Desire in Whispers - Extra Extra Magazine

SUNFLOWER SWEARWORD SWEAT

I remember well when I was still a primary school kid, for a brief moment I thought there must be something not quite right with my dad. I saw a book that years later I understood to be Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality on the bookshelf. At the time what had me fixated is that it mentioned sex on its cover. My puerile imagination, already littered with greatest hits of collective consciousness passed down the years through the educational system along with the school canteen smell of old sunflower oil, sauerkraut, beetroot and chlorine cleaning agent, made me very agitated. The word ‘sexuality’ had to do with something worrisome and possibly very wrong. For a short while I believed that I’d stumbled upon a big secret that I had to hold on to myself. ‘My dad’s gay and I am the only one to realize this’, ‘But this doesn’t make any sense’, ‘How can this be?’ circling round in my head for a few days.
Pretty soon, I forgot all about it with the fading thought that there must be a discrepancy, that I was not getting something. I never came back to this completely isolated incident that occurred as a sudden, inexplicable short-circuit of neural pathways, just a silly little thing. Now looking back at it, it was a set of language rules enacting itself, well knit together through years of collectively learned sublimation and shame.
Through the ubiquitous jargon of late nineties/early 2000s Vilnius school break, which I am sure did not differ much from that of the sixties or eighties, ten-year-olds would quickly learn that weird is also queer, therefore, ‘wrong’. And it was dealt like cards are dealt: you don’t question a bad card if everyone’s getting one once in a while. Swears such as gaidys (En. rooster, cock) coming from the Soviet prison slang, meaning the lowest caste in the inmate hierarchy – a weak, ‘womanly’ person to be constantly abused physically and mentally – could be heard every day and put into habitual circulation. Another one was pydaras from Russian pydar, which is in turn from Ancient Greek paiderastes – the lover of boys. By around age eleven to twelve, for schoolboys, these would become the ‘go to’ words when you found someone odd or you just did not like them much.
An embarrassing thought, a slip, a spill carves Vilnius open, its suppressed sexuality, squelched queerness and otherness.

The History of Sexuality is a three-volume series of books written between 1976 and 1984 by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The first volume of the book is titled An Introduction while the second volume is titled The Use of Pleasure, and the third volume is titled The Care of the Self. Foucault’s main goal in the books is to disprove the idea that Western society had repressed sexuality since the seventeenth century and that sexuality had been something that society did not talk about.

SOFIA BLINKS

Vilnius is a city slowly healing from its manifold wounds. Its glands, sprouts, fluids – corporeal and conscious matter flexing its tendons, rewriting, forgetting and again recalling its own stories while gently touching its inhabitants’ calves, coming up to the inner thighs, blowing slightly on the necks, pecking, whispering secrets which, when heard, are not forgotten but withheld under oxidized garage locks. At a glance, no longer needed or wanted, but somehow still in place. As Stanislaw Lem’s planet Solaris, Vilnius is perpetually learning itself – to touch, to cuddle, to play, to grasp rather than interpret, to sense bodily presences, to accept its failures and at least titter at its self-seriousness.
Lustful, superfluous, although tightly squeezed sensual intensity is breathing in and out as I walk one of the main streets of Vilnius, Gedimino Avenue, originally named St George Avenue in 1836. Under Polish annexation it was renamed after the Polish-Lithuanian romanticist poet Adam Mickiewicz and during the Soviet era it become Lenin Avenue. At either end, the Catholic Cathedral and the Orthodox church look straight at each other. This was a gesture of conciliation in a city that, in July 1940, after the Soviet Union had taken control of it, British labour union activist Ann Louise Strong called ‘a tangled knot of ethnic hatred and an example, one of many in Europe, that capitalism doesn’t solve the problem of hatred. If someone will resolve this issue here, they will for the whole Europe.’ I walk past tourists heading towards the Old Town and teenagers chilling around Zara and H&M.
I see Neringa is still under renovation, a restaurant famous for its quasi-modernist interior and the likes of Tomas Venclova and Joseph Brodsky having frequented it in the sixties. Pre-war intellectuals and their younger followers would meet over a bottle of Armenian cognac around a table in the corner. They spoke rather freely, though, knowing that a KGB agent or at least a bug would be planted somewhere near. For a laugh rather than conspiratorial reasons, they used specific slang such as Sof’ia Vlas’evna (a fictional name) for sovietskaia vlast’ (En. Soviet power). In their conversations Sofia would appear as an aged lady who had gone through numerous unhappy love affairs and was not expected to live much longer. Brodsky at the time had already been denounced as a ‘pornographic’ poet by the party, arrested, and sent to mental institutions twice. Soon after, he was expelled (‘strongly advised to leave’) from the Soviet Union.
Gedimino Avenue was also the home of a much lesser-known café, Akimirka (En. A Blink of an Eye), one of few places in Vilnius where the gay community could meet and, according to several accounts, even caress each other relatively undisturbed, unless, of course, on your way there, an unfriendly chap would see you talking and walking ‘like a pydar’. No photographic material of Akimirka or its regulars, that I could find, remains – only that it was a few steps nearer to the Parliament and the Orthodox church than Neringa.

