ENThe article deals with stress variance in the subdialect of the Eastern Aukštaitian of Anykščiai. The data for the research have been retrieved from the following written sources: texts in the “Litauische Mundarten gesammelt von A. Baranowski,” published by the German linguist Franz Specht in Leipzig in the 1860s–1880s, descriptions of the Anykščiai dialect of the 1850s and 1860s stored in the Dialects archive of the Geolinguistic Centre of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, and dialectal texts edited by dialectologists at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The sources examined show that stress variance is related to stress retraction. The texts dating from various centuries suggest that relative stress retraction was more intense in the Anykščiai subdialect relatively late and formed unevenly - it did not take place in the northern part before the second half of the 20th century; in the southern area, it remains irregular and in the process of formation. The development and extension of stress retraction could be related to changes in stress patterns of words. In the second half of the 20th century, differences in the assignment of stress to words of masculine and feminine declensions began to emerge. In ā stem nouns of feminine declension there was a tendency to assign stress to the root, whereas in a stem nouns of masculine declension and in words with other stems in many cases stress was assigned to the suffix.These differences are determined by interrelated factors: 1) the disappearance of accentuation and semantic model of two plurals - simple and collective; 2) analogies of accentuation of words with the same stem and derivatives of the same word-formation type; 3) interaction between the stems and their development; 4) irregularity of more intense stress retraction. Keywords: Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Anykščiai, stress retraction principle, stress variant, stress model, stem, dialectal texts. [From the publication]