem to action by any means, to do something, no matter what,to break something at any price... A young person would become

a Fascist or a Communist solely due to their environment orcircumstances.20

In his eight years of middle school and high school, Algir-das achieved superior results: he took at least nineteen subjects,earning nine 4s and nine 5s, the highest, infrequently givengrade in the Lithuanian system.21He apparently was not a gift-ed vocalist, for Music and Singing provided him his only 3! In

18 AleksandraKaubaletter to Greimas 25 October 1989 and Greimasletter to Kauba 5 November 1989,in Greimas and Kauba, Algirdo

Juliaus Greimo, 90-91.19 Certain prominent activists even rapidly migrated from one pole to

the other without traversing the middle, such as Jacques Doriot inFrance.

20 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 15.21 Certied 15 October 1936 French translation of Greimass June

1934 certicate from ygiki Jonas High School, provided to theUniversity of Grenoble; Archives du dpartement de lIsre, Gre-noble, Fonds du rectorat de Grenoble, sous-srie 20T non cot,Greimas le.


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June 1934, he passed the comprehensive national high schoolexams and received the recommendation to continue his stud-ies at university. His father recognized the achievement by pre-

senting him with the works of Nietzsche in the original.22

In the fall of 1934, Algirdas enrolled at the Law School ofVytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, the capital of Lithu-ania between the two world wars, located only thirty milesfrom Marijampol. Greimas describes aunas as a cosmopoli-tan city, where he rst fraternized with a smarter, somewhatsnobby crowd returned from foreign metropolitan centers, in-cluding some in England and America. He took classes from

a number of professors who were distinguished scholars andprominent public gures, including university ector MykolasRmeris, the founder of Lithuanian constitutional law and jus-tice of the Supreme Court; Vladas Jurgutis, former chairman ofthe Bank of Lithuania and Foreign Minister; and the eminentphilosopher Vosylius Sezemanas.23 However, the gure whomade the greatest impression on him was Lev P. Karsavin, ahistorian of religious philosophy. arsavins lectures on me-dieval Christian philosophy instilled in Algirdas an enduringlove for the Middle Ages and inspired him by their elegantmastery of Lithuanian: I was fascinated by his beautiful, cul-tivated language. I hadnt known that it was possible to speakso nely in Lithuanian about wise matters.24Karsavin and theother faculty named had all studied in St. Petersburg as wellas in Germany or France, and they educated Greimas in Slavic

intellectual traditions.Outside of class, lawyer-in-training Algirdas recountsa student life of nights spent drinking beer and reciting po-etry with chums followed by hungover mornings devoted toreading gures such as Leon Trotsky, Oswald Spengler, andJohan Huizinga, who formed his rst conceptions of history,the discipline which would provide the framework for the

22 Greimas radio interview with Francesca Piolot broadcasted onFrance Culture 17 February 1989.

23 Kaponis,Algirdas Julius Greimas, 6.24 Greimas, Karsavino aktualumas, 40.


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rst two decades of his research.25He joined Neo-Lithuania, auniversity student organization devoted to maintaining Lithu-anian independence and protecting its interests. It and other

student clubs developed leaders for the intellectual, economic,and political life of the young country.Greimas never nished his law degree, however, and

ended up studying in France, which prepared him for becom-ing a French citizen and pursuing his career in that country.While he allows that he was interested in anything but law,26he attributes the switch to global geo-politics: How I then be-came French, the merit goes to Mr. Hitler. Its Hitler who de-

cided to blackmail Lithuania, not to accept its exports. Lithu-ania thus had to reform its economy and politics and turn toFrance The government decided: now were going to createFrench lyces. But there werent any professors of French. Sothree hundred guys were sent to France with scholarships tolearn French and become French professors. I was a law stu-dent. I told myself: why not go to France?27

Greimas was sent to the University of Grenoble in the

Alps, where he enrolled in the Humanities College. He tookclasses from Antonin Duraour, a respected specialist in o-mance dialects, who had studied in Leipzig, the intellectualcapital of historical linguistics. Greimas credits this remark-able master with giving him a rstrate training in omancephilology, forming him in the rigorous methods of linguisticanalysis, and teaching him a respect for the text.28Duraourinstructed his disciples to stay away from the aberrant novel

structural linguistics led by the Prague phonologist NikolaiTrubetzkoy, whom the erudite and dignied professor baldlylabeled an asshole during his lectures in the amphitheater.29

In Grenoble, Greimas hooked up with his buddy AlexisChurginas, also a rstyear student at the university. Hebecame

25 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 1.26 Greimas, Karsavino aktualumas, 40.27 Greimas, La France est gagne par linsigniance, 44. TranslaGreimas, La France est gagne par linsigniance, 44. TranslaTransla-

tions from the French are by the author.28 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 14.29 Greimas, Entretien in Chevalier and Encrev, Combats, 122.


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friends and roommates with an older compatriot and fellownew student, Jonas ossuAleksandraviius (Jonas Aistis), whowould go on to become a celebrated poet. After a rocky transi-

tion, Greimas adapted to his new environment. As he recalls,The rst year, I was always cursing France, for me it was amess: 1936, the [Socialist] Popular Front, you can just imagine.Nothing worked, whereas even we Lithuanians had some senseof order. The second year, I fell in love with France.30Thanks tothe new cultural context and to the Spanish Civil War, his politi-cal leanings shifted to far-left anarcho-syndicalism.31

Greimas passed exams and obtained certicates in psy-

chology, phonetics, French philology, and French medievalstudies, and was awarded the licence s lettres in June 1939.The curriculum contributed a third stratum to his intellectu-al makeup, the Romance tradition, which would become hisdominant frame of reference going forward. With Duraour,he dened a doctoral dissertation topic in historical linguistics.The thesis would study place names in the Graisivaudan Valleynear Grenoble, identifying creations and alterations eected byits successive inhabitants, from pre-Celtic tribes through theCelts, Germanic tribes, and Romans. The Graisivaudan maystill await its study, however, for international political eventsagain altered the course of Greimass career.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Lithuanias south-ern neighbor Poland. Moving to establish a line of defensealong the border of its zone of inuence as dened in the nal

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR issued ultimatums to thethree Baltic States and Finland and exerted its control over thecountries. As Greimas recalls, the Russians arrived, but leftthe country socalled independent.32 He was mobilized inthe Lithuanian army, called back home before classes started inthe fall of 1939 in Grenoble, and enrolled in Ocers Trainingat the Pirmojo Lietuvos Prezidento Antanas Smetona MilitaryAcademy in Kaunas. A fellow member of his platoon remem-

30 Greimas, La France est gagne, 44.31 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 15.32 Greimas, La France est gagne, 44.