Filmmaker, writer, actor Andrei Tarkovsky and Natalya Bondarchuk in Solaris (1972)

Joseph Brodsky travelled to Vilnius shortly after completing eighteen months of hard labour near the Arctic Circle for ‘having a worldview damaging to the state’ and ‘social parasitism’. His visit marked the beginning of a lifelong relationship with Lithuania, where he frequently escaped to towards the end of the Soviet Union. The poet eventually emigrated to the US. While in the US, Brodsky taught at several universities and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.

Neringa was opened on November 6, 1959. The authors of the project and name for the then-café were Algimantas and Vytautas Nasvyciai. On November 5, 1970 the interior was listed among State Protected Monuments of Lithuanian Architecture.

ENDLESS SUMMER

Endless Summer, the first ever novel about homoerotic love in Lithuania by sociologist Arturas Tereškinas, is a fiction but reads as an autobiographical diary of sexual encounters in late nineties up until the present. Plenty of those took place in the protagonists’ home town, Vilnius. A sense of threat is felt throughout in every new encounter, the stranger’s doorstep. Anxious inklings materialize in the end as one of the most prominent figures in Vilnius’ gay scene is killed in his own flat, seemingly during a BDSM role play with people he met through a dating website and invited over. Low-fidelity snuff footage appears online a few months later, although it’s difficult to tell if what is seen is his death. Raw, undiluted intensity, a cusp of ‘limit experience’ ends abruptly and in horror. It doesn’t make the news but behaving in a non-heteronormative manner pairs a turn from the societal norm with an ever-present peril.
For the protagonist, his own body is the vessel of sensual knowledge, a somatic proof and an archive of invisible, classified intimacy suspended in liminal space. It pervades Vilnius throughout: Naugarduko Street, where he lives, nondescript flats of Pašilaiciai and that one exclusive sauna in the Old Town, doctors, politicians and TV presenters among other guests gather there once a month.
Written as fantasy are pleshkas (cruising spots) in the secluded corners of Vingis Park girdling the sleeping districts of New Town, Lazdynai, Karoliniškes and the much more prestigious Žverynas neighbourhood, once reserved mostly for the nomenclature of the Communist Party. Valakampiai beach, among other male-only or female-only nudist beaches by the Baltic seaside (uncommon in the rest of the Soviet Union), acted as invisible spaces for expressing and experiencing desire that was deemed not only improper but illegal, as homosexual relationships among men were banned until 1993.

Artūras Tereškinas is Professor of Sociology at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. He is author of numerous articles and several books including It’s a Man’s World: Men and Wounded Masculinities in Lithuania (2011), Culture, Gender, Sexuality: Essays on Different Bodies (2007) and Bodily Signs: Sexuality, Identity and Space in Lithuanian Culture (2001).

