COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

Antanas Sniečkus was the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party from 1936 till his death in 1974. The collection holds many documents, including correspondence with Lithuanian writers, and transcripts of meetings with the intelligentsia (in 1957) which reflect the aspirations and ambitions of the country’s cultural elite to preserve and develop the cultural heritage of the Lithuanian nation. The most interesting documents for the project cover the period of de-Stalinisation in Soviet Lithuania.

The collection includes the documents of the Danube Circle Association, which was a non-governmental organization in opposition to the government’s project to construct a River Barrage Dam near Nagymaros (Hungary) in the 1980s. The Danube Circle movement tried to prevent the construction of the dam with samizdats, public debates, and protests. The Circle was one of the new types of alternative movements, which expanded the base of the “traditional” intellectual opposition.

Ferenc Fejtő was an original, democratic leftist thinker. His library is a unique trace of the criticism of Eastern European rightist, authoritarianist, socialist dictatorship, and Western European leftist romanticism. Fejtő, who maintained strong connections with European intellectual elites, left Hungary for France in 1938, yet remained deeply committed to the fate of freedom-lacking Eastern Europe.

The collection holds various documents (manuscripts, letters, etc) relating to the Lithuanian historian Ignas Jonynas. His works written in the interwar period laid the foundations for modern Lithuanian national historiography. During Soviet times, Jonynas was a professor of history at Kaunas and Vilnius universities. In 1949, he was severely criticised by Party activists for ‘bourgeois objectivism’ and nationalism. However, Jonynas was still very popular among students, and had a huge influence on the younger generation of Lithuanian historians.