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bered him afterwards as a true apologist for peace, but also agood soldier.33In 1940, after a little over a years training, Grei-mas completed the curriculum, but did not receive an ocers

commission, allegedly for political reasons, and was instead as-signed to the reserves.34After a year of the velvet glove, the Soviets dropped pre-

tenses, issued new demands, and engineered the takeover ofthe Baltic nations. Greimas remembers, then the Red Armyarrived: ultimatum, occupation. They incorporated us into theed Army; I didnt know a word of ussian. I was given a pieceof paper: I was a reserve ocer in the glorious ed Army of

workers and peasants. We were Bolsheviks.35The USSR begana systematic process of Sovietizing every aspect of the Balticcountries, from politics and nance to business and education.Its political police also began secretly identifying military, polit-ical, civic, economic, and moral leaders, whose removal wouldenhance the stability and security of the new Soviet Republicsand foster their development toward Bolshevik socialism.

In October 1940, Greimas began teaching French andLithuanian Language and Literature and other humanitiessubjects at schools located in iauliai. Although he had livedthere a dozen years earlier, he no longer had family or friendsin town. He taught at the Trade Institute and got hired to giveadditional classes at the adult high school (gymnasium) andthe girls high school, which the Soviets made coeducationalat the start of classes in the fall of 1940.36He met and became

friends with one of his students in the evening adult classes,Julius Juzelinas, later a wellknown composer and organist.The thirteenyearolds in the former girls school recall their rstimpression of Greimas: young, very young and blond, hairevenly combed back, blue eyes, lips compressed, head tilted

33 Nainys, A. A. Algirdas Julius Greimas.34 Kaponis,Algirdas Julius Greimas, 7.35 Greimas, La France est gagne, 44.36 This and most of the information about Greimas in iauliai come

from two sources: Greimas, Tada, kai baurikas kraujas virtomlynu and Peleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos.


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somewhat to one side, agreeable. He entered in full stride.37In the course of the year, the students developed a nurturingspecial psychological connection with their instructor such

that they still remembered him in great detail six decadeslater. Greimas emphasized literature, of which he evinced adeep knowledge, and delivered interesting lessons. He spokevery beautiful Lithuanian, with a light Suvalkian accent. Hestressed that, as Lithuanians, their national identity and theirroots in the country were important and that the Lithuanianlanguage possessed a poetic quality. He also underlined theworth and richness of French literature and encouraged every-

one to see Paris at some point in their lives in order to expe-rience an international intellectual center. In his second yearat the school, Greimas struck up a friendship with his late-lifecorrespondent Aleksandra Fledinskait, then a student com-pleting her last year, later an environmental artist in the UnitedStates and the wife of Greimass friend Vytautas auba.38Healso became close friends with a Lithuanian language teach-er at the school, Tomas Stonis, who remembered that therewasnt a better conversationalist than A. J. Greimas he neverlied, never minced his words.39

Contemporaries in town recall the twenty-three year oldAlgirdas: In iauliai, A. J. Greimas was a free spirit, a willingshowo, and a frequent guest at the homes of the most promi-nent iauliai citizens.40Thanks to his knowledge of French andGerman, he got involved with the theater in town: he translated

a play, recited a poem by Baudelaire during the performance,and provided actors with background information.41He alsohad his rst serious romantic relationship, with iauliai native

37 This quotation and the following sentences are from Greimassformer student Julija BartaitAdamkeviien as recorded inPeleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos, 113 and 1516.

38 Aleksandra auba, Paintis, in Greimas and auba,Algirdo Ju-

liaus Greimo, 5.39 Quoted in Peleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos, 17.40 Peleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos, 18.41 Greimas, Tada, kai baurikas kraujas virto mlynu, 56.


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Hania Lukauskait.42 The daughter of a well-known lawyer,ten years older than Algirdas, Hania had studied in Vienna andKaunas, married, borne two children, divorced, taught school,

and published two collections of poetry.43

She had recently re-turned to iauliai to direct its public library. An activist in leftistpolitics, Hania temporarily drew Greimas close to the ideologyof the Socialist evolutionary Party, the Lithuanian oshoot ofAlexander erenskys unsuccessful rival to Lenins BolshevikParty.44Later during the war years, Algirdas and Hania wouldgo their separate ways, but Greimas always harbored enormousrespect for Lukauskait. She worked tirelessly to give iauliai a

dynamic cultural life, became active in the anti-Nazi resistance,survived nearly a decade in the dreaded Vorkuta Gulag dur-ing the Soviet era, and afterwards became one of ve found-ing members of the Lithuanian Human Rights Committee ofHelsinki. Greimass obituary of her paints her as a principledwoman leading by peace and dignity, bearing the glow ofhuman nobility, and showing uninching courage: She didnot know what fear is.45

Writing about iauliai some forty years later, Greimas de-scribes the metropolis as unique within Lithuania. He arguesthat the epic that was the city of iauliai must be preservedfor the memory of the nation because, alone among urbanareas of the country in the 1940s, it successfully embodied therevival of the independence idea.46iauliai managed to knit to-gether into a positive dynamic three constituencies that dened

separate, often antagonistic agendas elsewhere: workers whohad arrived to man the recently established manufacturing sites,reformist-minded city dwellers, and the traditional landed gen-try in the surrounding countryside. iauliai was a distinctiveLithuanian symbiosis of the Twentieth Century, constructed by

42 Ona LukauskaitPokien (190683); Greimas letter to Kauba 4January 1990 in Greimas andKauba,Algirdo Juliaus Greimo, 102.

43 Dikaitis,Ona LukauskaitPokien.44 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 15.45 Greimas, Apklojo kanos, apgaub voratinkliai.46 Ibid.


