The Concept of Lithuanian literature in the 19th century

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ENThe term "Lithuanian literature" in the process of nationalization of Lithuanian literature in the 19th century was used in two senses, historical and philological, in connection to civic and ethnic concepts of the Lithuanian nation. Until the 1870s, in Lithuania, the former land of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Russian Empire, the historical concept of "Lithuanian literature" prevailed, as it fit the form of the premodern civic nationality and the multicultural state of the civic nation, but to a certain extent it was in competition or in combination with the philological concept of "Lithuanian literature" that emerged from Prussian Lithuania. The historical concept of "Lithuanian literature" was connected to the statehood tradition of the former Lithuania and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the development of Lithuanian literature was seen as a way to overcome the arrhythmia of the Lithuanian political and cultural life brought about by the historical circumstances. The usage of the term reveals the conditions under which Lithuanian literature functioned in the multilingual culture and the various perceptions of the relationship between the country's literature in the Lithuanian and Polish languages.The historical concept of "Lithuanian literature" that was prevalent in the early to mid-19th century lost the possibility of further development due to the detrimental institutional context and much stricter policies of ethnic-religious minorities in the Russian Empire at the end of the century. Thus the variants of the concept of "Lithuanian literature," the history of their usage that was determined by the tradition of statehood and its cultural memory, partly account for the circumstance that Lithuanian literature, unlike the national literatures of other cultural communities of the region (e.g., Czech, Latvian) achieved the level of self-description only rather late, at the end of the 19th century. Since the Lithuanian ethnic community did not have sufficient possibilities for cultural-political organization (especially for education), the Herderian variant of nationalizing literature became dominant at the end of the 19th century as a more promising "communal technology" that offered more possibilities of cultural organization. Nevertheless, the historical concept of "Lithuanian literature" that was present in the early to mid-igth century in Lithuania and the reality of literary life it represented, even if it did not achieve continuity in the process of modern Lithuanian culture, survived as a recurring problem of national and cultural identity, never fully absorbed by Herderian cultural anthropology. [Extract, p. 60]