Tucked away in the middle of Old town, behind Tauro Kalnas and its colonnaded palace of trade unions, is the Vilnius city administration and registry office, in a fantastic modernist gem of a building. The building, which also is known as the ‘Palace of Marriage’, was built between 1968 and 1974, has an aura of architectural icon about it. Built in exquisite modernist style, reminiscent of Finnish modernism superstar Alvar Aalto, it is as eye-catching today as it must have been during Soviet times. The building features the same style both in its interior and on the exterior. Characterised by plastic shapes and dynamic spaces, the Palace of Marriage merges with its natural environment, while the signature stairway of the façade acts as a symbolic bridge of people’s lives. It became a part of the most beautiful memories for many citizens of Vilnius. Courtesy Open House Vilnius Architect – G. Baravykas, Interior – E. Guzas, Stained Glass – K. Šatunas, 1974.

ECSTASY CHERRY, MOSSY

One of its improvements, The Palace of Marriage, a civil bureau for registering marriages, divorces and deaths, doing away with the unwanted religious aspects, was built on the site of a recently demolished Lutheran cemetery in 1974 – a new world replacing the old – in the fashion of ‘avant-garde’ socialism. Charazov, the chairman of the Lithuanian Communist Party at the time, was raging – ‘couples are still marrying in churches because there is still no atheistic space of marriage in the capital!’ Undoubtedly, this had to be undone, and with spotless ideological fervour. The task for the team of architects was to spatially envision a new, atheist form of ritual and affect, every space leading to another to heighten the tension and drama up until the culmination. When you’re almost there, in the last hall, a ceremonial table acts as the Communist replacement of an altar. Formally abstract stained-glass windows became the solemn background. Cherry, moss and yellowish colours, and contrasting materials like vertically corrugated grey plaster, marble flooring, and a hanging travertine ceiling marked the interior, designed to show off Soviet modernist chic.

PRIVATE

The master of ceremonies, dressed in black with a silver lining, gives the matrimonial speech, voice trembling with pathos, a very specific mode of public speech for big occasions only. A performance of heightened sensuality and fluster, it is sugar sweet and simultaneously monotonous and formal. That same speech has been given for decades and is a ritual reduced to its function, similar to the unchanging menu of the canteen, designed to serve the society rather than individual joy. Lofty, winding metaphors end up as pointers towards the responsibilities the newlyweds are now to undertake, and the grey plaster walls and sandy cut-glass grand chandelier nod in silent agreement. Another couple is already in the queue, time is ticking and the master prepares a new folder of documents to sign.
The procedure is oddly beautiful though: the couple builds up their own ephemera, a monad for their moment of intimacy, finding a back door and defying the situation ‘concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance’ as Situationists put it. I believe sole, brief moments of joy, revelation, ecstasy and passion still permeate Vilnius – dwindling, to be longed for rather than fought for, appearing through conversation as a myth or past rather than irrevocable presence.
It’s no wonder that in 1998 Private magazine chose the Palace of Marriage for a porn shoot of a threesome. A jouissance, an act of transgression or any excess of life is feared and palpably desired here. Someone from Vilnius recognized the place while looking at Private on a trip abroad, and a huge public uproar followed. The director pleaded that he was fooled by the foreign team of photographers and models. They promised him, he said squeamishly, they would be using the main marriage hall to shoot an exciting new wedding dress collection. He got away with a stern warning and the only thing to be replaced was the ceremonial table-altar.
A few years later a porn video titled Russian Winter was made public on the web, the new table-altar on show as well as the chandelier and Lithuanian national coat of arms Vytis. When a mainstream newspaper broke the story, a reader recalled that he recently bought a VHS tape at Gariunai market with ‘locally produced footage of orgies’ at the Vilnius Palace of Marriage. It was six times as expensive (around €30 now) as a regular tape. This was the last straw and the end of the hapless Palace of Marriage director’s career.