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new labor in the factories, with progressive townspeople andLithuanianstyle district landowners.47

In March 1941, Greimas was recruited by an acquain-

tance and former scout leader into a nationalist movement, theLithuanian Activist Front (LAF).48He recalls being told, Wehave a secret activist organization here. Youre a member, towhich he replied, O, lets do it.49But lacking local contacts,he initially had only infrequent interactions, when he wouldvisit Churginas in Kaunas.

Algirdass parents had moved to Prienai in Suvalkija,astride the Neman iver about twentyve miles from both

aunas and Marijampol. Education inspector Julius was elect-ed mayor in 1934, a position he held until the Soviets took overin 1940. On 14 June 1941, Soviet authorities detained Julius andKonstancija in Prienai by force, separated them, locked them incattle cars on trains, and shipped them out to dierent camps inSiberia.50They were two out of 18,500 Lithuanians51 and 45,000Balts deported during the week of 14-18 June. In iauliai, theSoviets mobilized reserve lieutenant Algirdas Greimas and or-dered him to inventory the possessions of individuals who hadbeen deported during the night, even as his parents waited intheir freight cars in Prienai.52The deportations represented therst major wave in the Soviet plan to relocate or eliminate no-tables throughout the region.

Julius Greimas was sent with the other Baltic men to pris-on camps and then transferred with the majority of the Lithu-

anian men to Kraslag, the complex of Gulag Corrective LaborCamps clustered around the town of Reshoty, a stop on theTranssiberian railway in Krasnoyarsk.53 He died in Reshoty

47 Ibid.48 Greimas, Apie 1941 metus, 6.49 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim apie rezistencij, 45.50 Burauskait, Lietuvos gyventoj genocidas, 306.51 Anuauskas, Deportations.52 Greimas, Tada, kai baurikas kraujas virto mlynu, 4.53 Burauskait, Lietuvos gyventoj genocidas, 306. On Kraslag, see the

Krasnoyarsk Memorial Society website.


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on 23 January 1942.54When the NVD special tribunal exam-ined his case later in absentia, it dropped the charges broughtagainst him. Algirdas recounts:

its the image of his death that haunts me continuously he onlystayed alive three months in the minus forty degrees Celsiuscold. What my sister told me afterwards from those who sur-vived is that his friends removed his last pair of pants in orderto bury him in the absolutely frozen ground. And thats the lastimage of my father.55

Like the other Baltic women and children detainees, Kon-stancija was sent to an exile settlement in a remote area of the

Soviet Union. She was ordered to work on a stud farm in thevillage of Yabogan in rural Altai territory,56 about fty milesfrom the border with Kazakhstan. She returned semilegally toLithuania in 1948, but was arrested in 1949. After ve monthsin the Kaunas prison, she was brought back to Yabogan, whereshe remained another ve years. In 1954, after Stalins death,she was allowed to go home, along with most of the other de-portees in Soviet territories. She rejoined her daughter Grainaand family in Kaunas and lived the last two years of her lifewith them.

Algirdas would maintain leftist political views and in-tellectually consider himself a Marxist throughout his life,but the experience with Soviet rule turned him into an em-phatic anti-Communist.

On 22 June 1941, a week into the mass deportations in the

Baltic States, Hitler launched the largest military operation inthe history of the world, the invasion of the Soviet Union, in-

54 Out of 2,500 Lithuanian prisoners taken to Kraslag, only 400 sur-Out of 2,500 Lithuanian prisoners taken to Kraslag, only 400 sur-vived the winter of 1941-42, a time when the USSR was at peacewith its neighbors. Throughout Russia, the majority of the Balticsummer deportees died that winter from hunger, exhaustion, andexposure (Eidintas, Aleksandras Stulginskis and Anuauskas,Deportations).

55 Greimas, interview with Piolot, 14 February 1989.56 Burauskait, Lietuvos gyventoj genocidas, 306. I thank Giedrius

Subaius for the transliteration and translation from the ussian,kindly obtained and sent by Vytas Virkau.


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cluding the Lithuanian SSR. Over four and a half million Axispersonnel participated in the attack. On the very rst day ofOperation Barbarossa, the Luftwae bombed military targets

in strategic Lithuanian cities, including iauliai, and the Weh-rmacht ung over 900,000 troops against some 600,000 Sovietdefenders in the country. Aleksandra Fledinskait recalls hid-ing all night in the cellar with the family where she rented aroom while the artillery shells exploded, then being roustedout at gunpoint by German soldiers in the morning. She re-counts that Later that morning, Greimas came over and to-gether we went to town to see what was going on. On the main

street, joining the people standing on the sidewalk, we watchedthe German tanks roll in, cannons pointed, the steady rattle oftheir treads shaking the ground. In silence we stood there wit-nessing yet another invasion.57

Whereas in the capital city, aunas, the LAF took ad-vantage of the invasion to commandeer public buildings andcommunication centers and declare independence before theGermans arrived, hoping that the invader would recognize the

new government, Greimas saw no such uprising in iauliai.58

Just as the Soviets had told Lithuanians that they were liberat-ing them from blood-sucking capitalists, so too the Germansnow assured them that they were liberating them from theBolshevik menace.

