'Is Baublis Still Alive? It Was so Huge…': Early 19th-Century Lithuanian Issues with Polish Memory (and Vice Versa)

• In Event: Lieux de mémoire of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Places, Texts, and People

Abstract

At the beginning of the 19th century in Samogitia there was a huge old oak tree, hollow inside, called ‘Baublis’ by local people. Around 1814 Dionizy Paszkiewicz, a nobleman, arranged it as a summerhouse: he put a table and chairs there and on and next to the walls he placed a collection of artifacts creating – exactly what? A first Lithuanian museum? A cabinet of curiosities? A junkyard? On the basis of Lithuanian and Polish testimonies about Baublis from the first half of the nineteenth century, I intend 1. to discuss answers given to this question by Lithuanian and Polish authors and 2. to show that an emerging (or reborn, or changing) national community needs (or at least needed in the age of nationalism) not only stories about its past, but also stories about those stories, that a narrative memory therefore needs a narrative frame.

Author

• Pawel Bukowiec, Jagiellonian U (Poland)