Berth Milton Senior, founder of Private magazine, was the first in the world to start a full-colour sex magazine. The first issue of Private was printed in 1965 and presented a great challenge. Mr. Milton Sr created it all by himself. He did the photo-sets, developed the film, the layout, the editing, as well as the paperwork. Eager to get through with it, it is not hard to understand how many times he had to improvise.

Interior of the Palace of Marriage

SUNBATHING IN OUR SECOND SKIN

Strangers to the city, whether friends from abroad or people met in brief accidental encounters, now make up a choir of voiced frustration in my head. It can be difficult to create openness. Those encounters might be intimidating in the first place but may lead to an expected event as I remember finding myself at the Palace of Marriage unexpectedly. Those encounters of abrupt intimacy forcefully hold heavy doors open that are about to shut when they try to get to know the locals here. If they hold on for long enough, an instant of sensual energy, creativity, playfulness fills the space up but then over a few days it fades away and you end up confused at first, estranged later.
There is much talk in Vilnius of being honest. For instance, some want to stay true to themselves, some shield themselves with just being honest. But honesty is not simple. Malevich once said that to be sincere means precisely to remain repetitive, to reproduce one’s taste, to deal with one’s own already existing identity. Getting intoxicated with difference and exteriority doesn’t mean to simply open up and tell a preconceived story about oneself. Vilnius has grown a second skin on us and we like to take good care of it. It is only May and there has been more direct sunlight in the past three weeks than in last two summers put together. So we go sunbathing and sincerely expose our second skin to the sun – in the parks, in our balconies and backyards and on the riverbed beaches. To peel it off is to leave oneself vulnerable. It is quite difficult to say ‘I’ and even more so to say ‘we’. I look back and a doubt hits me: was there a moment when a generation collectively identified the ingrown derma as something to slough off?