Greimas recalls that the following morning, he heardthat LAF partisans were gathering in the former Girls Teach-ers College, and ran over.59As a former reserve ocer, he was

appointed to lead the company comprising some two hundredunarmed men. He began signing orders to get the city runningagain and gave permission to open a bakery so that the in-habitants could buy bread. The German command sent overthe order to round up and deliver at least one hundred Jewsto sweep the streets. Greimas was surprised and remembersfeeling that something was not right. I conveyed the order,

57 Aleksandra [Fledinskait]auba emails to the author 3 and 4December 2010.

58 Greimas, Apie 1941 metus, 6.59 Ibid.


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but the next morning, I didnt return to further liberate thehomeland.60It smelled bad, he recalled afterwards.61He be-came the editor of the iauliai weekly Tvik for a time. In cit-

ies and small rural settlements, Lithuanians themselves carriedout pogroms that burned synagogues and killed almost 4,000Jews in Kaunas alone in June 194162and eight to ten thousandtotal throughout the country between 23 June and 3 July.63Al-though Greimas says that he himself witnessed no such Lithu-anian violence against Jews in June in iauliai, history recordsthat Lithuanians murdered about a thousand Jews in the cityon 30 June and 1 July.64

Whereas the Wehrmacht mainly advanced through Lithu-ania with little resistance, a erce battle took place near asein-iai, forty miles from iauliai, halfway along the road to Kaunas.For four days, 23-27 June, German Panzers fought the Sovietarmor, including new V heavy tanks, in a conict involvingover one thousand tanks. Greimas recalls a vivid scene he wit-nessed at the time in Gubernija, a suburb of iauliai: Im lyingin a ditch next to a Gubernija highway, and in the middle of the

road a Russian tank is burning. On both sides of the highway,young German soldiers wearing glasses hurriedly lay tele-phone lines. The hatch of the tank ies open and a ed Armysoldier jumps out of it, on re. A German stops, approacheshim, and we surround the two heroes. Excited, the Germanstarts cursing the Russian. See where it got you, wanting warand revolution! And the ussian, as if he had understood, an-swers in his own language: Stupid! He thinks we wanted war,

and dies.65During the rst months after the invasion, many Balts, ec-

static to be rid of the Soviets and hopeful for independence, wel-comed the new invaders. Greimas recalls that in the beginning,

60 Ibid.61 Paul Perron, conversation with the author 12 July 2011.62 Gaidis,A History, 74 and Ona imait letters to Icchokas Meras 17

May 1961 and 31 January 1964, quoted in ukys, Ona imait.63 Arad, The Final Solution, 74743.64 Ibid., 743.65 Greimas, Tada, kai baurikas kraujas virto mlynu, 4.


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when the Germans would pass by, villagers would tie a cowto their cannon and give them the cow. Take it, thank you forhaving liberated us.66Soon, however, the Gestapo and the SS

showed up and set up camp. When the Gestapo arrived, welearned what a real occupation was like.67Greimas was awareof few atrocities committed by the initial Wehrmacht units, butthe Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) and the Einsatztruppenunder its control started actively liquidating the Jews.68Some250,000 Lithuanian Jews were executed or deported under theNazis, most of the latter never to be seen again.69

In addition, rather than undoing the Soviets radical eco-

nomic revolution or compensating the dispossessed as the Bal-tic States had hoped, the new occupiers maintained and evenextended the Soviet nationalizations and collectivizations.70Institutions of higher learning and many schools were closed.Germans arrived to run the farms, factories, businesses, and -nancial institutions, like modern Baltic Barons, while the localswere hired at low wages paid in a paper currency possessinglittle market value.71As under the Soviets, locals saw massivequotas of domestic output get shipped away to the center of theempire with little compensation, while virtually nothing usefulcame back in return.72Legal food and fuel were rationed andaccess to public transportation curtailed. Hitler, Himmler, andthe SS ocials who drafted the Master Plan for the eastern ter-ritories annexed by Germany (the Generalplan Ost)decided that85 percent of Lithuanians would be deported or eliminated in

order to create the desired elbow room to be enjoyed by theGerman bermenschcolonizers.

66 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 45.67 Greimas conversation with the author 20 January 1982.68 Greimas, Apie 1941 metus, 7.69 Porat, The Holocaust in Lithuania, 160, and Gaidis, A History,

8081.70 Foreign Delegation of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party,

Memorandum, 220-222; cf. Oras, Baltic Eclipse,227, 249.71 Foreign Delegation of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party,

Memorandum, 220.72 Ibid., 220-221; cf. Oras, Baltic Eclipse,228-229.


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The teaching positions in iauliai represented depend-able income, but the provincial industrial center did not oerthe most stimulating environment for a young man under the

age of 25.73

In the fall of 1942, Greimas moved back to the livelycapital, Kaunas. He landed a job as a library expert in the De-partment of Cultural Aairs within the Internal Aairs Oce.Once in Kaunas, Greimas became active in the Union of Lithu-anian Freedom Fighters (Lietuvos laisvs kovotoj sjuga, LLKS),an independent underground group that had previously hadintermittent association with the LAF and with the LithuanianNationalist Union.74Attracting activists from dierent politi-

cal orientations, the LLKS counted among its leaders chem-ist Jurgis Valiulis (later Karolis Drunga), engineer KlemensasBrunius,chemist Jonas Deksnys, and Stasys akeviius (laterymantas), who was a Vilnius University professor and mayorof Vilnius during the German period. From 1941 to 1944, aboutthree thousand individuals joined the LLKS and took the vow:

I swear by all that is holy and honorable that, with all my eorts

and my life, I shall ght for the restoration of Lithuanias Inde-pendence, without any hesitation whatsoever shall execute alldirectives of my intermediaries and all commands receivedthrough them, shall never reveal anything that could betray theLLS, and shall not abandon the LLS until Lithuanias inde-pendence has been restored. This oath I guarantee with mylife.75

The organizations bylaws further specied that LLS mem-bers breaking the oath will be punished by death.

