Overview

This evocative and wide-ranging set of articles is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.

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9781618115072

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Reviews

...Lithuania in the two world wars has been studied extensively by military, political, and social historians but has been given little attention by researchers of culture and art. With this selection of modern Lithuanian scholarship from an impressive array of disciplines, Jankeviciute and Zukiene have taken a welcome step toward correcting that omission. They have composed a collection of interest to a readership beyond that of students of modern Baltic history; the articles engage equally with film and music theory, memory studies, and narrative theory. - Slavic Review, 77.3

The Art of Identity and Memory is an impressive collection. Set in the cross-disciplinary context of artistic analysis, history, and memory and regional studies, the nine contributors succeed in presenting a highly informative, rich, and reliable study. By examining major topics in the cultural histories of various facets of Lithuanian life during and between the two world wars, new and interesting questions have been asked and addressed. As a result, this pioneering richly documented volume successfully and respectfully refines and challenges previous scholarship. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to all those interested in Lithuanian history, cultural studies, and East European Jewish history.--Mordechai Zalkin, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Author Information

Giedr Jankeviit is a senior researcher at the Art History and Visual Culture Department of the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and teaches at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her current field of interest lies in artistic culture of occupied countries. Her monographs include Valstyb ir dail: dails gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 19181940 (Art and State: Art and Artistic Life in the Lithuanian Republic, 19181940, 2003) and The Graphic Arts in Lithuania 19181940 (2008). She has edited the catalogues Under the Red Star: Lithuanian Art in 19401941 (2011) and The Realities of Occupation: Posters in Lithuania during World War I and World War II (2014, with Laima Laukait). She organized the international conference ""Art and Artistic Life during Two World Wars"" (Vilnius, 2011, with Laima Laukait) and edited a collection of articles with the same title prepared on the basis of the presentations read at the conference (2012, with Laima Laukait). Currently she is writing a monograph on Lithuanian art and artistic culture from 1939 to 1944 and compiling a book on the art historian Mikalojus Vorobjovas (Nikolai Worobiow, 190354), who was active in Lithuania in the mid-twentieth century.

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