KOMJAUNUOLIAI

The hippies in Lithuania could not manifest themselves as a movement; communes were called ‘parasite lairs’ and immediately dismantled by the police. Long hair was cut off in the middle of the street with help of komjaunuoliai (En. commie youth) and was also measured in schools (it could not be longer than the diameter of a pencil, a bit more if you were a musician). Youths disapproving of otherness would assault hippies in the street. Local jazz and rock bands, among them a few all-female bands, were monitored and censored, jeans and records were available only from relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain, bootlegs on low-quality, easily broken tape. Radio Luxembourg was sometimes on the air and recent Western pop music could be heard, and Estonians were luckier as they could watch Finnish TV. Not to mention Poland and Czechoslovakia, separate entities from the Soviet Union and liberal in comparison. Song lyrics could not have any sexual connotations, nor could any other works of art as sexual freedom was deemed a sign of capitalist decadence. Only a few public governmentally unapproved gatherings were organized. They were soon to be shut down altogether after dissident Romas Kalanta’s self-immolation that left the regime in shock. One such gathering was a memorable one-day festival in 1970 at restaurant Žirmunai, after the intended venue, Kirtimai culture centre, was closed down by the Soviet police. Musician Oleg Zacharenkov remembers: ‘Džyza and Fikusas were on stage and they were scathingly mocking the Soviet-approved pop music. A fabulous crowd came. One guy removed his shirt and started dancing on the table. At that point everyone was caught up in madness and ecstasy… Meanwhile the administrator of the restaurant tried to stop the craziness, reminding them that it was not ‘the wild West’ here. Nonetheless, the attendees didn’t stop dancing and there was a feeling that no one even dared to imagine. For me, that evening is still unimaginable and impossible.
A completely packed venue soaking in the ecstasy of improvised dancing. This event didn’t have a precedent in the whole Union and possibly was a unique and the only, gathering of this kind.’
No one sung anti-Communist songs; they shouted no slogans as it was too dangerous. One inscription on the wall read ‘why?’ written by a student at the Vilnius Institute of Arts.
Still, severe consequences were to be suffered: one of the organizers had to leave for Ukraine and the other was removed from the university; others were arrested and questioned by the police. The press at the time barked out: ‘…there was playing, singing and dancing! They were in some sort of ecstasy. And some of them took their tops off. Some girls where only wearing a bra while others started rolling on the floor’.
Hippie moral code in Russia made free love a priority as well as drug taking, and poppy seeds were made use of. Maybe it was Lenin’s decree’s long-lasting influence. Alcohol was the standard drug of choice for a few generations. LSD and mushrooms were not really available until the late eighties in Vilnius, although sleeping pills from the pharmacy were, along with some smokes, brought by friends on military service in the Caucasus. It didn’t catch on here as the hippie code did not mention free love or collective love-making, nor the drug use as a necessary form of cultural opposition. The famous quote that there was no sex in the USSR is not really true. In the trans-Atlantic live TV broadcast between audiences in the US and USSR, Soviet and Russian actress Lyudmila Ivanova actually meant that there was no sex in the USSR on TV. The mishap was circuit-bent to a myth truer than Lyudmila’s words.
The story of Vilnius’ hippies for me is not a long-gone memory to reminisce on; rather it speaks as a totality of desire sublimation. A troubling history of public affection acts as under-layer for the marginalization and criminalization of non-normative behaviour. Dancing on a table at a non-private party without your top on is still a radical gesture, however absurd it may seem. A kiss between two girls in a supposedly LGBTQ+ friendly club still can get frowned upon, I’ve learned in recent conversations.
The norms of accepted public sensuality are incredibly rigid and it comes down to an inability to collectively intoxicate ourselves with exteriority. Vilnius reveals itself as a vulnerable being with lustfulness it dares not embody. As a social organism it has been substantiated into a self-identity that repeatedly sublimates each of our individual desires. The conditioning to act in a self-repressive way, and the way we self-censor ourselves as one social organism, brings up a self-identity crisis that repeatedly sublimates each of our individual desires. Looking self-repression in the face asks us to move beyond sincerity, to unhook the narratives that the organism was whispering and proclaiming to itself for generations. For this being to recognize and acknowledge its second skin, the extent of desires suspended and that multiplicity of identities, which it has not enjoyed performing, is a daring self-confrontation that has been dreamed and then always shunned upon waking. Evasion is coupled with the act of othering, which is essential as a reaffirmation of the well-being of this visible body of Vilnius. But the sunbathed surface, the second skin, cannot conceal that more and more of what was opaque is becoming perceptible. The social organism, intoxicated with an excess of excitement, can no longer metabolize what it could effortlessly a few years back. It begins to learn a new language of affection. Medical terminology along with governmentally approved prosaic Lithuanian and imported dirty talk doesn’t cut it, and our skin senses it. ‘I’ve been with someone’, to phrase it like that, is to be ashamed, to neutralize what is never neutral. We knew it long ago individually. We couldn’t spell it out loud. Lexical components do not matter that much to it now. As the second skin degrows, it helps us relearn to pant, gasp, gulp, sweat and swear. The intonation, pitch and speed alters, tense muscles and gestures loosen, the facial expression lets go. A daydream of soaking-wet ecstasy dreamed in the sixties. Vivid and clear, it sucks me in as a hallucinatory whirl; it’s a humid day and as I glance right to Žemaite Square I am not sure if reality is on my side.

Romas Kalanta (February 22, 1953 – May 15, 1972) was a nineteen year-old Lithuanian high school student known for his public self-immolation protesting Soviet regime in Lithuania. Kalanta's death provoked the largest post-war riots in Lithuania. Kalanta became a symbol of the Lithuanian resistance throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000, he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Cross of Vytis.

Dancing on a table at a non-private party without your top on is still a radical gesture, however absurd it may seem.