Greimas helped produce the groups major publication, itsfour-page bimonthly newspaper Freedom Fighter (Laisvs kovoto-jas), one of the three principal underground periodicals editedin Lithuania during the war.76Through radio contact with its

73 ibuntas Mikys telephone conversation with the author 10 Deibuntas Mikys telephone conversation with the author 10 De-cember 2010.

74 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 45. On the LLKS, see

Bubnys, Nazi Resistance, 60-80.75 Lietuvos laisvs kovotoj sjungos statai.

76 For information on Laisvs kovotojassee Bubnys, Nazi Resistance, 65-67, 74-80, and Kaszeta, Lithuanian Resistance.


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representative Algirdas Vokietaitis stationed in Stockholm, theLLKS enjoyed regular communication with the British Intelli-gence Service. Through its own domestic sources and through

the conduit to Britain, the Freedom Fighter disseminated uncen-sored information, as well as perspectives aligned with Lithua-nian rather than Nazi interests, to the populace. The paper alsodemonstrated to the outside world that Lithuanians as a wholedid not support the Third eichs program of a New Europeas did the puppets installed by the occupiers in nominal posi-tions of authority. It is dicult to overestimate the signicanceof such publications in times of war and relentless propaganda.

Around the time that Greimas joined it, the paper was produc-ing 3,500 copies of each issue, and soon increased its circulationto 5,000. Greimas got to know one of the directors of the news-paper, Jurgis Valiulis, who became one of his closest friendsfor life.77On 4 August 1943, the Gestapo discovered the mainprinting oces in aunas, conscated all of the equipment andpapers, and arrested and jailed eleven LLKS members, some ofwhom were sent to Dachau.78

In the course of 1943, the fortunes of the armies at warshifted signicantly: after halting Axis forces at Leningrad,Moscow, and Stalingrad, Soviet forces went on the oensiveand began to advance along much of the Eastern Front. TheGermans beat a continuous westward retreat toward theirhomeland, hoping only for eventual stalemate and a negotiatedsettlement.79The picture was similar in the West, where the Al-

lies advanced steadily, clearing the Wehrmacht from North Afri-ca in May 1943, from Sicily in July 1943, and from the southernpart of mainland Italy by October 1943. The enormous buildupof Allied troops, aircraft, ships, and materiel on the EnglishChannel in 1943 pointed to a massive invasion of France.

Part of the Third eichs response was to ratchet up itseorts to impress civilian workers and recruit military unitsthroughout its occupied territories. It set quotas for Lithuania

77 Greimas, ad Jurgis nemirt.78 Bubnys, Nazi Resistance,75.79 Mller and Ueberschr, Hitlers War, 127.


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to provide tens of thousands of additional laborers for Germanfactories. In February 1943, it launched an initiative to create aLithuanian SS Legion.80Freedom Fighter led the struggle against

the endeavor, which proved to be the principal focus of Grei-mass antiNazi underground activities.81 As he rememberedthe papers message:

The Germans are asking you to participate in the Work Brigade?The answer is: dont go, dont join! The Germans are talking upthe SS Legion? Answer: Dont go, dont join.82

The protests bore positive results: Lithuania fell far short of its

workforce target and managed to emerge from the war as oneof only two countries (with Poland) occupied by Germany thatnever formed a native SS Legion.

Publishing and printing were among the many sectorsthat were highly controlled during the occupation. Greimas be-lieved strongly that there should be a forum in which the writ-ers of the day could express themselves and be read by a broadpublic. He conceived the idea of a cultural journal. The occupi-

ers would never issue a permit for such a work in the capital,but he was able to obtain approval to produce it in iauliai.83Having no experience in the publishing world, he recruitedpartners and went through Hania Lukauskaits brotherinlaw, a prominent doctor, to get a recognized writer to serve aseditor-in-chief. Kazys Jankauskas, iauliai native and authorof well-received novels and short stories, recalls that Greimassomewhat bluntly explained to him:

In peace time you could not be an editor, youre not a ghter,you could not struggle against other editors, but during the war,when there are so few periodicals, you are the perfect t to rep-resent not just one literary opinion, but the whole.84

In spite of wartime logistical hurdles, thirty nationally orinternationally known Lithuanian authors contributed original

80 Bubnys, Nazi Resistance,162-170.81 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas II, 8.82 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 45.83 Greimas, Tada, kai baurikas kraujas virto mlynu, 6.84 Peleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos, 18.


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articles to the 1943 and 1944 book-length installments of Varpai:literaturinis visuomeninis almanachas (The Bells: A Public LiteraryAlmanac), printed in ten thousand copies. The title recalls that

of the celebrated nineteenth-century nationalist cultural maga-zine Varpas The Bell. The almanac established the reputationfor putting out a quality product, and also for never printingpro-Nazi or anti-Semitic pieces, in spite of watchful censors.85Bringing together talented contributors of all generations fromyouthful to established authors, oering perspectives on everyaspect of art and culture, and containing samples of almostall of the writers from the time who enjoy recognition today,

Varpai represents the most important record of Lithuanian let-ters of the period.

More than half of the rst issue of 38 pages was devotedto literature, including a complete veact play, a contributionby Vincas rvMickeviius, and poems by Henrikas adaus-kas, Jonas Aistis, Bernardas Brazdionis, azys Bradnas, An-tanas Mikinis, and Jankauskas himself. Churginas, Radaus-kas, and others also provided translations of classic world au-

thors such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dante. The texts wereinterspersed with full-page reproductions of artwork by M. K.iurlionis, Adomas Galdikas, and other contemporary artists.The 1943 issue also oered essays on music, painting, science,theater, and society by director Juozas Miltinis, Vincas Myko-laitis-Putinas, Greimas, and others. It concluded with obituar-ies, reviews, and a calendar of events.

The 400page 1944 issue adopted a dierent structure and

format, but provided a similar comprehensive sampling of lit-erature, ideas, and the arts, and included many of the samecontributors. It also incorporated work by senior gures intheir eld, including poems by Jurgis Baltruaitis senior andessays by Jonas Grinius and Vaclovas Birika. Art again helda place of choice, notably works by Vytautas Jonynas, Juozasdainis, and Aleksandras Mariulionis.

