Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania

Violeta Davoliūtė is a researcher and freelance journalist based at the Department of History, Vilnius University. She has published widely in the fields of memory, trauma and cultural studies in Eastern Europe. Her most recent book is Maps of Memory: Trauma, Identity and Exile in Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States. Vilnius, 2012 (co-edited with T. Balkelis).

• Introduction: Misplaced Memories 1. Modernity and Tradition between the Wars 2. War, the City and the Country 3. Reconstruction and Nation Building 4. Engineers of Urban Souls 5. A Soviet Lithuanian Renaissance 6. Soviet Modernity and its Limits 7. The Rustic Turn 8. The Rustic Revolution Epilogue: Memory’s Many Returns

"The book is a solid study on contemporary Lithuanian history, admittedly tailored to historians in general and Baltic scholars in particular, but which might appeal to a broader audience too." FRANCESCO LA ROCCA, Central European University"Davoliūtė’s engaging book makes it clear that the Soviet period should be viewed less as a parenthesis in Lithuania’s grand narrative than as a 50-year period that, for better and for worse, profoundly shaped modern Lithuania." KEVIN C. O’CONNOR, Gonzaga University"The book is very timely, well-written, and thought-provoking. It certainly marks the qualitative development of studies of Lithuanian national culture beyond internalist, institutional accounts of folk culture and language-based ethnic nationalism by explicating underlying social mechanisms that enabled these particular discourses of national culture to rise to prominence. As such, Davoliūtė’s study is an important step toward the acknowledgment of a greater social complexity underpinning Soviet and post-Soviet culture, and will certainly stimulate further studies in this direction." - Volume 15 of Ab Imperio in 2014