TEMPTING GESTURES

As soon as I walk in, I notice that the municipality has decided to install a playground, overlooked by Žemaite. One of the first Lithuanian feminist writers, the editor of Vilniaus žinios (En. Vilnius News), is represented as an archetypal caring rural granny, sternly looking on, arms tightly clasped together above a long skirt, hair underneath a traditional scarf. It is tricky to recognize in this portrayal one of the most important women’s rights activists and writers of the early XX-century. The park is just a few steps further away from Neringa but it is largely abandoned and feels squeezed-in without a clear public purpose.
This is a testimony to the importance of revisiting radical gestures specific to this locality of quashed desires. These gestures have been deliberately overlooked or overwritten. Žemaite was a highly unusual personality in early XX-century Vilnius. She fell in love with and married a working-class fellow, while she came from a relatively noble family, smoked arduously, had seven children, went to jail, wrote her first novel at the age of fifty and went to jail for censored writing. It is documented through her love letters that she was passionate about the husband of her daughter, who was thirty years younger than Žemaite. A quasi-autobiographical book, Trys Mylimosios (En. Three Lovers), implies that she, as the grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter were all caught up in the affair. No less fiery was her fiction writing: the short story ‘Kieno galia, to ir valia’ (En. ‘He, who has the power, has the will (to decide for himself and others)’, 1903) asks, ‘Oh dear, where’s justice in all this? His is will, his is truth and his is the final word. Will we, women, always be constrained like this?!’, in another short story, ‘Mieste’ (En. ‘In The City’, 1905), Žemaite talks about the experiences of a prostitute and also ironically rewrites the Biblical creation myth in which a confounded God proclaims: ‘The times have changed… Now everywhere you look women are fighting for equal rights and when not given, they take up manlike work.’
In her time Žemaite was severely criticized as an uneducated peasant who was only writing from an immediate experience without any critical distance. In addition, in one of her novels she depicts a mutually supportive family and includes a scene of a sensitive, uneasy, empathetic man reduced to tears, which was met with uproar and bashed as an ‘unnatural’ and ‘untrue’ representation of manhood. Žemaite’s ever-present scarf is another beautiful gesture – signifying her determination to fight for women’s rights, especially in the rural areas of Lithuania where she – before moving to Vilnius – lived for most of her life.

Performance of the Lithuanian Literary Classic Trys Mylimosios by Julija Beniuševiciute-Žymantiene, the well-known pseudonym of Žemaite. The comedy Three Lovers, tells the story of the village boy Lyudvika, who at the same time tempted three woman. The situation becomes sweltering because the three loved ones involve a mother, a daughter and a grandmother.

VERONIKA ŠLEIVYTE

There’s an urgency to turn the tables as radical art such as Žemaite’s literary work is still trivialized. Recently rediscovered was the archive of Lithuanian painter and graphic artist Veronika Šleivyte, offering a glimpse to her personal photo diary. Vera insatiably bites chocolate straight from a nun’s hands; poses for the camera cross-dressed as an affluent landowner boasting a sly, confident smile; kneeling down having ripped an apple straight from the tree; sunbathing naked with a friend or a lover, at ease, reading a newspaper. This makes up for a photo diary of an outsider exploring the aesthetics of politics through the bodies of her and her own friends, possibly lovers, as early as the thirties and forties. Homoerotic relationships between women were not even mentioned in the law, invisible and supposedly non-existent. Her photographs offer a different socio-aesthetic. Men, rarely seen in the diary, are beings of another world, unreal, non-central. Attraction is not abstract for her; it is tangible, very real and in the same realm of the everyday. She actually goes apple-picking; she is working in a parish school for orphans. There is no guilt or shame there; the diary forms a unique female gaze – carefree, unapologetic.