The literary criticisms Greimas contributed to Varpai,were among his rst publications. The 1943 volume included

85 Tomas Venclova letter to the author 24 August 2010.


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his obituary of the poet Kazys Binkis,86futurist and leader of the

literary movement The Four Winds (Keturi vjai) and someonewho, with his wife, had hidden Jews in their home from the

Nazis. Greimass longest article, the 1944 Verlaine, the Manand the Poet,87presents the nineteenth-century French Sym-bolist Paul Verlaine. At the time, Lithuanias intelligentsia waslargely unfamiliar with French literature, and Greimas waskeen to introduce the modernist lyric poets Baudelaire, Ver-laine, and Rimbaud. Immediately following the article are fourVerlaine poems selected by Greimas and translated by Radaus-kas. The same issue also includes a largely unfavorable review

of Graina Tulauskaits second collection of poetry, a piece thatforeshadows Greimass considerable polemical production.88

The Varpaiarticle by Greimas that has since attracted themost attention is his 1943 essay Cervantes and his Don Quix-ote (Servantesas ir jo Don Kichotas). The piece was occasionedby the publication of the rst complete Lithuanian translationof Cervantes masterpiece, on which Aleksys Churginas col-laborated. In what would prove to be Greimass typical fash-ion, the article engages the specics of the work then uses thatdiscussion as a springboard for a broader, deeper reection.Articulating the goals of his ygiki Jonas reading group,Greimas writes:

We must truly recognize with some shame that we dont knowthe classics, that we dont even intuit the possibilities enclosed inthe works of the great masters which are oered to travelers ofthis earth as a common treasure of humanity.

The Humanism articulated in the article is one in which each na-tion is called to participate actively. As Spain has done throughthe genius Cervantes, each nation must bring its seed to thegranary of humanity. The article explicitly ties the importanceof the translation to historical circumstances:

It comes at the moment when we are in the greatest need of help.In this terrible encounter between the powerful of the world,

86 Greimas, Binkisvliauninkas.87 Greimas, Verlaineasmogus ir poetas.88 Greimas, Graina Tulauskait.


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this beloved country is so lacking that naive faith in its ownhuman mission.

Neither the style nor the structure of the work engages

Greimas in the article, but rather its emblematic hero, the greatoptimist. Don Quixote will teach us how to battle windmillswithout fearing ridicule. The man from La Mancha also dem-onstrates that hedonism is not the answer: Happiness is notimportant to him: he seeks the complete realization of his life,its meaning. Wartime Lithuanian readers recognized obviousantitotalitarian and anti-Nazi overtones,89and Greimas himselflater declared the piece a political allegory:

In this absurd situation, we had to organize the resistance againstthe Germans, right? But to what end? So that the Russians couldmove in? The resistance was an absurd resistance. Thats when Iwrote my rst article in Lithuanian, on Don Quixote.90

The essay on Cervantes work sketches a transcenden-talism that draws from both Romanticism and Platonism toformulate a stirring call to heroism for a higher purpose, one

which readers tacitly grasped:Understand that above and beyond this world of distorted andpaltry images, there is another fairer, truer reality: the world ofideas and forms created by man himself in accord with hisdivine image. And Don Quixote tells you: think great things, forthought is the only reality in the world. Raise nature to yourlevel, and may the entire world be a reection of your heroicsoul. Struggle for honor; this alone is truly worthy of man. Andif they wound you, let your blood ow like healing dew, andsmile.

In later years, Jonas Mackus used the code name Don Quixotefor his anti-Soviet resistance work.91

In January-February 1944, Lieutenant General Marki-an Popov finally relieved the siege of Leningrad and begandriving the German forces back toward the Baltic States. Inearly February, Soviet troops crossed the border into Estonia

89 Tomas Venclova letter to the author 24 August 2010.90 Greimas, La France est gagne, 44.91 Caro, Don Quijote.


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and fought multiple engagements. Straight to the east, in Be-larus, Red Army Marshals Zhukov and Vassilevskiy controlledthe skies, massed a force four times larger than the enemys,

and prepared for a decisive assault.92

In February 1944, GeneralCommissar von Renteln announced a new initiative to recruitmilitary units in Lithuania. After intense negotiations, GeneralPovilas Plechaviius, hero of the wars of Independence, agreedto form and lead the Lithuanian Local Special Units, providedthat they operate solely under Lithuanian command and be de-ployed only to defend the homeland.93

The nationalist call for volunteers brought in twice as

many men as the Germans could or would arm. Lacking com-manders, however, the units ordered ocers of the Lithuanianarmy to register, including Greimas. As he recalls,

When I registered, the Germans took the list with the names andaddresses where people lived along with other documents. Theystarted looking through them and were thinking of sendingsome of the men on the list as ocers to serve in active reserveunits. So I moved, I changed apartments. I started living with afriend. I changed my job, too.94

Aleksys Churginas suggested that he join him as a trans-lator in the National Publishing House in Kaunas. They wentto see the editor-in-chief, Henrikas Radauskas, who hired Grei-mas. It turned out that he was not actually competent to do thework, but the situation did not prove to be insurmountable:

I corrected translations of Haus tales. The translation was verybad and I was a poor editor, I didnt know how to correct it. So

Churginas taught me, gave me private lessons in how to trans-late. In a word, the work was a pretext. Nobody there workedseriously.95

Greimass friend the artist Adolfas Vaiaitis held a position as abook designer at the same publishing house, and rememberedGreimas as a brilliant conversationalist.96

92 Mitcham, Crumbling Empire, 16.93 Bubnys, Nazi Resistance, 184-203.94 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 46.95 Ibid.96 Peleckisaktaviius, Prasmi paiekos, 11.