AISTROS, NEMUNAS, NAGLIS

The work of Veronika Šleivyte is even more striking having in mind that from the forties onwards any type of erotica was completely banned, and that the inter-war tabloid magazine Aistros (En. Passions), featuring stories of Lithuanian and international celebrity life and female nudes, had been completely forgotten by then. In fact, pornography is still illegal in Lithuania today. In the late sixties, a buzz in this arena arrived in the form of Nemunas. This was a cute, square-shaped magazine that for a few years was the single politically non-conforming magazine in the whole of the USSR, in which erotic photos acted as a cover-up for critical articles and reviews of social realist art practices. At least 16,000 copies of the magazine were printed every month; it was blamed for giving rise to the hippie movement and the Kalanta incident. The editor was let go, and the next one was much more careful; as a result, the erotic, non-conformist fire was extinguished for a long time. When erotic photobooks started being published in the late eighties again, they were stolen from the printing house before they could be sold. In the Soviet era, passion and sex was stigmatized and something to keep private, even for heterosexuals: no multiple partners (especially for women), no mini-skirts, no crop tops, no jeans. It was embarrassing to ask for condoms at the pharmacy.
Naglis (a Lithuanian male name) was the first homoerotic magazine ‘for gays and their friends’ in Lithuania. The debut edition of it was published in 1993, when homoerotic relationships were criminalized by law. It was full of artwork by local visual artists, translations of writers such as Jean Genet or Mikhail Kuzmin, recommended lists of homoerotic movies, and fiction by local authors, usually signed using pseudonyms, as well as letters from its devoted readers, plus educational material on safe sex. It offered a different gaze from the sensationalist tabloid coverage of parties at that one gay club on Basanavicius Street or governmental reports on homophobia. The editor recalls that he himself would drive around Lithuania to distribute it, as not many of the readers at the time were adventurous enough to ask a seller for it at the kiosk. Nevertheless, the readers would crave and demand more authentic sex stories, desire unhinged and voracious after decades of deficit and sublimation. To avoid copyright issues, a graphic artist would repaint photos from foreign publications, skilfully employing a pointillist technique. Naglis was eventually killed off through continued pressure from the Lithuanian Journalist Ethics Commission and the printing house director’s suggestion ‘to look for a more modest’ place to print.
An inclusive DIY and community philosophy that was at the core of late nineties and 2000s punk, ska and hardcore movements is coming back again with new initiatives: reclaimed youth centres, artist-run spaces, reading groups and radios. XI20, an unregulated punk club run by a community that resides and takes care of the place, is not a struggling remnant of that time but still an energizing part of the Vilnius music scene. The club is open to host events by anyone who can convince the community (one vote is enough to veto the proposal) that their idea is worth doing and in accordance with the politics of the venue. The community included an Infoshop in Vilnius that later on moved to Kaunas. There one could find books and a generous selection of zines on non-state, anti-authoritarian, feminist, LGBTQ, antimilitarist politics, culture, and history, as well as on gender, class, and race, art and anti-art; there’s some fiction, too. Books and zines are shared for as long as you need to read them through. A kitchen, a table, an armchair, some tea and coffee, a spontaneous party every once in a while. I still have to return a copy of Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life, unsparingly lent to me seven or eight years ago. Soho, the only publicly gay club in Vilnius, hosts dance and performance nights as well as one-off concert concerts with Lithuanian pop music divas.
One of the brightest stars, Džordana Butkute, rose to fame in the wild early nineties, the era of uncontrolled capitalism, privatization and organized crime. She was and still is a perfect example of the new laissez-faire attitude that came after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While the individualistic emancipation she, as a pop artist, personified, is not without its issues, her songs like ‘Nemyl e jau taves’ (En. ‘I Didn’t Love You All Along’) or ‘Vienas namuose’ (En. ‘Alone at Home’), with lyrics like ‘when you’re alone at home, you do whatever you want, no one will find out what you’re dreaming about’, capture a transformational moment: no longer was it embarrassing to do whatever you want when you’re all alone. Aistros, Naglis, Nemunas, the works of Žemaite, Šleivyte, XI20, all are radical gestures of their time on hostile ground. Retraced today, they still are there to affect us as beacons of emancipatory action.