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As of fall 1943, resistance eorts in Lithuania were coordi-nated by an umbrella organization VLIK (Vyriausiasis Lietuvosilaisvinimo komitetas, Supreme Committee for the Liberation

of Lithuania). On 30 April-1 May 1944, the Nazis captured aVLIK agent, Colonel Kazimieras Ambraziejus, with compro-mising documents on him.97Using the information obtained,the Germans arrested ftyseven members of the LLS in thefollowing days, along with many other resisters. Half of theLLKS taken were leaders, including Jurgis Valiulis and the oth-er principals of the Freedom Fighters; nine of them died duringtheir incarceration in prisons or concentration camps, or short-

ly thereafter. The Germans conscated the publishing oces ofthe paper as well. Greimas endeavored to take Valiuliss placeas best he could by directing the publishing operations and thepropaganda section of the paper.98He contacted the editor ofthe iauliai weekly Tvik,who arranged for his workers toproduce Freedom Fighter. Greimas made iaulai resident andLLKS member Bronys Raila the editor. Two more issues of thepaper came out in this fashion, ten thousand copies each, whichhad to be shipped in suitcases from iaulai on trains surveilledby the Nazis.

New members had to be recruited in order to rebuild theunderground network. Greimas brought in teacher and poetAntanas Mikinis and novelist Liudas Dovydnas. He recallshaving them take the LLKS oath on the tomb of Kazys Binkis inthe aunas cemetery, just for added eect.99

The Lithuanian Local Special Units headed by GeneralPlechaviius dissolved in late spring 1944, when the Nazis at-tempted to exert their control over the troops. Plechaviius andother leaders were arrested in May and shipped to concentra-tion camps. Other regular Lithuanian army battalions remainedactive, units which the Germans had formed initially for Lithu-anian self-defense and internal security, but which they hadprogressively co-opted for duties on the Eastern Front. In the

97 See Bubnys, Nazi Resistance, 77-79 and 136-141.98 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 45.99 Ibid.


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spring and summer of 1944, these battalions began comingback from Minsk, and their commanders looked to the Resis-tance movement for instructions. Greimas recalls, the battal-

ion chiefs came to me and asked what they should do. And Iwas only a newspaperman. Im sitting there by myself and Imdiscussing with these ocers. It was a bit scary for me. Andthey say, Give us orders.100

Around the same time, Greimas was approached by a Ger-man ocer who commanded an Abwehrmilitary intelligenceunit that was withdrawing from Lithuania. The men wantedto leave their weapons and ammunition with the Lithuanian

Resistance: they could arm an entire regiment.101Greimas ar-ranged for the ocer to meet with a colonel in the active Lithu-anian army who commanded a military sector, and the massivemunitions transfer did indeed occur. His friend Bronys Railaalways enjoyed telling the story of how the transaction earnedGreimas, the impractical philologist, connoisseur of Frenchliterature and poetry, a record in the NVD les in Vilnius asan arms merchant.102

In early March 1944, Soviet air raids severely damagedthe historic Estonian town of Narva and heavily bombed thecapital Tallinn. Ground battles in northern Estonia intensiedthroughout the spring. The Allies nally invaded France in ear-ly June 1944. Greimas became aware that informed Lithuanianmilitary personnel such as General Ratikis and other com-manders were only willing to direct anti-Soviet operations from

outside the country, from Germany.103

In June, VLIK decided totransfer its operations to Germany.104The LLKS demanded thata national manifesto be drawn up and proclaimed, but VLIKocials could not convene a meeting since its leaders had dis-persed.105Greimas later recalled,

100 Ibid., 46.101 Ibid.102 Raila, Versms ir verpetai, 119-120.103 Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 4546.104 Bubnys, Nazi Resistance, 142.105 Greimas, Apie 1941 metus, 7.


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I had no doubt how the war was going to end. The Russianswere going all the way to Berlin. What kind of an undergroundare you going to organize?... When there was nothing else thatcould be done, I left the country.106

With the Soviet reoccupation of Lithuania fast approaching,surely he also realized that his prole and resistance activitieswould put his name on the NKVD lists and earn him the samefate as befell his parents. Perhaps he also wondered whether itmight just be possible to return to a free France at some pointin the not too distant future.

Greimas recounts that he left Lithuania, travelled to Ml-

heim in the Ruhr Valley, then in July 1944 settled in Mulhousein southern Alsace, annexed to Germany during the war.107There he met with Raila and other resistance members at vari-ous times. In February 1945, Alsace was liberated by the Allies,and in April Greimas made his way to Paris.

Greimas was among the fortunate individuals who sur-vived the war unscathed, but the years were intense, turbu-lent, and determining for him. The twenty-two year old whohad planned to write a dissertation in a tranquil French Alpinetown instead trained in Lithuania to be an army ocer, ocial-ly served under three dierent ags in succession, suered theseparation and deportation of his parents and the death of hisfather, and participated in the resistance and the undergroundpress. Greimas says that his wartime experiences spawned twonotions that proved to be important to him throughout his life.

First, his Candide-like successive integration into warring Ger-man and Russian forces inspired in him a transnational Eu-ropean identity: I had the feeling of being a European. Twoarmies were struggling against each other, and I was right forboth of them.108Secondly, the conict inspired him to devotehis career to the search for the fundamental conditions of sig-nication and values:

106Greimas, I Algirdo J. Greimo atsiminim, 47.107Greimas conversation with the author 20 January 1982 and Raila,Atsisveikinant su Greimu, 272.