Džordana Butkute – I didn’t love you and I won’t! (newspaper, 1991)

WET, TUCKED UP IN WOOL

‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else,’ Italo Calvino says in Invisible Cities.
In the two postmodern novels on Vilnius, Gavelis’ Vilniaus Pokeris (En. Vilnius Poker) and Kuncinas’ Tula, written at the moment of rapid political change, these dreams are nightmares and Vilnius is an alienating and alienated place. For Gavelis, ‘Vilnius lies exhausted, virtually paralysed, with its arms tied together and its mouth stuffed’; the narrator is walking ‘along the back of a corpse’.
His Vilnius relies on binaries of sincere and fake, dirty and pure, healthy and sick. The tincture of these ends up negative, abnormal, ugly and devoid of meaning. When he finally finds the intimacy that he calls true, it appears short-lived and deceiving. Like the unreliable, ever-shifting cityscape, the particular, personal qualities of body are totalized in his delirious mind into a faceless body with no gaze and a superhuman, impossible vagina. The overwhelming desire to make contact with the other and its futility characterizes his condition; he is unable to connect intimately with another or grasp the flux of reality, and he cannot escape the meandering, rotting labyrinths of a bad trip. Intimacy is marginalized, violent, filthy and, in the end, widens the gulf between self and other. In Kuncinas’ Tula, the ability to sense Vilnius is enmeshed with the potency of sensual human contact. Both novels recognize an identity crisis for Vilnius. However, Tula, rather than wallowing in the shards of a traumatic, unintelligible cityscape and its histories, finds a personal space of belonging within Vilnius, an intimate city reconciling present and past through love-making, bodies melting into the social corporeality of its urban organism.
As I reach the Žverynas bridge, descend and walk along the River Neris, I sense palpably these daydreams that its inhabitants have dreamed. The city dreams itself too. It carouses and it becomes unclear how many surfaces there are to poke at and pry into. Is there a third and a fourth skin augmenting or was there nothing to take off, as we caress ourselves and brush against one another? I can’t tell.
Later that day, the wavering environment of the dance floor inhales and exhales. After the obscurantist aesthetic of the eighties synthwave, darkwave, which dominated the non-mainstream clubs, venues and DIY gatherings for almost ten years, it seems that it is now giving way to a more immediate, physical sonic culture and the platforms supporting it. A sense is dilating, unexplored, warm, though; it quivers. To paraphrase Jean-Yves Leloup, there’s an urgency for the shapeless and purely social. A lust for sensorial experience to physically graze us. Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilna, Vilnius is bursting with myths – stories it keeps telling itself and stories it keeps to itself. Overflowing, retrospective and prospective. They cohabit, pretend they don’t see each other, they caress each other, they fear being rejected, they lust and they grieve. Vilna is wool, vilnyti is to flow and Vilnius is a gelatinous substance. Stretching, elastic, swaying.
It’s unsure of itself, looks for warmth unceasingly. Purely social, touches all our collarbones; it is purely sensual now, we get caught up. Entranced, it loosens up, we loosen up, lingers. This one’s neither prospective or retrospective: it’s for us.

Jurgis Kuncinas (1947–2002) is still one of the most popular Lithuanian writers. Very prolific, he wrote mostly half-fictionalized autobiographical stories, some novel-length, some shorter. He also published several books of poetry (including poetry for children), and a few collections of non-fiction essays. He was a very proficient translator from German. In life and in work, he was known for his ability to sense beauty in the mundane, and even in dirtiness, and for his humour, sometimes bitter-sweet, but often side-splitting, which is rare in Lithuanian literature. He is also known and admired for his penchant for describing well-known places and cityscapes (usually of Vilnius, but also of his native Alytus), and for transforming them into something intrinsically romantic and beautiful. Kuncinas is also one of the most widely translated Lithuanian authors: his works are available in Polish, Russian, Swedish and German. His often drunken vagabond characters invoke comparisons with Charles Bukowski and beatnik literature.

Considered a modern-day classic of Lithuanian literature, Tula won the Lithuanian Writers’ Union award for the best book of 1993 and is now in its third edition in Lithuania. It has previously been translated into Russian, Swedish, and Polish.

11 Vilnius: Desire in Whispers

by Adomas Narkevičius