108 Greimas, La France est gagne, 44.


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I looked at everything that was happening with consternationI felt very intensely the feeling of the absurd, of non-sense, whichimpelled me toward a quest for meaning.109

Greimass friend and Lacanian psychoanalyst MustaphaSafouan once described Greimas as sincere, single-minded,engaging, generous, and also as a very combative man, allthe more so that he had to deal with dark forces of death, per-haps connected to Lithuania.110Knowing nothing about Gre-imass father, when Safouan heard the story of his death, hefelt strongly that it supplied the impetus in question. On theother hand, a good friend emphasized the importance that the

occupations and the deportation of his parents had on Grei-mas, but judged that on balance, the entire experience of thewar years was a character builder for Greimas.111The long-time reader of Nietzsche could apply the notion of amor fati tohis own circumstancesand embrace what chance and destinythrust his way. Another close collaborator noted that Greimasalways consented to the accidents of History that he had livedthrough112 and indeed told him and another member of theParis research group, only partly tongue in cheek, What youand Franoise Bastide need is a good little war.113Greimas ei-ther already possessed or quickly acquired humor as well as acertain fatalism to negotiate cataclysms.

After the war, Greimas continued his activities in the un-derground, now targeting the Soviets. He also published ar-ticles that reect on what such struggles entail, especially the

1953 The Concept of Resistance (Rezistencijos svoka). Arst irony: they necessitate new political leaders. The existinglegitimate principals selected by the traditional legal proce-dures cease to be eective or valid, ceding the stage to un-prepared and unqualied volunteers who will dare to make

109 Ibid.110Mustapha Safouan telephone conversation with the author 9 June

2010.111 Paul Perron conversation with the author 12 July 2011.112 Landowski, Honoris causa.113 Ibid.


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themselves a laughingstock of serious people and renouncetheir quiet work and life.114Far from underlining the ambientmoral and material degradation or the toll exacted by the con-

ict, the essay emphasizes that underground struggles forcethe collective body to think, to confront the changed context,and to renew its purpose:

Resistance is the original, tense moral climate in which, shakenby history, a nation nds its new opportunities, the conscious-ness of its new destiny.115

Similarly, at the level of the individual, rather than foregroundsuch emotions as fear or despair, uncertainty or regret, the ar-

ticle argues that the elaboration of a novel axiology engendersin participants a vivid aesthetic experience and unique aware-ness, a specic sensuous atmosphere, in which new humanvalues are created, in which ones world view is experiencedand comes into being.116In an existentialist mode, the under-ground activities oblige each subject to reect, make choicesand declare their positions in the face of limit situations:

Resistance is primarily the act of self-determination of a free

individual, an authentic commitment of the individual, speak-ing against outdated or imposed values and in favor of a certainsystem of values implicated in the act of self-determinationitself. Before it becomes an action, Resistance is a choice and apronouncement.117

vvv

Vytautas Kavolis once asked Greimas, What did you bringwith you from Lithuania that later proved particularly impor-

tant to the development of your academic thinking? Did Lithu-ania prepare you well for your destiny?Greimas responded,in part:

Probably I brought nearly everything from Lithuania: thecountry smell of my childhood in the region of Auktaitija, myambition and obstinacy grounded in the region of Suvalkija, ele-ments of German culture in philosophy and history; an under-

114 Greimas, ezistencijos svoka, 1.115 Ibid.116 Ibid., 2.117 Ibid., 1.


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standing of the Scandinavians and Slavs spirit; all of thesethings remained incomprehensible to the nations of the formerRoman Empire.118

Arrived at the end of our narrative, one may extend avolissquery to probe the relation between Greimass formative yearsand his subsequent life and career. Three points suggest them-selves. Growing up in the new Lithuanian Republic and beingraised by a civic-minded parent seems to have inculcated inAlgirdas an unusually strong commitment to his native landand a singular interest in using and nurturing the Lithuanianlanguage. Many are the exile scholars who publish only in their

adopted international idiom. Secondly, in contrast to newer We-stern trends, Greimas retained the Old World tradition of long-term close friendships: throughout his life, he maintained anactive exchange with a number of family members and friendsfrom youth, and after leaving Lithuania, established a numberof new bonds and close collaborations that lasted three decadesor more. Lastly, Greimas was steeped in the historical perspec-tives of the nineteenth century, which informed not only his

academic thinking, but also his political beliefs and outlook onlife. In order to become a major gure in continental structu-ralism and semiotics, he had to break with what he knew bestand held most dear and strike out in new directionsin hislate 30s!

Beyond sure conclusions such as these, one can entertaintwo further reections. First, Greimass semantics and semioticsappear unusual in that their wide purview embraces language,

discourse, and society, spheres typically segregated into distin-ct disciplines in the postwar era. In todays highly specializedresearch cartography, linguistics concentrates on constituentsounds and language structures up to the sentence, literary cri-ticism explores works beyond the sentence, while sociology andanthropology study societies. Greimass revolutionary exten-sive, multidisciplinary project in fact continues the venerablecomprehensive perspective of the philology that he learned

from Duraour, which comprises an inseparable triad of lan-guage, culture, and texts. More broadly, his wide scope is in

118 Greimas, Intelektualins autobiograjos bandymas I, 3.


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harmony with traditional East European inquiry that resistedhyper-specialization and retained a more holistic approach.

Second, it is hard not to be struck by parallels between

Greimass participation in resistance movements and his laterwork with semiotics. As he constructed the latter project, it toorequired a deep commitment to a collective eort focused ondaunting long-range objectives pursued in the face of tena-cious, entrenched adversaries. The semiotic enterprise entailedan almost impossible goal: to develop a new scientic projectand to get it established alongside such disciplines as lingui-stics, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. And where-

as most productive intellectuals focus their energies on theirindividual research, particularly in the humanities, right fromthe start, Greimas actively sought to build a group in Paris anddevoted great time and energy throughout the rest of his care-er to recruiting promising students and colleagues, mentoringthem, collaborating with them, and brainstorming ideas forprojects and responses to attacks. The underground struggleproved to be excellent training for the academic battles of the

Latin Quarter, France, and the globe.

Lithuanian students celebrating February 16 in Grenoble, France, in 1938 or1939. Algirdas Julius Greimas is the second to last seated on the right side of thetable and Professor Antonin Duraour is directly across from him. Photographcourtesy of Ramut Iemantait Ramunien.


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